Gentle Reminders

To the Body -->

Dust thou art, to dust returnest!

To the Soul -->

Love thou art, to love returnest!

 

Finding Love...

Love and music, two of the most common languages spoken. I saw the truth in these lines from the Bible recently. They go as follows:

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Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offense, and is not resentful.

Love take no pleasure in other people’s sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.

Love does not come to an end. But if there are gifts of prophecy, the time will come when they must fail; or the gift of languages, it will not continue for ever; and knowledge-for this, too, the time will come when it must fail.

For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesying is imperfect; but once perfection comes, all imperfect things will disappear. When I was a child, I used to talk like a child, and think like a child, and argue like a child, but now I am a man, all childish ways are put behind me.

Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge that I have now is imperfect; but then I shall know as fully as I am known.

In short, there are three things that last; faith, hope and love and the greatest of these is love.

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The language of love - the love of God - the purest form of love. Love conquers all!!!

It makes a big difference!

The Price of Peace

I am reading this book called "Dare 2B Wise" by authors Joe White and Kelli Stuart. The book contains chapters which are presented as 10-minute devotions, reflections on values. This particular chapter I read called "the price of peace", I thought was very inspiring. In order to establish the permanency of the content I decided to write the contents of the chapter as a blog-post. 

What follows hence, is an excerpt from the the book in the words of Joe White.

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Better a dry crust with peace and quiet than a house full of feasting, with strife.

--Proverbs 17:1

How much money do you have?

How beautiful is she?

How "hot" is he?

What kind of car do you drive?

How fast can he run the forty?

How big is her house?

How skinny is your body?

How muscular is he?

What kind of clothes does she wear?

In our appearance-crazed society, we measure "wealth" in a lot of interesting ways, such as our looks, our athletic ability, our car, our figure, our build.

I've probably met a million kids in my lifetime. I've talked with thousands one-on-one. I've gotten to know hundreds pretty well.

You wanna know what? The most beautiful are usually not the happiest. The most handsome may not be the most fulfilled. The best athlete is not necessarily the most content with himself. The guy with the hottest car is not generally the most peaceful.

In fact looks, talents and wealth usually have very little to do with a person's inner peace, joy, and sense of fulfillment. In the long run, the things that matter the most aren't the things we can see and possess.

Advertisers unrelentingly work to make us think that things are paramount, so they can sell their product.

If people were content with who they are and what they have, clothing and jewelery and diet deals wouldn't sell very well, would they?

Peace -- in your family and in yourself -- is what really matters.

Do you have joy in your heart? Joy comes from being thankful in all circumstances and serving others more than you serve yourself.

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Thank you.

r v Natural-Born Cyborgs?

Our Cognitive Science class decided to attend this talk on October 20th, 2010; titled "Natural-born Cyborgs? Reflections on Bodies, Minds and Human Enhancement". This talk fit right into the research realm of the course  and hence it was relevant that we attended. The session as expected was very insightful and intellectually stimulating all the way. The presenter was Dr. Andy Clark, a very charismatic personality and quite an emphatic speaker. He is a Professor of Philosophy and Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I even tried googling him and found this wikipedia link --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Clark, which apparently means,"He is a big deal!"

I intend on reviewing the talk through this blog-post. Yeh, that's right! I was that impressed. :)

Disclaimer: The sentences that follow, hence, will be a bunch of random ideas, conclusions, inferences, quotations; with little or no coherency. I apologize for any confusion this may cause, but somehow I like the mystery element associated with this form of expression.

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Cyborg: part human, part machine.

The idea behind a Cyborg: The biological platform of humans are limited and hence upgrade the platform through technology (eg:- pacemakers, cochlear implants, birthcontrol drugs, PC's, iPhone's, GPS's etc).

The factor that causes the research progress is that the idea of "normal" changes with time. What's normal is very open-ended and relative to time and being. Biology and technology, both keep getting complex over time.

Not far is the day when us Homosapiens will be called Robosapiens and that will mark the next phase in evolution.

We as human beings continually engineer and re-engineer our own behavioral and mental capacities. The paper "Cyborgs and Space" discusses this idea of human-machine hybrids, wherein it is possible to retro-fit humans to space. So basically instead of trying to tailor the universe to suit the human, it is a great deal easier to tailor the human to suit the universe.

Whenever we think of cyborgs, we imagine a being that has been wired first hand like the terminator. Now,  this is a common misconception that I shared in having before the talk. As far as the technological incorporation is concerned, it is the synergy that counts between the artificial addition and the being, as opposed to the direct connection/wiring, whatever we may choose to call it.

There are many brilliant minds who have been and are involved in this active field of research such as: Dr. Daniel Clement Dennett, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, Varla, Thompson, Rosch, Bruner, Norman, Heidegger, Gibson, Bateson to name a few.

The entire concept of the "Natural-Born Cyborgs" can be traversed through 4 connected parts:

1. Augmenting the body

"I am the sum-total of the parts I control directly." - Daniel Dennett.

This idea being so novel back in the day, Heidegger needed to introduce several neologisms to capture the depth of concept such as 'present-at-hand' and 'ready-to-hand', which are now used to describe attitudes towards various things in the world.

Stelarc (Stelios Arkadiou), a Greek-Australian performance artist whose work focuses heavily on extending the capabilities of the human body, has a third mechanical arm attached to his body. He controls the extra limb through surface electromyography.

Metaphorically expressed, "We do not will our hand to move, we will for the task to be done." This is the general attitude towards the unification of the eternal technological element and our biological selves. Its use should be subliminal and not conscious.

For eg:- Car drivers in their vehicle, Mechanics with their tools, Musicians with their instruments etc.
"Phantoms in the Brain" was one of the books recommended by Andy Clark, that deals with probing the mysteries of the human mind.

Paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius, also known as the "blade runner" or the "fastest man on no legs", is a double amputee and runs with the aid of Cheetah Flex-Foot carbon fibre transtibial artificial limbs by Ossur. He has been able to set several world records running on his prosthetics. A similar case, is that of American athlete, actress, and fashion model Aimee Mullins. She also uses prosthetic limbs owing to the amputation of both her biological legs.

2. Extending the Senses

"Our mind and senses are just as negotiable as body parts."

Really?

Sensory Substitution means to transform the characteristics of one sensory modality into stimuli of another sensory modality. Tactile Visual Sensory Substitute is an example of the implementation of this concept. Several new systems have been developed that interface the tactile image to tactile receptors on different areas of the body such as the on the chest, brow, fingertip, abdomen, and forehead.

"Sensory Substitution and the Human-Machine Interface" is an excellent paper which explores the idea of developing systems that compensate for sensory loss.

Consider the example of the "feelSpace Project", a belt with vibrators attached, which are governed by heading information from an electronic compass: the one vibrator pointing north is active. Thereby, the belt user is constantly provided with tactile heading information relative to the earth's magnetic field. If, for instance, the user is directed to west, the vibrator on his right hip vibrates. Studies show that after 6 weeks of constant wear, subjects displayed improved spatial awareness.

"Beyond sensory substitution - learning the sixth sense", "Why red doesn't sound like a bell" are among several other works that delve into the topic of sensory substitution.

So basically, the bottomline is: 

Maybe our senses too are just a set of garments, just like the parts of the body. We are re-configurable!

3. Enhancing the Mind

Brains: masters of 'productive laziness'

Anecdote:

"Do you the time?"

"Yes!"

and THEN we look at the watch.

"Curing Cognitive Hiccups", "Genius", "The Extended Mind", "The Memory Glasses: Wearable Computing for Just-in-Time Memory Support", "Recognizer" are among several publications, books and softwares that contribute to research in the area of enhancing the mind.

4. Our Worlds, Ourselves

...a kind of a personal dissolution into the bio-technological matrix.

As far as progress is concerned :"BLOAT" shouldn't bother us as much as "SHRINKAGE".

Carolyn Baum discovered a certain place where patients with Alzheimer's lived in a regular domestic home environment instead of care homes. How did they survive? Well, they went about their daily activities with the help of cognitive props, tools and aids.

Consider the case of Patrick Jones, a working catholic deacon in Colorado Springs, whose suffered traumatic brain injury. What enables him to go about his daily activites? He uses a combination of Evernote, a Mac program for visualization called Curio and an iPhone. So basically his biological limitations have been overcome by harnessing the use of technology. Technology has become such an indispensable part of deacon Patrick's life that if we deleted his Evernote data, it would be like inflicting brain damage on someone while he slept.

"What if HM had a Blackberry?" a very interesting article published in the magazine Psychology Today by Dr. Gary Marcus. It speaks of coping with amnesia using modern technology.

Conclusion

Dr. Andy Clark then concluded the session with a line from Yeat's poem, 'He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven':- "Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"

Observations from the question answer session that followed;

1. Because of economic divide, we could speciate into a different race based on the technology we can afford, which serves as the agency.

2. Dependence on technology or Interdependence between the biological being and the technological enhancement shouldn't be mistaken as cognitive shrinkage, but right identified as cognitive re-distribution.

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I wish to conclude with a dialogue from the movie "I, Robot".

Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith's character): Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
Sonny (Robot): Can *you*?

Anybody and Everybody - Really? Is that what you want?

Full due credits to the author and success coach - Robin Sharma, for the story below:-

The Tale of Two Fields 

Once, there was a pristine green field that was alive and lush, amidst the extraordinary bloom of Springtime. Next to it happened to sit another field. This one full of weeds, dirt and rough edged stones. A testament to mediocrity. And an acute lack of care.



Through the operation of Nature's laws, the seeds of the weeds from the mediocre field were slowly blown over to the lush field. And so, day by day, the once stunningly beautiful one - with once awesome potential - succumbed to the influence of it's low-grade next door neighbor.



Before the season was through, there sat two fields. Both completely overcome by weeds. 



The leadership lesson for you and I (in this world that aches for real leaders): your influences and environments matter. The people you associate with will infect your thinking. The content of what you read/watch/listen to will affect your game. And the things you surround yourself with will determine whether you work at wow. Or end up at a field called mediocre.

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With the experiences I've had thus far in my life, there has been a significant change in my attitude and personality with gaining the understanding that "it is not important to be all things to all people, but it is important to be all I can be". One fine day, pondering on the idea expressed in the story above, I felt inspired to write the lines below-->

"It is possible for all living beings to mingle with each other; it does not seem a unique characteristic. The unique part is when we are able to use discernment over abilities. It is important to protect ourselves at all times from negative influences. This is what goes on to eventually determine 'Thought Quality' ~ 'Life Quality'."

But then again, there is a need to mention - the desire for life experiences and ways to attain them is subjective to every individual.

Interdependence

I recently read this article titled "Interdependence" on one of the blogs I follow. Funnily the next time I checked in on the article it wasn't there anymore. Thankfully, I had printed it out. Now since I have the tendency to lose the pages that I collect, I decided that I'd imprint the article on the blog. Why am I doing this? I loved the simple, surprising truth it conveys. So here goes -->

We all depend on one another for all kinds of things, don't we? We depend on the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. Interdependence. That's fine! We set up society this way and we allot different functions to different people for the welfare of everyone, so that we will function better and live more effectively -- at least we hope so. But to depend on another psychologically -- to depend on another emotionally -- what does that imply? It means to depend on another human being for my happiness.

Think about that. Because if you do, the next thing you will be doing, whether you're aware of it or not, is DEMANDING that other people contribute to your happiness. Then there will be a next step -- fear, fear of loss, fear of alienation, fear of rejection, mutual control. Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling.

I enjoy it on a non-clinging basis. What I really enjoy is not you; it's something that's greater than both you and me. It is something that I discovered, a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, the orchestra doesn't stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful. And when I'm alone, it continues to play. There's a great repertoire and it never ceases to play.