04w06:1 Posted February 2nd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 6 number 1 (it’s all about the wiring) Note: I was using an incorrect calendar for the week numbers – this is week six. – Timothy ——————————————————————— The machine that invents | Tina Hesman http://tinyurl.com/2bfn5 “Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, gets credit for all those things, but he’s really just ‘the man behind the curtain,’ he says. The real inventor is a computer program called a Creativity Machine. What Thaler has created is essentially ‘Thomas Edison in a box,’ said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at General Dynamics and one of Thaler’s chief cheerleaders. ‘His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information,’ the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. ‘His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!'” Related Link http://www.imagination-engines.com/technologies/cm.htm Biology vs. the Blank Slate | Ronald Bailey & Nick Gillespie http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1568/5_34/91475038/print.jhtml “Pinker: […] The blank slate mentality is popular with people who believe that any human trait can be altered with the right changes in social institutions. It’s popular in the more radical branches of feminism, although not with the original core of feminism that stressed the drive for equity between the sexes. I think it allies to some degree with Marxist approaches to society. Not that Marx literally believed in a blank slate, but he certainly believed that you could not intelligently discuss human nature separate from its ever-changing interaction with the social environment. […] The noble savage myth is behind the sensibility that violence is learned behavior, a slogan that is repeated endlessly whenever violence is chronicled in the news. It’s also behind the Romantic idea that violent nonconformists are actually seeing the hypocrisy of society and challenging social institutions from a marginalized viewpoint, as opposed to the idea that such people are psychopaths and that we should prevent them from wreaking havoc on everyone else. [The doctrine of the ghost in the machine…] is there in a vaguer way, too, among others who fear that a materialist viewpoint–the idea that human experience and choice are products of a physical organ called the brain–is corrosive of morality, meaning, and ultimate purpose. reason: Why do you call these ideas myths? Pinker: Because they’re wrong. ” Long urls made short using TinyUrl (www.tinyurl.com) —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Monday 02 February 2004 @ 1:15 AM
