Culture - Would sex with a robot be infidelity? Imagine you’re rich enough to spend $40,000 to visit a town for a day where rules don’t matter. You can be whomever you want. You can kill whomever you want. You can rape whomever you want. You can force every single person you encounter to honour your every sadistic whim. There are no consequences for your actions in this town. Sounds evil, right? Now imagine the same scenario, with just one twist: everyone you force into sex is a robot. Does that sound as evil as the first scenario? The robots can’t hurt the guests. This is one of the major ideas being explored in Westworld, HBO’s newest drama, about a Wild West-themed amusement park where guests are able to do whatever they wish to the ‘hosts’, or robots, who populate the resort. “All kids rebel,” warns head of security Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth). Westworld forces viewers to confront urgent questions about our future - particularly as they relate to our increasingly wired sense of eroticism. Cybersex Are there not? Maeve is a host.
35 Incredible Tim Berners-Lee Quotes Sir Tim Berners-Lee is an English computer scientist and is also known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. As the founder and director of the World Wide Consortium (W3C), he oversees the mission, freedom, and openness of the Web. Here is a collection to some of the most incredible Tim Berners-Lee quotes from his life. “Any enterprise CEO really ought to be able to ask a question that involves connecting data across the organization, be able to run a company effectively, and especially to be able to respond to unexpected events. “Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch.” “Celebrity damages private life.” “Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.” “I basically wrote the code and the specs and documentation for how the client and server talked to each other.” “I hope we will use the Net to cross barriers and connect cultures.”
Stop Apologizing For Being Yourself I’ve got a simple question for you: Who are you? Look, this is not a job interview or any type of interview. I’m not looking for a politically correct answer. No, I’m talking about who you truly are — deep down. Because let’s face it, you and I both know that we all have two personalities, who live two different lives.There’s the life we want to live, and then there’s the life we’re actually living. I used to be that way. Living the way I wantedTurning my passion into a careerTaking ownership and full control of my life You know what my problem was? But I meet people all the time who are afraid to be themselves. Recently, a reader asked me: “Hey Darius, do you think I should stop being silly so that people take me seriously?” And I get emails like this all the time. You should never apologize for who you are. I get a lot of questions that can be boiled down to this: I can’t be myself. We fear that people won’t like us, respect us, or value us if we don’t “fit in”. Why do we fear that so much?
I'll Bee There for You: Do Insects Feel Emotions? Charles Darwin once wrote in his book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals that insects “express anger, terror, jealousy and love.” That was in 1872. Now, nearly 150 years later, researchers have discovered more evidence that Darwin might have been onto something. Bumblebees seem to have a “positive emotionlike state,” according to a study published this week in Science. In other words, they may experience something akin to happiness. Unlike humans, you can't simply ask a bee to interrogate its own emotions and describe them. Biologist Clint Perry of Queen Mary, University of London devised an experiment to do just that. Then the researchers tested the bees on ambiguously colored flowers at intermediate locations. The assumption that an ambiguous stimulus contains a reward despite the lack of evidence is called an optimism bias. Sound familiar? In another test involving a simulated predator attack, the sugar-addled bees showed the same optimism bias.
18 Greatest Robert Hooke Quotes Robert Hooke was an English philosopher, architect, and polymath. Hooke is known as one of the greatest experimental scientists of the seventeenth century. With a broad scope of interest ranging from physics and astronomy to chemistry and biology, Hooke invested many historic mechanical components and instruments. Here is a short listing to some of the greatest Robert Hooke quotes from his life. “By the help of microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible world discovered to the understanding.” “By this the Earth it self, which lyes so near us, under our feet, shews quite a new thing to us, and in every little particle of its matter, we now behold almost as great a variety of Creatures, as we were able before to reckon up in the Whole Universe itself.” “Cut your morning devotions into your personal grooming. “It all depends on whether you have things, or they have you.” “Nature … is, as it were, a continual circulation.
The Pygmalion Effect: Proving Them Right The Pygmalion Effect is a powerful secret weapon. Without even realizing it, we can nudge others towards success. In this article, discover how expectations can influence performance for better or worse. How Expectations Influence Performance Many people believe that their pets or children are of unusual intelligence or can understand everything they say. Clever Hans could also read and understand questions written or asked in German. Then psychologist Oskar Pfungst turned his attention to Clever Hans. Instead, Clever Hans had learned to detect subtle, yet consistent nonverbal cues. The Pygmalion Effect Von Osten died in 1909 and Clever Hans disappeared from record. The case of Clever Hans is of less interest than the research it went on to provoke. Could we be, at times, responding to subtle cues? False Beliefs Come True Over Time In the same way Pygmalion’s fixation on the statue brought it to life, our focus on a belief or assumption can do the same. The IQ of Students
Karen Armstrong on Sam Harris and Bill Maher: “It fills me with despair, because this is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps” Karen Armstrong has written histories of Buddhism and Islam. She has written a history of myth. She has written a history of God. Born in Britain, Armstrong studied English at Oxford, spent seven years as a Catholic nun, and then, after leaving the convent, took a brief detour toward hard-line atheism. During that period, she produced writing that, as she later described it, “tended to the Dawkinsesque.” Since then, Armstrong has emerged as one of the most popular — and prolific — writers on religion. In her new book, “Fields of Blood,” Armstrong lays out a history of religious violence, beginning in ancient Sumer and stretching into the 21st century. Reached by phone in New York, Armstrong spoke with Salon about nationalism, Sept. 11 and the links between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Over the course of your career, you’ve developed something of a reputation as an apologist for religion. I don’t like the term “apologist.” Your new book is a history of religion and violence. Yes. Yes.
Epistemology Branch of philosophy concerning knowledge In these debates and others, epistemology aims to answer questions such as "What do people know?", "What does it mean to say that people know something?", "What makes justified beliefs justified?", and "How do people know that they know?"[4][1][5][6] Specialties in epistemology ask questions such as "How can people create formal models about issues related to knowledge?" Etymology[edit] The etymology of the word epistemology is derived from the ancient Greek epistēmē, meaning "knowledge, understanding, skill, scientific knowledge",[7][note 1] and the English suffix -ology, meaning "the science or discipline of (what is indicated by the first element)".[9] The word "epistemology" first appeared in 1847, in a review in New York's Eclectic Magazine : The title of one of the principal works of Fichte is 'Wissenschaftslehre,' which, after the analogy of technology ... we render epistemology.[10] Historical and philosophical context[edit] Knowledge[edit]
Thoreau on How Silence Ennobles Speech and the Ideal Space for Conversation More than a century before Susan Sontag wrote that “silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech,” Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) wrote in his journal in 1853: “I wish to hear the silence of the night, for the silence is something positive and to be heard.” In another entry, he noted that in any great space for conversation, “there should be a certain degree of silence surrounding you.” For Thoreau, as for Sontag, silence wasn’t merely an aesthetic experience — it was a singular mode of inhabiting one’s own thoughts and conversing with the world. Only a year later, Thoreau published Walden (public library; public domain) — one of the most insightful books ever written, which also gave us his enduring ideas on defining your own success — and expounded on this notion that silence ennobles conversation by giving thought space to unfold. Thoreau writes of the small cabin he built with his own hands:
How VR Gaming will Wake Us Up to our Fake Worlds “It has no relationship whatsoever to anything anchored in some kind of metaphysical superspace. It’s just your cultural point of view […] Travel shows you the relativity of culture.” — Terence McKenna Human civilization has always been a virtual reality. At the onset of culture, which was propagated through the proto-media of cave painting, the talking drum, music, fetish art making, oral tradition and the like, Homo sapiens began a march into cultural virtual realities, a march that would span the entirety of the human enterprise. Virtual Reality researchers, Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, write in their book Infinite Reality; “[Cave art] is likely the first animation technology”, where it provided an early means of what they refer to as “virtual travel”. Today, philosophers and critics have pointed out that businesses such as McDonald’s and Starbucks are like virtual realities in and of themselves. Indeed, no one ever actually ‘enters a church’. When we read we decode the text.
Brain Pickings Tap into the power to persuade by using these 6 speech techniques Monica Garwood Politicians and other public figures deploy particular rhetorical devices to communicate their ideas and to convince people, and it’s time that we all learned how to use them, says speechwriter Simon Lancaster. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. There is a secret language of leadership — and it’s one that anyone can learn, says UK speechwriter Simon Lancaster in a TEDxVerona talk. He has made a career out of crafting addresses, remarks and talks for top politicians and CEOs of international corporations such as Nestle and Unilever, and continues to do so. By tools, he’s not talking about special software or databases — he’s referring to rhetoric. “The reason we all used to learn rhetoric at school was because it was seen as a basic entry point to society,” explains Lancaster, who is based in London. Building block #4: Metaphor
Philosophy of Mind: all-female syllabus - Zoe Drayson Welcome to my all-female syllabus for teaching undergraduate philosophy of mind. I created this syllabus largely to show that it can be done, and to create a resource for other philosophers looking to add female authors to their syllabi. (I did not create this syllabus in an attempt to rid the philosophical world of men.) I was also inspired by finding this personal ad on Google. I'm very happy for people to use (any part of) this syllabus on its own or to supplement an existing syllabus. All the readings can be found in my Dropbox file here. This is very much a work-in-progress: please email me with comments and suggestions. Description of course Unit 1: Introduction There are two core problems in philosophy of mind: the problem of consciousness and the problem of intentionality. Units 2-4: Consciousness The problem of consciousness concerns how to account for the first-person subjective nature of our conscious experience within a third-person objective approach to science. Unit 10 Wrap-up