Embracing Chaos

The Blue Brain Project describes itself as:
The Blue Brain Project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations.
Others have described it as “a step toward the superbrain” or even ”the most interesting project in human history.”
I agree that this project is extremely important. [...]

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I’ve been thinking about writing this post for quite a while, and I figured tonight might be my last chance. Plenty of people have been worrying about how the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could destroy the planet by creating small black-holes that might suck in the entire earth. As the good folks at CERN re-assure us, everything is fine. I pretty much believe this. That is to say, I’m pretty sure LHC will not destroy all life as we know it. Pretty sure. Otherwise, we’ve all got a few more hours to live. So long as my buddy Stephen Hawking’s…

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One of the reasons I chose not to pursue a career in science was a feeling that all the interesting problems of physics have been solved. In a sense I still believe this — I don’t see the current line of pursuit bearing much fruit. But I do see two really important questions that physics hasn’t answered. What makes them especially interesting is that most of the scientific establishment doesn’t even recognize them as valid questions. Ever since Maxwell unified the theories of electricity and magnetism in 1864, physicists have been working towards a single model that can explain all…

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There’s been a lot of fuss lately about Nick Bostrom’s ideas that we live in a simulation as a result of an article in the New York Times. Here I’ll provide some analysis of Bostrom’s bold claim, including a proposed mechanism to explain my grandfather’s assertion that mathematical simplicity and beauty were indicators of underlying truth. I’ll also explore the implications of this possibility to our daily lives, and show why this is another reason to follow Transhuman Morality. Simplified Simulation or Complete, Accurate Model? The simulations Bostrom describes would not be precise to the subatomic level, but rather use…

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In this essay, I’m going to explore the question “If the human brain is Turing complete, what does that imply about the existence of free will?” And moreover, what does that mean about the ability to upload our consciousness into computers? First, a little computer science background. Turing completeness is the idea that a computing system has the same capabilities as a universal Turing machine. This theoretical machine moves along a long tape which has various symbols on it that the machine can read and write. The machine itself is always in one internal state, but will change to different…

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