You ever look at the seconds on a digital watch and notice that sometimes they seem to move faster?

Like you maybe running around and you look, at it seems to be beating forward quickly, but when you sit and meditate on it, you can make each second feel longer.

When I read Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines, I was introduced to this concept of time being the measure of change.

So I tried applying that to my mind. If I could speed up or slow down the rate of mental change, could I make time feel slower?

Slashdot | Addicted to Information?

"According to this New York Times article, two Harvard faculty members say that information causes a "dopamine squirt" in humans, a rush similar to that given by narcotics. Just as narcotics are addictive, information is as well. They've given the disorder of information addiction the name 'pseudo-ADD' because it tends to cause somewhat ADD-like symptoms."

(You have to pay for the NYtimes article.)

Buck says it has something to do with dopamine relases being correlated with learning novel information on your own. Hmm, could explain why I get this antsy feeling and semi-manic behavior when I enter random hives of mega-information on the Internet, like those list of fallacies below. Relates to my Information Monster post.

Memetics

Dawkins listed the following three characteristics for any successful replicator:
copying-fidelity:
the more faithful the copy, the more will remain of the initial pattern after several rounds of copying. If a painting is reproduced by making photocopies from photocopies, the underlying pattern will quickly become unrecognizable.
fecundity:
the faster the rate of copying, the more the replicator will spread. An industrial printing press can churn out many more copies of a text than an office copying machine.
longevity:
the longer any instance of the replicating pattern survives, the more copies can be made of it. A drawing made by etching lines in the sand is likely to be erased before anybody could have photographed or otherwise reproduced it.

Thought contagion theory begins by inverting the age-old question of how people acquire beliefs, focusing instead on how beliefs acquire people

Professional matchmakers also play into the picture, but not in as direct a way as one would expect. Matchmakers who charge for using astrological methods compete with those who don't. But the astrologer matches by arbitrary criteria that produce dead-end courtships. Ironically, that causes customers to come back and pay for return visits. However, the matchmaker who succeeds in making sensible pairings looses customers more quickly, since more of them find satisfying relationships. These differences help the astrological service expand and take on new practitioners. It's another viral mechanism for astrological compatibility ideas to spread, not just despite their flaws, but because of their flaws.

The Brain Machine Interface

Basically all human-computer interfaces do is transfer that which is in the human brain into the computer. The goal is to then increase the bandwidth between brain and machine.

Pictures, Education on BrainWaves

Specific Product Names

My fingers hurt, even though I use a Dvorak Keyborad Layout and have a special keyboard. Input hasn't really revolutionized at all since Apple introduced the mouse, keyboard, and GUI. What a day it will be when all I can just run brain2blog.exe and be done.

Google Search Terms:
eeg input devices
eeg input devices neural control

Evolution/Involution of Consciousness

The Purporsive Evolution and Involution of Consciousness in the Universe

500+ Links attempting to unravel the secrets of consciousness.

So I was reading Consciousness Explained by Daniel Clement Dennet (a.k.a. Daniel Dennet). I started out with the following mindset:

Consciousness is such a mystery, what is it? Where is all the stuff that I see. Is there a mind's eye? And is there a mind's mind's mind's eye?

I trucked through the first 100 pages, and Dennet pinned down many of the concerns regarding consciousness, among them the following:

- Mind-Body problem (Descartes felt there was this other space where computation happened and would then port into our brains somewhere)
- The actual locaton of what we see
- The composition of mind-stuff

However, toward the end of my 100-page journey, Dennet actually started to unravel the mysteries. He demonstrated certain things about my consciouness that I thought were one way when in fact they were actually illusions of a process going completely another way.

He provides mental exercises that do affect your way of seeing the world. For a few minutes after some of them, I had trouble seeing things like a normal person, i.e. I had trouble walking or reading signs--I was too aware of the process and started to doubt things in the ways described by Dennet

Needless to say, I felt that the conclusion I was getting was that All sacred concepts such as I, or an inner self, was just illusions building on illusions of subjectivity, cohesivness of perception, and a separation of inner perception from outer perception

It was also a fun text with modelling that was creative such as composing an argument over whether your mind functioned in a Stalinesque or Orwellian fashion... i.e. whether it would, as Stalin would, alter reality by staging events, or as the members of Minitrue in 1984 would do by constantly changing the archives retroactively

Needless to say, my curiosity was satiated and I stopped reading. I knew that if I kept on reading further I would eventually have a complete understanding of consciousness. All I wanted to get was the certaintity that consciousness was explainable and that I could access it through hand-waving if necessary but actually fully understanding consciousness ceased to amaze me.