prasanna’s posterous

reminded by a cover at s.n.o.b tonight

I may have discovered my true calling in life. Connecting little kids with toys they love. I got a friend's daughter this teddy bear in a bunny costume. He recently sent this to me:

One thing I have to tell you- that Bunny/Bear that you got for P is her favorite toy ever.  She won't go anywhere without it, won't go to sleep without it, and generally asks around after him if he's not in sight.  Thought you might like to know. :-)

Although this might be more indicative that my mind resembles that of a 3 year old since I just get whatever I think would be cool if I was that age ;)

good old swedish metal

Talking to @billclerico during lunch today he mentioned this quote which is a really good reminder of how you can sometimes get stuck thinking about things in the wrong way especially products. things which are fun are just as important as those which solve obvious business problems (yes, this is bloody obvious).

Biz Stone @ startup school 2009

... I realized I was totally engaged in this product. So we decided we should keep working on it. At the beginning it was “okay this seems compelling”. Early on someone said “twitter is fun but it isn’t useful”. Ev said “Neither is ice cream”

This one is from one of the interviews in the ego tunnel. Metzinger talks to Wolf Singer (ohh it rhymes) about the unity of consciousness. I like this particular part of the conversation by Singer

The binding problem results from two distinct features of the brain: First, the brain is highly distributed system, in which a very large number of operations are carried out in parallel; second, it lacks a single convergence center, in which the results of these parallel computations could be evaluated in a coherent way. The various processing modules are interconnected, in an exceedingly dense and complex network of reciprocal connections, and these appear to be generating globally ordered states, by means of powerful self-organizing mechanisms. It follows that representations of complex cognitive contents - perceptual objects, thoughts, actions plans, reactivated memories - must have a distributed structure as well. This requires that neurons participating in a distributed representation of a particular type of content convey two messages in parallel: First, they have to signal whether the feature they're tuned to is present; second, they have to indicate which of the many other neurons they're cooperating with in forming a distributed representation. It is widely accepted that neurons signal the presence of the feature they encode by increasing their discharge frequency; however, there's less consensus about how neurons signal with which other neurons they cooperate.

further into the interview

Even if the proposed scenario turns out to be true, the question remains as to whether we have arrived at a satisfactory description of the neuronal correlates of consciousness. What do we gain by saying that the neuronal correlate of consciousness is a particular metastable state of a very complex, highly dynamic, non-stationary distributed system - a state characterized by sequences of ever-changing patterns of precisely synchronized oscillations? Eventually, advanced analytic methods may reveal the semantic content the actual meaning of such state vectors and it may become possible to manipulate these states and thereby alter the contents of the consciousness thus providing causal evidence for the relation between neuronal activity and the contents of phenomenal awareness. However, this is probably about as close as we can come, in our attempts to identify the neuronal correlates of consciousness. How these neuronal activation patterns eventually give rise to subjective feelings, emotional, and so on, will probably remain a conundrum for quite some time even if we arrive at precise descriptions of neuronal states corresponding to consciousness.
Further research will lead to more detailed descriptions of such states - but these will likely be abstract, mathematical descriptions of state vectors.

Will we have the ability to index the brain in coming years? What will these algorithms look like given the way information is encoded in the brain? It seems to require a different approach to the search problem. I'm assuming here we understand at some level what a particular series of states represents. Then there are ethical implications to this sort of work. Would you be comfortable having a stream of consciousness indexed?

stp were one of my favorite bands when i was younger. plush is probably my favorite song but big empty is a very close second.

with all the facebook feed changes the site has been really flaky all weekend (maybe this is just localized to me?). on the other hand maybe the universe is trying to tell me something ;)

while not a big fan of book clubs i'm going to give one a shot. some delicious noir to start with.

from the ego tunnel

Conscious experience is like a tunnel. Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal construct but also an extremely selective way of representing information. This is why it is a tunnel:  What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us. Our sensory organs are limited: They evolved for reasons of survival, not for depicting the enormous wealth and richness of reality in all its unfathomable depth. Therefore, the on-going process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality.

This raises some interesting questions about individual interpretations of reality. While we may all generally perceive the world very similarly it is possible that some people perceive more of this underlying reality and others less. Is our projection fixed or can it be modified? If it can be modified how can we do this in a safe way (I can name lots of unsafe ways ;) ? I think there is enough evidence that points to the fact that we can manipulate of consciousness in some dramatic ways. How deep does the rabbit hole go? :)

talking to the cabbie on my way home today it turned out we were both at the same show when the haunted played at the pound years ago. we talked metal the whole ride :)