BioCybernaut Trip
Introduction After starting a meditation practice and keeping with it for a year, I wanted to learn more about any physiological changes that might have occurred. In particular, if I had — or if I could change my practice to…
eXtreme Education: Cognitive programming
I read a few articles that I’d like to pull together and place under the growing umbrella of what might probably become my personal teaching philosophy. First, when you look at eXtreme Programming, it consists of a collection of reinforcing…
Homoiconic Dichotomy and Interactive Publications
Both Linguistics and Computer Science have some concern about the difference between form and meaning. This difference is usually introduced in a syntax vs semantics lecture. I would like to show that it actually occurs in a wide variety of…
Meaningless is Meaningful
Today I had a long and philosophical discussion with one of my friends. He started the conversation with a baited question: “Have you ever met a Solipsist?”. How could I avoid that one? Of course the conversation delved into the…
Designer Graphics
I have the misfortune of owning all of Ed Tufte’s books. Reading and enjoying these books has given me a sensitivity to data display that now makes me cringe whenever I see a terrible chart. Even in academic papers, benchmark…
Minds from Agents
Recently, I came across this SEED article, Divide Midns, Specious Souls; which has this deliciously anti-religious, pro-science quote: Within the wide range of works arranged along the axis of soulism, from Life After Death: The Evidence, by Dinesh D’Souza, to…
Thinking about Thinking
So far, in my reading of Minsky’s Society of Mind, his hypothesis, that the mind is an agglomeration of specialized agents working in conjunction with each other completely meshes with observations of my own behavior. In particular, I’ve noticed that…
Enlightened Materialism
I keep finding interesting stuff on this old HD; Here’s a documented e-mail conversation between myself and a high-school friend Jeff Peoples on materialism and the mind. It was dated 2004-04-07 and appears to have been written in response to…
The Three types of Existence
I know that I promised a post about process composition and software architecture, but this just can’t wait. Last night I had a really nice conversation with one of my high school friends about the nature of existence. It all…
Linguistics and SciFi
Ok, It’s been more than a week since I last wrote down any of my thoughts. I recently went on travel for work, and gave a presentation of the software that I’ve been working on. I was received well, and…