Before the memristor, it would have been impossible to create something with the form factor of a brain, the low power requirements, and the instantaneous internal communications. Turns out that those three things are key to making anything that resembles the brain and thus can be trained and coaxed to behave like a brain. In this case, form is function, or more accurately, function is hopeless without form. [...]

A memristor is a two-terminal device whose resistance changes depending on the amount, direction, and duration of voltage that’s applied to it. But here’s the really interesting thing about a memristor: Whatever its past state, or resistance, it freezes that state until another voltage is applied to change it. Maintaining that state requires no power. That’s different from a dynamic RAM cell, which requires regular charge to maintain its state. The upshot is that thousands of memristors could substitute for massive banks of power-hogging memory. Just to be clear, the memristor is not magic—its memristive state does decay over time. That decay can take hours or centuries depending on the material, and stability must often be traded for energy requirements—which is one of the major research reasons memristors aren’t flooding the market yet. [...]

A biological brain is able to quickly execute this massive simultaneous information orgy—and do it in a small package—because it has evolved a number of stupendous shortcuts. Here’s what happens in a brain: Neuron 1 spits out an impulse, and the resultant information is sent down the axon to the synapse of its target, Neuron 2. The synapse of Neuron 2, having stored its own state locally, evaluates the importance of the information coming from Neuron 1 by integrating it with its own previous state and the strength of its connection to Neuron 1. Then, these two pieces of information—the information from Neuron 1 and the state of Neuron 2′s synapse—flow toward the body of Neuron 2 over the dendrites. And here is the important part: By the time that information reaches the body of Neuron 2, there is only a single value—all processing has already taken place during the information transfer. There is never any need for the brain to take information out of one neuron, spend time processing it, and then return it to a different set of neurons. Instead, in the mammalian brain, storage and processing happen at the same time and in the same place.

That difference is the main reason the human brain can run on the same power budget as a 20-watt lightbulb. [...]

To build a brain, you need to throw away the conceit of separate hardware and software because the brain doesn’t work that way. In the brain it’s all just wetware. If you really wanted to replicate a mammalian brain, software and hardware would need to be inextricable. We have no idea how to build such a system at the moment, but the memristor has allowed us to take a big step closer by approximating the biological form factor: hardware that can be both small and ultralow power. [...]

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/moneta-a-mind-made-from-memristors/0

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Jonathan Coulton

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[via: Cato]

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So What If Corporations Aren’t People? “Corporate participation in public discourse has long been a controversial issue, one that was reignited by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010). Much of the criticism of Citizens United stems from the claim that the Constitution does not protect corporations because they are not “real” people. While it’s true that corporations aren’t human beings, that truism is constitutionally irrelevant because corporations are formed by individuals as a means of exercising their constitutionally protected rights. When individuals pool their resources and speak under the legal fiction of a corporation, they do not lose their rights. It cannot be any other way; in a world where corporations are not entitled to constitutional protections, the police would be free to storm office buildings and seize computers or documents. The mayor of New York City could exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he’d like to move his office there. Moreover, the government would be able to censor all corporate speech, including that of so-called media corporations. In short, rights-bearing individuals do not forfeit those rights when they associate in groups. This essay will demonstrate why the common argument that corporations lack rights because they aren’t people demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of corporations and the First Amendment.” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1873158

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Beyond Darwin: Ways to Evolve New Functions – At a recent Kavli Futures Symposium, nineteen experts from a diverse range of fields discussed the promise of using the lab to understand and exploit the evolution of organisms — an advance that may one day be used to develop new vaccines or other biotechnology products. https://www.kavlifoundation.org/kavli-futures-symposium-evolution-new-functions-main

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Parfit: On What Matters (Volume I) is out! http://www.amazon.com/What-Matters-I-Derek-Parfit/dp/0199572801

Cf. Derek Parfit, 1984: Reasons and Persons http://www.amazon.com/Reasons-Persons-Oxford-Paperbacks-Parfit/product-reviews/019824908X

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Matt Webb

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Translation technology may let humans speak with dolphins http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/translation-technology-may-let-humans-speak-with-dolphins/

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How we come to know our bodies as our own http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/cp-hwc061411.php

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INFORMATION AND ITS METRIC “When one speaks of information one refers to that entity shared by all sources that are equivalent up to recoding. This observation suggests a definition of information. Information of the source S is the equivalence class of all recodings of the symbol sequences from S. This is noteworthy since information generally is left undefined in information theory. Information theory only considers the amount of information or rates of production, loss, and transmission, as measured by various entropies. [...]

Recoding R partitions the space I of unique information sources into mutually disjoint subsets. [...]

This suggests the definition of the more abstract information space I [...] as the set of equivalence classes of I under recodings R. [...] Elements of shall be denoted X, Y, and so on. [...] The elements of I shall be the objects of interest in the following. The necessary logical distinction between the class X and its constituent sources will be blurred in the following. A reference to X as an information source should be construed as connoting the common properties of its members. As a source, X is the generic source. We can speak, in a similar vein, of the events or measurements of source X. [...]

Theorem: d is a metric and (I, d) is a metric space. [...]

The theorem indicates that the space of information sources has quite a bit of topological structure. For example, the notion of [epsilon]-balls of “close” information sources, the continuity of functions on information sources, and the limits and convergence of sequences of information sources, can be developed. These and numerical computations of information distances will follow in a sequel. [...]

CONCLUDING REMARKS

One question that arises in this development is why not simply use mutual information instead of the information metric. Aside from the pseudo-geometric picture we have presented, we note that the former measures only a kind of informational correlation. The information metric, however, quantifies the degree of recoding equivalence. And so, it provides some insight into the nature of information itself. Mutual information is a derivative concept that simply reflects the properties Shannon entropy and no more.

The foregoing mathematical development instantiates a particular philosophical view- point, that of phenomenology. All that an observer has to work with in developing an understanding of the world are finite measurements and the attendant information. This intrinsic finiteness derives first and foremost from the limited computation resources available to an observer in a finite space-time region. The information space, as developed here, is the substrate for all perception, quantification, and modeling building. This is then structured with the pseudo-geometry as we have just shown. Only under suitable restrictions is one justified in using observations to form probabilities via (say) frequencies of events.

Information theory was founded on a quantitative measure of the amount of information. The foregoing has given a formal definition of information itself in terms of the equivalence class structure of sources. But what of the “meaning” of this information? A motivation of this work, unstated until this point, was the conviction that an understanding of the topological structure of the metric lattice of inferential logic is necessary for developing a quantitative measure of meaning and of context. Thus, we offer no immediate answer to the question, only the hope that progress can be made. We shall return to this question in the future.”

@inproceedings{crutchfield1990information,
title={Information and Its Metric},
author={Crutchfield, JP},
booktitle={Nonlinear structures in physical systems: pattern formation, chaos, and waves: proceedings of the Second Woodward Conference, San Jose State University, November 17-18, 1989},
pages={119},
year={1990},
organization={Springer}
}

Download: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=2410770660010935934

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Transhumanist Declaration

1. Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.

2. We believe that humanity’s potential is still mostly unrealized. There are possible scenarios that lead to wonderful and exceedingly worthwhile enhanced human conditions.

3. We recognize that humanity faces serious risks, especially from the misuse of new technologies. There are possible realistic scenarios that lead to the loss of most, or even all, of what we hold valuable. Some of these scenarios are drastic, others are subtle.

4. Although all progress is change, not all change is progress.
Research effort needs to be invested into understanding these prospects. We need to carefully deliberate how best to reduce risks and expedite beneficial applications. We also need forums where people can constructively discuss what should be done, and a social order where responsible decisions can be implemented.

5. Reduction of existential risks, and development of means for the preservation of life and health, the alleviation of grave suffering, and the improvement of human foresight and wisdom should be pursued as urgent priorities, and heavily funded.

6. Policy making ought to be guided by responsible and inclusive moral vision, taking seriously both opportunities and risks, respecting autonomy and individual rights, and showing solidarity with and concern for the interests and dignity of all people around the globe. We must also consider our moral responsibilities towards generations that will exist in the future.

7. We advocate the well-being of all sentience, including humans, non-human animals, and any future artificial intellects, modified life forms, or other intelligences to which technological and scientific advance may give rise.

8. We favour allowing individuals wide personal choice over how they enable their lives. This includes use of techniques that may be developed to assist memory, concentration, and mental energy; life extension therapies; reproductive choice technologies; cryonics procedures; and many other possible human modification and enhancement technologies.

http://humanityplus.org/learn/transhumanist-declaration/

Cf. http://www.philosophybro.com/2011/06/mailbag-monday-transhumanism-and.html

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Breakthrough to bridge the gap between man and machine: a research team has developed a technique for mapping both the connections and functions of nerve cells in the brain https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1104/11041102

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Schumpeter

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Regan Penaluna

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