There have recently been some interesting developments in modeling the brain. On Wednesday it was reported that the Blue Brain project achieved a significant milestone. They have successfully modeled the neo-cortex of a rat brain. The associated picture is of a column within the modeled neocortex. More cool pictures can be found at the Blue Brain Project Gallery.
In April it was also reported that half a mouse brain had been modeled on an IBM super-computer. It would seem that the mouse brain model wasn’t as detailed as the one mentioned yesterday.
I’ve been reading a book kindly lent from a friend called ‘Creation: Life and how to make it’. It was written by Steve Grand a programmer who was the primary developer for an artificial life simulation called Creatures back in 1996. I have strong memories of the game though at the time I didn’t regard the creatures in the simulation as alive as Steve Grand seems to express. I haven’t reached far into the book so I haven’t any concrete opinions as of yet but it has been leading in some interesting directions.
At the start of the book he lays the foundations for his belief on the possibility for artificial life. I can’t take a direct quote from the book because he rambles all over the place. I get the impression that he has absorbed his opinions from various texts. He argues that mind/matter dualism is a fallacy and that everything is of one substance. He talks about how objects don’t persist as substances but only as patterns and that science’s obsession with substance is (mis)leading it to the mind/matter paradoxes. His belief for the ability to build life in a computer is at its base a belief in form over substance. If the form is present then life will arise whatever the substance. If a PC can create the right form/model then life will exist in that form.
This reminded me of David Chalmer’s argument that if every neuron in the brain was replaced with a silicon chip it would still function identically and was thus an argument for form over substance. David is an advocate for the possibility of strong AI. His arguments spring out of a dualist viewpoint and he is quite friendly toward panpsychism. Steve Grand is not a dualist though and I was inspired by his attempt to synthesise a type of dualism with modern science.
Quite by coincidence I was browsing the science books at Planet Books today and stumbled upon a book on science and theology in which constructive postmodernism was put forward as the way through the morass of the science/religion debate. Constructive postmodernism at its core advocates Alfred Whitehead’s process philosophy where process is primary and substance is subordinate to it. This is in contrast to the classic ontology used by most modern science where substance is primary and process is subordinate. This seems to match quite well to what Steve Grand was advocating and has me wondering if he is aware of this movement or whether his ideas are synthesised out of science books that play with these ideas. He certainly doesn’t provide any significant depth to his arguments in his book.
Deconstructive postmodernism has been a strong catalyst for my thoughts and experiences over the last 15 years or so and and I hadn’t come across the constructivist expansion. So I now have a new area to explore which is great. The thing that scares me is that Christian movements have been using process philosophy to advocate their theologies and thats always a dangerous sign. If you’re interested there’s a very interesting article on constructive postmodernism here.
It was in my early 20’s that I truly realised that my happiness wasn’t based on material success or possessions. I was relatively poor, had no close friends or family, was living in an empty house by myself, sleeping on the floor and surviving on raw veges and tofu. Yet at this time I had some of the happiest months I have had in my life. I always reflect back to that time in the knowledge that even if I loose all my friends and possessions it won’t impoverish my life. I had a saying then, “cessation of desire leads to ultimate fulfillment”.
Years later I started reading reports in the media of studies of happiness and it’s causes. The first big finding by sociologists was that happiness and money don’t seem to be correlated. Many reports indicate that the happiest people in the world live in both the richest and the poorest countries. More recently there was a psychological study which concluded that only about 10% of our happiness level is due to our life circumstances. Money, religion, education, job performance and marriage contribute very little to happiness. The most important contributors to happiness in our lives that we have control over are the things we choose to do day to day.
One of the most interesting things I’ve discovered over the last few years is that happiness as a goal based on long term achievement is an illusion. We do many things in our lives that aren’t enjoyable but we suffer through them because we think they will give us something that will make us happy at the end. This is not the case. The prime example of this is working hard in an unsatisfying job to save to buy things to make you happy. If you aren’t happy with what you are doing now it’s likely that it won’t get better until you change your day to day life.
Nowadays I view happiness as coming from a number of things. One is a simple lifestyle. The less you need the easier it is to fulfill those needs and the happier you will be. The second is daily actions or events that align with your ethics and life goals. The third is flow. Flow can be achieved through intense involvement in entertainment, work or meditation practice.
My goals in the last few months have been to bring my day to day life into alignment with my long term goals and ethics and start to simplify my lifestyle and act more spontaneously day to day.
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