China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Overcoming Chronic and Degenerative Diseases with Energy Medicine 1
Published in Aruna Bakhru, Nutrition and Integrative Medicine, 2018
Another candidate for the ultra-fast biology is “wetware”: In a book entitled Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell, Dennis Bray (2009) proposed that all cells are built of molecular biochemical circuits that process information from the environment and perform logical operations, comparable in sophistication to those taking place in electronic devices. Bray defines Wetware as the sum of all of the information-rich biochemical processes and “computations” taking place inside a cell—the interactions of dissolved molecules or arrays of molecules forming complex webs or circuits. Bray also suggested that the computational properties of cells provide the basis for the distinctive properties of living systems, including the ability to embody in their internal structures “images” of the world around them. This concept was supported by the work of Albrecht-Buehler who described a rudimentary form of cellular “vision” based on the light sensing properties of a cytoskeletal component known as the centriole. After some 30 years of observation, Albrecht-Buehler concluded that single tissue cells have their own data- and signal-processing capacities that help control their movements and orientation.Albrecht-Buehler 1985, 1992
Getting Information from the Unknown World
Published in David E. H. Jones, Why Are We Conscious?, 2017
Another possible approach grows out of my dissatisfaction with liquid theory. The liquid state has a character of its own—for example, it encompasses nearly all chemistry. Life, and a fortiori consciousness, occurs only in the liquid phase. All biological cells contain not merely liquid water and many substances in solution, but lots of objects in aqueous suspension as well. Astronomers searching for a planet which might support extraterrestrial life (and to date they have not found one) concentrate on planets whose surface temperature is compatible with the existence of water as a liquid. There may be subtle wisdom in the way that many computer experts call the human brain’s mental contribution to a computer program, one from ‘wetware’.
Remembering and planning to do things.
Published in Patrick Rabbitt, The Aging Mind, 2019
In his earliest experiments exploring working memory, Alan asked volunteers to do two tasks at once. They found this much harder if both tasks made very similar demands. The same logic has been used to test what, precisely, are the demands made by prospective memory tasks. As we might expect, the more demanding a prospective memory task, the more it is disrupted by other tasks. This may seem to be an uninteresting re-statement of the obvious truism that it is more difficult to do two difficult than two easy things at once. Nevertheless, we must always bear in mind that humans have been strenuously thinking about themselves and their minds for thousands of years and that much of what laboratory psychologists have had to do during the last two centuries is to codify, experimentally validate, document and quantify ancient intuitions. Those who are comfortable with simple analogies between mental activities and computer hardware may choose to liken mutual interference between simultaneous tasks to the problem of a machine that has only one central processor to deal with information needed for one kind of decision at a time. This acts as a bottleneck, and other information, needed for different decisions, must queue to be dealt with. Our short-term wetware-memories differ from computer hardware-memories in the sense that they can hold queuing information only for very brief intervals of time before it decays and is lost. It also seems that our brains have separate dedicated processing systems for different kinds of sensory information, such as sounds (words) and patterns (vision) or for hand and leg movements. These systems can work in parallel so that different information from different sensory sources can be processed simultaneously but information received from a single sensory source has to queue to be dealt with.
Data, Metadata, Mental Data? Privacy and the Extended Mind
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2023
This question—concerning our minds’ coupling with recent and current technologies—is an important one. Admittedly, peoples’ intuitions, when asked to comment on it, often pull toward different directions. On my part, I suspect that each persons’ stance toward the Extended Mind thesis largely depends on their own experience and cognitive strategies—do they often perform mental tasks by bidirectionally interacting with existing technologies? If the answer is positive, they are more likely to feel the force of the thesis. Nevertheless, let’s not lose sight of the larger picture here: Whatever the status of existing technologies may be, one can easily imagine that, in a few years’ time, when brain-machine interfaces (e.g., Elon Musk’s Neuralink) will have been perfected, the coupling between our brains and technologically stored information will be as seamless as the one we currently entertain with the data bathing in our wetware. When that is the case (and it may not be too long before it is)—i.e., when we command and retrieve information from our smart devices merely by thinking about it—it will be increasingly hard for anyone to deny that such devices and the information they contain are proper parts of our minds. In fact, even the view’s fiercest critics are quick to note that, while they doubt its truth so far, it is possible that the Extended Mind thesis may materialize in the future.8
Do You Mind? Toward Neurocentric Criteria for Assessing Cognitive Function Relevant to the Moral Regard and Treatment of Non-Human Organisms
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2023
Sherry E. Loveless, James Giordano
We have proposed that this information could be used to create and articulate a tentative equation: C ↔ Pm [a/dc]; in which cognitive processes (C), reflect patterns (P) of putative material substrates’(m) activities (a) in specific functional domains and contexts of occurrence (dc; Evers and Giordano 2017)). Efforts to elucidate these patterns (and possible use and/or revision of the equation) could be of value to establish ratio metrics that may be employed to formulate criteria that fortify correlations between neurological structures and mechanisms (i.e., the neurological “wetware”), and the experiential and expressive (intero- and extroceptive and -responsive) processes (i.e.—the “programs”) they evoke or with which they are involved.