Not usually my kind of music, but something is entrancing about Lana Del Rey’s voice…
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When you talk about free music, people who work in the music business will tell you you’ve gone too far. They’ll say you’re devaluing the art itself, and that once you go there, there is no coming back. I suppose I would agree if I thought that music’s only value was monetary. But I don’t.
Music does have monetary value. But more than its monetary value is its emotional value, its relational value, its artistic value, even its spiritual value. When you make meaningful connections with people based on artistic self-expression, I think you’re actually increasing the value of that art based on the many ways it’s valued.
"Giving it Away: How Free Music Makes More Sense
"Whenever we ask “why?” we generally mean “How?”, because why implies a sense of purpose that we have no reason to believe actually exists. When we ask “Why are there 8 planets orbiting the Sun?” we really mean “How are there 8 planets?”—namely how did the evolution of the solar system allow the formation and stable evolution of 8 large bodies orbiting the Sun. And thus, as I also emphasize, we may never be able to discern if there is actually some underlying universal purpose to the universe, although there is absolutely no scientific evidence of such purpose at this point, what is really important to understanding ourselves and our place in the universe is not trying to parse vague philosophical questions about something and nothing, but rather to try and operationally understand how our universe evolved, and what the future might bring. Progress in physics in the past century has taken us to the threshold of addressing questions we might never have thought were approachable within the domain of science. We may never fully resolve them, but the very fact that we can plausibly address them is worth celebrating. That is the purpose of my book. And it is this intellectual quest that I find so very exciting, and which I want to share more broadly, because it represents to me the very best about what it means to be human."
[The Blog : Everything and Nothing :
Sam Harris](http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/everything-and-nothing/)
"technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse."
Artificial General Intelligence and its Potential Role in the Singularity
AGI researcher and futurist Ben Goertzel on the intersection of AGI and a singularity.
"You know that feeling, when you’re alone in a house reading a book and you get really into what you’re reading and it gets intense, then the chapter ends and you look around, almost like you forgot where you were, and there’s this deep, almost creepy, silence that fills the whole house? That’s my favorite feeling."
(Source: ex-malo-bonum, via just-breezy)
"If mind is what flows through the mechanism of the brain, does that make neuroplasticity a process or a fact? “It’s a fact of a process,” he told me. “Process is a verb not a noun. It’s not a hypothesis, it’s a fact of science, a real entity, but a process—something moving, happening, and dynamic. Take running. It’s a noun but it’s about a moving process.”17 He touched on the same subject at the conference: “Everything we experience, memory or emotion or thought, is part of a process, not a place in the brain! Energy is the capacity to do stuff. There’s nothing that’s not energy, even ‘mass.’ Remember E=MC squared? Information is literally a swirl of energy in a certain pattern that has a symbolic meaning; it stands for something other than itself. Information should be a verb; mind, too—as in minding or informationing. And the mind is an embodied and relational emergent process that regulates the flow of energy and information."
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This argument over authenticity lies at the heart of the neuroethicists’ objections. If there is a single line that divides the supporters of neurological freedom from those who would restrict the new treatments, it is the debate over whether a natural state of human being exists and, if so, how appropriate it is to modify it. Wolpe makes the point that in one sense cognitive enhancement resembles its opposite, Alzheimer’s disease. A person with Alzheimer’s loses her personality. Similarly, an enhanced individual’s personality may become unrecognizable to those who knew her before.
Not that this is unusual. Many people experience a version of this process when they go away from their homes to college or the military. They return as changed people with new capacities, likes, dislikes, and social styles, and they often find that their families and friends no longer relate to them in the old ways. Their brains have been changed by those experiences, and they are not the same people they were before they went away. Change makes most people uncomfortable, probably never more so than when it happens to a loved one. Much of the neuro-Luddites’ case rests on a belief in an unvarying, static personality, something that simply doesn’t exist.
""The banks have said, leave us deregulated, we know how to run things, don’t put government in to meddle. Then with that freedom of maneuver they took huge gambles, and even made illegal actions, and then broke the world system. As soon as that happened then they rushed out to say ‘bail us out, bail us out, if you don’t bail us out, we’re too big to fail, you have to save us’. As soon as that happened, they said ‘oh, don’t regulate us, we know what to do’. And they almost went back to their old story, and the public is standing there, amazed, because we just bailed you out how can you be paying yourself billions of dollars of bonuses again? And the bankers say, ‘well we deserve it, what’s your problem’? And the problem that the Occupy Wall Street and other protesters have is: you don’t deserve it, you nearly broke the system, you gamed the economy, you’re paying mega fines, yet you’re still in the White House you’re going to the state dinners, you’re paying yourself huge bonuses, what kind of system is this?"
Jeffrey Sachs: ‘That’s not a free market, that’s a game’ - Talk to Al Jazeera - Al Jazeera English
"Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky."
Alan Moore (via decaying-organic-matter)
(via eddyizm)
"Taking this a couple of steps further, the article points out that, to many people, Facebook’s “frictionless” sharing doesn’t enhance sharing; it makes sharing meaningless. Let’s go back to music: It is meaningful if I tell you that I really like the avant-garde music by Olivier Messiaen. It’s also meaningful to confess that I sometimes relax by listening to Pink Floyd. But if this kind of communication is replaced by a constant pipeline of what’s queued up in Spotify, it all becomes meaningless. There’s no “sharing” at all. Frictionless sharing isn’t better sharing; it’s the absence of sharing. There’s something about the friction, the need to work, the one-on-one contact, that makes the sharing real, not just some cyber phenomenon. If you want to tell me what you listen to, I care. But if it’s just a feed in some social application that’s constantly updated without your volition, why do I care? It’s just another form of spam, particularly if I’m also receiving thousands of updates every day from hundreds of other friends."
