The Nature of Consciousness: How the Internet Could Learn to Feel - Steve Paulson "Romantic reductionist" neuroscientist Christof Koch discusses the scientific side of consciousness, including the notion that all matter is, to varying degrees, sentient. If you had to list the hardest problems in science -- the questions even some scientists say are insoluble -- you would probably end up with two: Where do the laws of physics come from? How does the physical stuff in our brains produce conscious experience? Even though philosophers have obsessed over the "mind-body problem" for centuries, the mystery of consciousness wasn't considered a proper scientific question until two or three decades ago. Then, a couple of things happened. By the 1980s, Crick had jumped from molecular biology to neuroscience and moved from England to California. Koch remains on the front lines of neurobiology. Why have you devoted so much of your life searching for the neural roots of consciousness? Koch: Consciousness is the central factor of our lives. You actually see a world. Koch: Correct.
Psychology of self The psychology of self is the study of either the cognitive, conative or affective representation of one's identity or the subject of experience. The earliest formulation of the self in modern psychology derived from the distinction between the self as I, the subjective knower, and the self as Me, the object that is known.[1] Current views of the self in psychology position the self as playing an integral part in human motivation, cognition, affect, and social identity.[2] It may be the case that we can now usefully attempt to ground experience of self in a neural process with cognitive consequences, which will give us insight into the elements of which the complex multiply situated selves of modern identity are composed. Kohut's formulation[edit] Heinz Kohut[4] initially proposed a bipolar self compromising two systems of narcissistic perfection: 1) a system of ambitions and, 2) a system of ideals. Winnicott's selves[edit] D. Berne's transactional analysis[edit] Memory and the self[edit]
77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better If someone granted you one wish, what do you imagine you would want out of life that you haven’t gotten yet? For many people, it would be self-improvement and knowledge. Newcounter knowledge is the backbone of society’s progress. Great thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and others’ quests for knowledge have led society to many of the marvels we enjoy today. Your quest for knowledge doesn’t have to be as Earth-changing as Einstein’s, but it can be an important part of your life, leading to a new job, better pay, a new hobby, or simply knowledge for knowledge’s sake — whatever is important to you as an end goal. Life-changing knowledge does typically require advanced learning techniques. Health Shake a leg. Balance Sleep on it. Perspective and Focus Change your focus, part 2. Recall Techniques Listen to music. Visual Aids Every picture tells a story. Verbal and Auditory Techniques Stimulate ideas. Kinesthetic Techniques Write, don’t type.
Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving - My Epiphany I became interested in the power of design in social contexts during a project at my former employer, frog design. Project Masiluleke (or Project M) was organized by Pop!Tech, frog, and MTN, an African mobile phone operator. Project M was designed to help stop the spread of AIDS in KwaZulu-Natal, a South African province with about 10 million people, including an estimated four million who are HIV-positive and 400,000 who will develop AIDS each year.Dugger, Celia. "South Africa Is Seen to Lag in H.I.V. Only 500,000 people have been tested for the disease and know their status, and of the 200,000 people in treatment, close to 40% will abandon the treatment program within two years. In many ways, the societal norms of the country were more difficult to overcome than lack of test kit accessibility, the interdisciplinary team routinely noticed during initial research. Research also showed that an estimated 80% to 90% of South Africans have access to a mobile phone.
Self-Consciousness Philosophical work on self-consciousness has mostly focused on the identification and articulation of specific epistemic and semantic peculiarities of self-consciousness, peculiarities which distinguish it from consciousness of things other than oneself. After drawing certain fundamental distinctions, and considering the conditions for the very possibility of self-consciousness, this article discusses the nature of those epistemic and semantic peculiarities. The relevant epistemic peculiarities are mainly those associated with the alleged infallibility and self-intimation of self-consciousness. It has sometimes been thought that our consciousness of ourselves may be, under certain conditions, infallible, in the sense that it cannot go wrong: when we believe that some fact about us obtains, it does. It has also sometimes been thought that some forms of consciousness are self-intimating: if a certain fact about us obtains, we are necessarily going to be conscious that it does. 1. 2. 3.
The fine dopamine line between creativity and schizophrenia | Sc New research shows a possible explanation for the link between mental health and creativity. By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia. High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. Creativity is also linked to a slightly higher risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Certain psychological traits, such as the ability to make unusual pr bizarre associations are also shared by schizophrenics and healthy, highly creative people. And now the correlation between creativity and mental health has scientific backing. "The study shows that highly creative people who did well on the divergent tests had a lower density of D2 receptors in the thalamus than less creative people," says Dr Ullén.
Wicked Problems Wicked Problems A wicked problem is one for which each attempt to create a solution changes the understanding of the problem. Wicked problems cannot be solved in a traditional linear fashion, because the problem definition evolves as new possible solutions are considered and/or implemented. The term was originally coined by Horst Rittel. Wicked problems always occur in a social context -- the wickedness of the problem reflects the diversity among the stakeholders in the problem. Most projects in organizations -- and virtually all technology-related projects these days -- are about wicked problems. Some specific aspects of problem wickedness include: You don't understand the problem until you have developed a solution. Wicked problems have no stopping rule. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong, simply "better," "worse," "good enough," or "not good enough." Every wicked problem is essentially unique and novel. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.
The story of the self Memory is our past and future. To know who you are as a person, you need to have some idea of who you have been. And, for better or worse, your remembered life story is a pretty good guide to what you will do tomorrow. "Our memory is our coherence," wrote the surrealist Spanish-born film-maker, Luis Buñuel, "our reason, our feeling, even our action." Lose your memory and you lose a basic connection with who you are. It's no surprise, then, that there is fascination with this quintessentially human ability. This is quite a trick, psychologically speaking, and it has made cognitive scientists determined to find out how it is done. When you ask people about their memories, they often talk as though they were material possessions, enduring representations of the past to be carefully guarded and deeply cherished. We know this from many different sources of evidence. Even highly emotional memories are susceptible to distortion. What accounts for this unreliability?
Alan Watts ~ You Are What Happens To You Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving - Welcome The end is always nigh in the human mind - opinion - 07 June 2011 Why are we so attracted to prophecies of doom, from religious raptures to environmental collapse? It's part of our psychology IN 1919, William Butler Yeats wrote The Second Coming, an allegory of the atmosphere in Europe after the carnage of the first world war. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity. The poem draws heavily on the mythic narrative of the apocalypse - or at least the first half of it, destruction. What usually follows is rebirth and redemption, a second chance, life born anew. The latest incarnation of the destruction-redemption myth is brought to you by numerological number-cruncher and evangelical Christian radio host Harold Camping. Like Camping's rapture, many of these prognostications have failed to unfold. Why, then, do we find the basic narrative so appealing?
Wicked Problems If you work in an organisation that deals with social, commercial or financial planning - or any type of public policy planning - then you've got wicked problems. You may not call them by this name, but you know what they are. They are those complex, ever changing societal and organisational planning problems that you haven't been able to treat with much success, because they won't keep still. They're messy, devious, and they fight back when you try to deal with them. Keywords: Wicked problems, general morphological analysis, policy analysis, Horst Rittel Introduction In 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, both urban planners at the University of Berkley in California, wrote an article for Policy Sciences with the astounding title "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning". At first glance, it is not self-evident what is actually meant by this term. Also, wicked problems are not actually "problems" in the sense of having well defined and stable problem statements. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.