Storytellers are not priests who commune with an ethereal realm, but artisans, like dumpling-makers, if somewhat slower. To work, then, dear youth, until the lamp drinks itself dry.
— The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (via Findings.com)
Must we talk about zombies? Apparently we must. There is a powerful and ubiquitous intuition that computational, mechanistic models of consciousness, of the sort we naturalists favor, must leave something out - something important. Just what must they leave out? The critics have found that it’s hard to say, exactly: qualia, feelings, emotions, the what-it’s-likeness (Nagel) or the ontological subjectivity (Searle) of consciousness. Each of these attempts to characterize the phantom residue has met with serious objections and been abandoned by many who nevertheless want to cling to the intuition, so there has been a gradual process of distillation, leaving just about all the reactionaries, for all their disagreements among themselves, united in the conviction that there is a real difference between a conscious person and a perfect zombie - let’s call that intuition the Zombic Hunch - leading them to the thesis of Zombism: that the fundamental flaw in any mechanistic theory of consciousness is that it cannot account for this important difference.
— Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (Jean Nicod Lectures) by Daniel C. Dennett (via Findings.com)
sciencefiction:These are fictional magazine covers from Blade Runner. They were created by production illustrator Tom Southwell in 1980-1981 and appeared in the background on a magazine stand in the city streets. (!!!!)
(via superelectric)
Writing. Great writing contributes to readers in a special way. Great writing can connect with another person on a level that other forms of entertainment are incapable of doing.
— Minimalism: Essential Essays by Joshua Fields Millburn, Ryan Nicodemus (via Findings.com)
Harris has no control over the text produced by his bot, which he finds “both comforting and alarming.” The source material includes the darkest moments of the human experience. He said the project is not unlike the artwork in the Times’ 8th Avenue building, a series of mounted screens that pluck phrases from stories and flash them without context.
— How a New York Times developer reverse engineered @Horse_ebooks –An Interesting by Andrew Phelps (via Findings.com)
I was amazed at how quickly and easily this guy was able to open the door,” Peter said. The locksmith told him that locks are on doors only to keep honest people honest. One percent of people will always be honest and never steal. Another 1% will always be dishonest and always try to pick your lock and steal your television; locks won’t do much to protect you from the hardened thieves, who can get into your house if they really want to. The purpose of locks, the locksmith said, is to protect you from the 98% of mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock.
— Why We Lie by Dan Ariely (via Findings.com)
Sexuality was defined in terms of usury, given for an interest, usually high and with no end; divorces were not allowed. The rates of interest invested in marriage were prefixed, unchangeable, monotonous.
— Indecent Theology by Marcella Althaus-Reid (via Findings.com)
What you want now isn’t necessarily what you’re going to want in five years, 10 years or, heck, next week. That doesn’t make you lost, it makes you normal.
— The Best Celebrity Commencement Speech Wisdom And Why You Should Heed It - Forbes by J. Maureen Henderson (via Findings.com)
Growing out of a MIT Architecture Machine Group (a predecessor to the MIT Media Lab) proposal in 1976 for research on “Augmentation of Human Resources in Command and Control through Multiple Media Man-Machine Interaction,” SDMS is organized around the well-known connection between memory and spatial organization. Historically, the memory palace was a common technique for improving human memory, and the paper specifically mentions the “Simonides effect.
— Dataland: the MIT’s ’70s media room concept that influenced the Mac by Thomas Houston (via Findings.com)
