Light passes freely through light. Were that not true, the visual messages we receive from the world would be scrambled by scattering, and much more complicated to interpret. In QED, that basic fact makes good sense: photons respond to electric charge, but photons themselves are electrically neutral.A Beautiful Question by Frank Wilczek (2015)
Research suggests there are states of arousal that fall between conventionally categorized states such as sleep and waking, supporting [John Lilly's] intuition that there are multiple states of human consciousness we have yet to fully explore. In the 1990s, the discovery of the Default Mode Network, an interconnected archipelago of brain areas whose activity decreases when we are focused on a task and increases when we stop focusing, complicated the notion that brain areas are either “on” or “off,” in use or on hold.from Postcards From the Edge of Consciousness by Meehan Crist
While researchers strive to figure out why vast data sets used to train algorithms do not reflect the reality they expected, others think the strange rules dreamed up by algorithms might be teaching us about aspects of reality that we can’t detect ourselves.
After all...a flower will look good to both a human and a bee, but that doesn’t mean both creatures see the same thing. “When we look at that flower in the spectrum that its pollinator can see in, the pattern is totally different”...Even though a bee would find our color perception weird, and vice versa, neither species’ view is an illusion. Perhaps the strangeness of neural-net cognition will teach us something. Perhaps it will even delight us.from Artificial Intelligence is already weirdly inhuman by David Berreby
At the most we gaze...in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness -- to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning.The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley (1954)
Fantasies — or nightmares — [such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein] are just stimulants to your imagination. What we should take seriously is the idea that the next stage of history will not only include technological and organisational transformations, but also fundamental transformations in human consciousness and identity. And these could be transformations so fundamental that they will call the very term ‘human’ into question. How long do we have? No one really knows…Some say that by 2050 a few humans will already be a-mortal. Less radical forecasts speak of the next century, or the next millennium. Yet from the perspective of 70,000 years of [behaviourally modern humans] what are a few millennia?Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (2011)
Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann envisaged situations arising when thinking machines could cease to be either controllable or comprehensible by their makers. Implicitly, they recognised that machines would develop by natural selection -- process without purpose or direction.The Soul of the Marionette by John Gray (2014)
In those far-off days our gang of boys first hit on the outlandish and impossible notion of straying even farther, beyond that inn, into no-man’s- or God’s-land, of patrolling borders both neutral and disputed, where boundary lines petered out and the compass rose of winds skittered erratically under a high arching sky. There we meant to dig in, raise ramparts around us, make ourselves independent of the grown-ups, pass completely out of the realm of their authority, proclaim the Republic of the Young…It was to be a life under the aegis of poetry and adventure, never-ending signs and portents. All we need to, or so it seemed to us, was push apart the barriers and limits of convention, the old markers imprisoning the course of human affairs, for our lives to be invaded by an elemental power, a great inundation of the unforeseen, a flood of romantic adventure and fabulous happenings…The spirit of nature was by its very essence a great storyteller. Out of its core the honeyed discourse of fables and novels, romances and epics, flowed in an irresistible stream. The whole atmosphere was absolutely stuffed with stories. You only needed to lay a trap under this sky full of ghosts to catch one, set a wooden post upright in the wind for strips of narrative to be caught fluttering on its tip.from The Republic of Dreams by Bruno Schulz (1892-1942)
