Creationists declare war over the brain Basically, the Intelligent Design crowd is turning their sights towards neuroscience and philosophy of mind, resolute in the mission to revive Cartesian dualism with the goal of “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies”. Because, you know, they have already finished proving evolution wrong and they need something to occupy them until the second coming. However, look at the bright side. The evolution/creationism debate has spawned an entire cottage industry within academic philosophy to popularize contemporary thought and bring the basic arguments for evolution into the mainstream. I mean, Hume destroyed creationism as a plausible theory 200 years ago, but while this is common knowledge among professional philosophers it had never quite trickled down to the public, so the culture wasn’t already inoculated against these kinds of malicious memes. I suspect the same will happen for the contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience, which is lightyears ahead of the pseudo-Freudian psychology that most people use to explain human behavior. The popular discourse could use some serious updating, and the best way to do it is for a bunch of dualist whackjobs to make a stink and to get roundly shut down in the public square.

This is our future. Robot watch via Dvice

From Engadget: New York Representative Pete King is hoping that the US will soon have a law requiring that all cameraphones make a noise when they snap a picture as well. To that end, King has re-introduced the so-called “Camera Phone Predator Alert Act,” which was actually first introduced in 2007 but went nowhere at the time. The bill, as the name not-so-subtly suggests, aims to prevent folks from taking cameraphone pictures without others people’s knowledge by forcing the phones to make a sound that’s “audible within a reasonable radius” and not able to be disabled. More from Ars\, which includes this stat: a recent survey of over a thousand teenagers and young adults (13 through 26) revealed that a fifth of the teens queried have posted a digital photo or video of themselves in their complete or partial birthday suits on the Internet. A third of the latter group have done the same.

Thanks Ian!

From IEEE: Rise of the Machines via Moral Machines via Jon

Bruno Latour, in conversation with Richard Powers, in honor of HAL: BL: To tell you the truth, I have never understood the Turing Test to begin with. In theory, it should match a flesh and blood human against a silicon machine. In practice however it matches a flesh and blood machine against a flesh and blood machine, so how could the test ever be negative? The distribution is different, I concede. On one side, you have one body explored by ten thousand biologists, cytologists, and neurologists, while on the other side you have one computer concentrating the brain power of ten thousand engineers, software writers, and wafer printers. But how can any Turing Test judge hope to disentangle these two collections? The idea of a test matching a naked, isolated intelligent human against an isolated naked automated machine seems to me as unrealistic as imagining than we are here alone talking through email “naturally”, “directly”, without any mediation. Things and people are too much intertwined to be partitioned before the test begins, especially to capture this most heavily equipped of all faculties: intelligence.

This is very old, but: U.S. Denies Patent for a Too-Human Hybrid Patents on humans could also conflict with the 13th Amendment’s prohibition against slavery. That is because a patent permits the owner to exclude others from “using” the invention. Because “use” can mean “employ,” officials wrote, a patent holder could prevent a person from being employed by any other — which “would be tantamount to involuntary servitude.”

Watch this video. Yep, its just a train. Now read the video info. This clip was uploaded by an Objectum Sexual, which is a person who is sexually attracted to objects. In this case, they believe themselves to be in a relationship with that train. Others are attracted to picket fences or roller coasters; in one case, a woman married the Eiffel Tower. Check it out. Within the last week, Amy started a YouTube channel talking about this and related issues. More info here and here. One quick comment on this phenomenon, though it may be unrelated: Warrington & Shallice (1984) identify certain kinds of brain disorders that result in hyperactive identification of animism in objects, and can specifically lose the ability to recognize objects as inanimate. These features appear to be disassociable, so it is likely that particular parts of the brain are dedicated to the identification of animism in objects. I wonder if this sexual orientation is somehow related to these brain regions.

Andy Clark’s new book “Supersizing the Mind” is apparently categorized by some trade book shops as “Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy”. Made me giggle.

As workers in the field fully understand, the phrase “artificial intelligence” is a terrible way to pick out the topic. Artificial intelligence is to be real intelligence, created by artifice. But artificial diamonds are not real diamonds created by artifice. They are fake diamonds. Real diamonds created in a laboratory are synthetic diamonds. And what is at issue is not intelligence—a phenomenon that admits of degrees and has its primary application to comparative assessments within the discursive community. It is really sapience that is at issue—something we language-users have and cats do not. So the issue would be better identified as “synthetic sapience” than “artificial intelligence.” But it is too late to get the label right. Brandom, John Locke lecture 3 “Artificial Intelligence and Analytic Pragmatism”