Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace---Complete Book minus jacket flaps - Education-Adult-Education
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. 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. What makes consciousness such a difficult problem for scientists to explain?
Hard problem of consciousness
The existence of a "hard problem" is controversial and has been disputed by some philosophers.[4][5] Providing an answer to this question could lie in understanding the roles that physical processes play in creating consciousness and the extent to which these processes create our subjective qualities of experience.[3] Several questions about consciousness must be resolved in order to acquire a full understanding of it. These questions include, but are not limited to, whether being conscious could be wholly described in physical terms, such as the aggregation of neural processes in the brain. If consciousness cannot be explained exclusively by physical events, it must transcend the capabilities of physical systems and require an explanation of nonphysical means. For philosophers who assert that consciousness is nonphysical in nature, there remains a question about what outside of physical theory is required to explain consciousness. Formulation of the problem[edit] Easy problems[edit] T.H.
A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain | Guest Blog
Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17th century when he claimed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible... the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished. From it, western thought developed two basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied and reason is transcendent and universal. However, as George Lakoff and Rafeal Núñez explain: Cognitive science calls this entire philosophical worldview into serious question on empirical grounds... What exactly does this mean? Embodied cognition has a relatively short history.
Lego Serious Play at CERN, Challenge Based innovation
CBi is the latest iteration of an evolving experiment at CERN in Geneva. The CBi acronym stands for “Challenge Based innovation”, and the experiment pulls in students from several countries and multiple disciplines. The Scimpulse Foundation collaborates with CERN since 2013 and in this occasion we facilitate a concept design workshop. It’s a sunny September morning in Mayrin, the outskirts of Geneva, right on the side of the ATLAS experiment building there is a new shell enclosure where a bunch of students practice and learn about innovation. The challenge is to design something that may enable blind people to perceive the surrounding environment; maybe some type of augmented sensory device. They call themselves the “Heisenberg” team. They fly through the training! After announcing that now we were going to get serious, I pose the first question: – I am going to ask you to go beyond the normal concept of blindness, starting from the opposite side … let’s build the model of: Let me see!
Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom
From SystemsWiki by Gene Bellinger, Durval Castro, Anthony Mills There is probably no segment of activity in the world attracting as much attention at present as that of knowledge management. Yet as I entered this arena of activity I quickly found there didn't seem to be a wealth of sources that seemed to make sense in terms of defining what knowledge actually was, and how was it differentiated from data, information, and wisdom. What follows is the current level of understanding I have been able to piece together regarding data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. I figured to understand one of them I had to understand all of them. According to Russell Ackoff [1989], a systems theorist and professor of organizational change, the content of the human mind can be classified into five categories: Ackoff indicates that the first four categories relate to the past; they deal with what has been or what is known. A further elaboration of Ackoff's definitions follows: Data... data is raw. Addendum
DIKW Pyramid
The DIKW Pyramid, also known variously as the "DIKW Hierarchy", "Wisdom Hierarchy", the "Knowledge Hierarchy", the "Information Hierarchy", and the "Knowledge Pyramid",[1] refers loosely to a class of models[2] for representing purported structural and/or functional relationships between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. "Typically information is defined in terms of data, knowledge in terms of information, and wisdom in terms of knowledge".[1] History[edit] "The presentation of the relationships among data, information, knowledge, and sometimes wisdom in a hierarchical arrangement has been part of the language of information science for many years. Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom[edit] In the same year as Ackoff presented his address, information scientist Anthony Debons and colleagues introduced an extended hierarchy, with "events", "symbols", and "rules and formulations" tiers ahead of data.[7][16] Data, Information, Knowledge[edit] Description[edit] Data[edit] Structural vs.
The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy - David Weinberger
by David Weinberger | 9:00 AM February 2, 2010 The data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy seemed like a really great idea when it was first proposed. But its rapid acceptance was in fact a sign of how worried we were about the real value of the information systems we had built at such great expense. What looks like a logical progression is actually a desperate cry for help. The DIKW hierarchy (as it came to be known) was brought to prominence by Russell Ackoff in his address accepting the presidency of the International Society for General Systems Research in 1989. But the actual first recorded instance of it was in 1934: Where is the Life we have lost in living? Those lines come from the poem “The Rock” by T.S. The DIKW sequence made immediate sense because it extends what every Computer Science 101 class learns: information is a refinement of mere data. But, the info-to-knowledge move is far more problematic than the data-to-info one. So, what is “knowledge” in the DIKW pyramid?
