The SmartS Club

The amount of data being created every second is breathtaking (five trillion bits per second, as George Dyson tells us at ege.org ). Some take this as proof for a tremendous increase in knowledge, others spot only chatter and pocket litter - (and yes, there are estimates that half of the storage capacity - and hence half of the power consumed for 'the internet' - is used for porn). Some see much more. Already in 1955, when the Norwegian-Italian mathematical biologist Nils Aaall Barricelli had heard about the machines operating on digital code in Princeton and finally managed to go there, he experimented with self-replication and cross-breeding of random strings on that machine. Being an experimentalist he observed carefully and studied patterns that reminded him of biological systems. Couldn't computer-code be treated similarly? Shouldn't there be the possibility of evolution in code? Roger Dyson highlights the fact of universal operating systems across multiple ...

Remember the Zebrafish ? That likeable little thing is termed the 'workhorse' model organism in developmental biology (and nobody has a problem with this metaphor). Be it as it is - Zebrafish are the pet model organism for brain studies for essentially two reasons: they are easy to breed - and the larvae are transparent, allowing for easy access to neuronal imaging. Recently Florian Engert and coworkers put paralysed zebrafish larvae in an experimental setup that is highly reminiscent of The Matrix, letting the fishlet experience a virtual world of environment-simulations and study the reactions to the stimuli by optically monitoring brain-functions via a fluorescent reaction to calcium-flow (which, you guessed it, is related to cell-activity)(see Nature 493, p467). The calcium-indicator is actually expressed by a transgenic line of fish (or other even less cuddly animals like fruit-flies, clamped under a microscope with their legs moving freely on a little ball). As reporte...

Do you understand german? Be happy if not. If you do you might be tempted to read this interview with the philosopher Patrick Spät . This young chap is so overconfidently bashing 'physicalism' that he doesn't stop himself from saying things like "already atoms have fundamental mental properties" (ah, I see, it is in the word 'fundamental').  I once met an esoterically enlightened person, who made quite a shipload of money claiming that photons obviously possess a free will as they can willingly decide whether to be particle or wave. Spät might like that idea. Remember, his atoms have mental properties. Mentality, he says, is a natural property just as charge, mass or spin. Sure. Go, measure it. Those properties then add up and the more atoms you have, the more mental you get. Great! What a huge mind my favorite skyscraper represents! And I always knew that my short cousin couldn't be as smart a smart-S as I am - simply because she lacks the number...

In one corner of the web somebody quotes somebody euphorically as giving "4 signs of a culture of innovation" (google that complete phrase and enjoy the list of cut-and-paste-authors that make you call for intelligent filters) The four signs? We get that dull list of standard soft-skills that no less than every serious company in the civilized world subscribes to - twice!: 1. Development of the employees 2. Concern for employees' progress 3. Respect for everyone's contribution 4. Teamwork and collaboration That was it. "4 signs of a culture of innovation" - Those four lala-points! To make things worse the list is supplemented by some bullet-points highlighting unmistakeable signs for 'un-innovation'(! snake-oil anybody?): a. Emphasis on sheer talent b. Categorizing by ability c-f. some modes of harassment that no employer, who isn't completely insane would ever subscribe to. Girls, boys, listen. 1-4 are the most commonly accepted soft-s...

Recently I enjoyed following a presentation at Platoon/Berlin on Alternative Currencies. It was a great pleasure to hear that very smart guy Gabriel Shalom introducing his video "The future of money" - and the video itself was a nice treat. But I felt increasingly at unease listening to the narrative about the presentation of the video at SIBOS, 'the worlds biggest banking conference'. There was some sound of pride in the voice of Gabriel and giggling in the audience when he reported that after the 7.5 minute short video there was absolute silence, no questions, no comments, nothing… "we dropped the evil-bomb", he said to the amusement of us folks. My problem was that common-sense in the room (well, it was a tent at Platoon): *they* are the bad guys *we* are the good guys. To phrase it drastically - even though I never dug too deep into the history and concept of money myself there was really nothing unexpected, scary, chilling, thrilling or excitingly...

Michio Kaku is featured on the website bigthink.com as a sympathetic elderly man able and willing to explain everything. On April 13 he tells us "why quantum physics ends the free will debate" . Well, sure. I am very supportive of the idea to popularize big scientific thoughts and achievements so that the broader public gets a glimpse of what is being mulled over in the head of those big shots. But I am totally allergic to oversimplification at the expense of the real message. Why does quantum physics supposedly end the free will debate? You guess it: because with Newtonian physics everything, every thought, every move you make every step you take was in principle predictable. The world was supposedly completely deterministic. You would just have to know all the parameters of the universe at the time of the big bang, then calculate and calculate until you arrive at your phase space of now and, voila, you could extrapolate into the future of your tremendously boring life. ...

What do you think of when you see your empty beer-glass in front of you? Right: it could be full. This is ok with me, you seem to be no techie. Would you have taken up the essence of the binary world through your umbilical cord, your first response would be: Beer=1, noBeer=0 - hey, what a great way to exchange messages in a bar! Rows of full and empty beer-glasses representing zeroes and ones, a wonderfull virtual world! No, I am not drunk - yet. While building a computer out of lined-up beverages might be a bit off mainstream, expensive and a never acceptable misappropriation of digestible goods, some tech-kids made the youtube-charts with a presentation of their computer built from stone and dust in the virtual world of minecraft. As Wired Magazine reports , some geek called Ben Craddock (or theinternetftw in his world) built a computer entirely out of the virtual matter redstone. When redstone is destroyed it forms redstone dust, which itself can be used to build wires with two pos...

A computer, no matter how fast and complex it might be, will at best simulate consciousness and imitate intelligence since - by the way a computer is constructed and used today – the computer is a generator for objects and states in a virtual reality. Virtual reality adds to but does not overlap with the physical reality (corporeality) of our everyday life. Intelligence and consciousness are products of corporeality and are therefore separate from the virtual world computers produce and play in. The border between these realities is sharp and clear and can not be transcended. As long as a computer is the medium for a simulation, imitation, visualization it will produce objects well within the virtual world. It will never produce intelligence or show consciousness. But is the computer doomed to be a medium only? No. Aren't our brains also just media for the play of sensations, thoughts, feelings? No. The difference lies in the way of operation. Todays computers have separat...

A stone is dropped into a pond creating a perfectly circular wavefront that propagates radially away from the point of impact. The speed of wave-propagation, the amplitude and wavelength can easily be modelled by a wave-function - a computer can simulate the wave-pattern on the water and display a virtual lake with breathtaking similarity. But it remains a simulation. The lake does not solve a wave-equation in order to show a wave-pattern. The propagation of a water-wave is the consequence of an inherent property of the water itself. The description by a wave-equation - as accurate as it might be - is a model of the real thing, a simulation - not even an imitation. These are two completely different - and absolutely not comparable - paths to the image of a water-wave. The simulated wave shows the same imagery as the real one, the wave-propagation looks identical, the optical reflections will be perfectly similar, it might even be possible to predict some wave-behavior. But the simula...

On June 22, 2010 David Gelernter presented his thoughts on Artificial Intelligence - the capability of computers to show intelligent behaviour - in a talk on invitation by The American Academy and FAZ in Berlin. The title "Dream Logic, Software Minds, and the Poetry of Human Thought" gave a hint at what to expect. He went deep into his rather personal understanding of intelligence and consciousness. Gelernter attempted a definition of 'thinking' (as opposed to the simulation of thinking) by deep introspection and analysis of his thought-processes. The result was a rather romantic, very anthropocentric praise of creativity, dreaming and intuition. Something tightly connected to feelings, emotion and unpredictability - a collection of elements a computer does arguably not have. A thinking computer, he inferred, should 'know' or 'feel' that he is thinking - thereby connecting thinking to consciousness. But is this the right approach? David Gelernter...