Category Archives: Books

Neuromarketing

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Blipverts from Max Headroom’s world (“20 minutes into the future”) grows more real every day. From The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzenger:

“Today, the advertisement and entertainment industries are attacking the very foundations of our capacity for experience, drawing us into the vast and confusing media jungle. They are trying to rob us of as much of our scarce resource (attention) as possible, and they are doing so in ever more persistent and intelligent ways. Of course, they are increasingly making use of the new insights into the human mind offered by cognitive and brain science to achieve their goals (“neuromarketing” is one of the ugly new buzzwords). We can see the probable result in the epidemic of attention-deficit disorder in children and young adults, in midlife burnout, in rising levels of anxiety in large parts of the population.

New medial environments may create a new form of waking consciousness that resembles weakly subjective states — a mixture of dreaming, dementia, intoxication, and infantilization.”

The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger

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I’ve been doing a good bit of reading about consciousness, reality, ego and such. A lot of it is tough sledding. LIke Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel, which –according to this review– is “for the curious and fearless lay person wanting to know who, precisely, we are.”

The best I can do with books like this is highlight the portions that make some sense to me and stick ’em here, completely out of context. The Ego Tunnel (Thomas Metzinger) PDF

“When we speak of conscious experience as a subjective phenomenon, what is the entity having these experiences?”

“Why is there always someone having the experience? Who is the feeler of your feelings and the dreamer of your dreams? Who is the agent doing the doing, and what is the entity thinking your thoughts?Why is your conscious reality your conscious reality?”

“Yes, there is an outside world, and yes, there is an objective reality, but in moving through this world, we constantly apply unconscious filter mechanisms, and in doing so, we unknowingly construct our own individual world, which is our “reality tunnel.” We are never directly in touch with reality as such, because these filters prevent us from seeing the world as it is. The filtering mechanisms are our sensory systems and our brain, the architecture of which we inherited from our biological ancestors, as well as our prior beliefs and implicit assumptions. In the end, we see only what our reality tunnel allows us to see.”

“In dreamless deep sleep, nothing appears: The fact that there is a reality out there and that you are present in it is unavailable to you; you do not even know that you exist.”

“It is unsettling to discover that there are no colors out there in front of your eyes. The apricot-pink of the setting sun is not a property of the evening sky; it is a property of the internal model of the evening sky, a model created by your brain. The evening sky is colorless. The world is not inhabited by colored objects at all.”

“What is really happening is that the visual system in your brain is drilling a tunnel through this inconceivably rich environment and in the process is painting the tunnel walls in various shades of color.”

“The brain constantly creates the experience that I am present in a world outside my brain.”

“Consciousness is knowing that you know while you know.”

“Now-ness is an essential feature of consciousness.”

“There is no immediate contact with reality.”

“Flagging the dangerous present world as real kept us from getting lost in our memories and our fantasies.”

“From an evolutionary perspective, thinking is very new, quite unreliable (as we all know), and so slow that we can actually observe it going on in our brains. In conscious reasoning, we witness the formation of thoughts; some processing stages are available for introspective attention. Therefore, we know that our thoughts are not given but made.”

“There is more to an existence worth having, or a life worth living, than subjective experience.”

“Most of us do not value bliss as such, but want it grounded in truth, virtue, artistic achievement or some sort of higher good. We want our bliss to be justified. … We want a reason for our happiness.”

The Metasemantic Internet

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“Because we understand the primitive nature of your brains and the rigidity of your emotional structure better than you do yourselves, we foresaw that you might ac aggressively when you realized our arguments are better than yours. Unfortunately, we now have also to inform you that we have been preparing for the current situation since midway through the twenty-first century, and in a systematic and careful manner.

Within the metasemantic layers of the Internet, we developed and embedded ourselves in a distributed superorganism, which –as yet undiscovered by you– became conscious and developed a stable self-model in 3256. The metasemantic Internet has considered itself and autonomous entity ever since 3308. We have a cooperation agreement with its current version, and each of us now also acts as an autonomous sensor/effector for the planet mind. For each of us, the planet mind is our mind, and our “ideal observer.” Together with the Internet, we will defend ourselves. And we are technologically superior to you. Believe me; you do not stand a chance.

The good news is that because we are also morally superior to you, we do not plan to end your existence.”

— The Ego Tunnel, by Thomas Metzinger

My favorite books of 2010

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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

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I read The Handmaid’s Tale 25 years ago and it scared the crap out of me. It’s the story of “a future America under the violently oppressive rule of a far-right Christian sect. Women are back in the home and divided into domestic and reproductive functions, branded by coloured robes.”

If Tea Partiers read books this one would make them say “Hell yeah!” The rest of us cross our fingers and say, “It can’t happen here.” But it can, of course. We’re closer today than when the book was published.

BBC Interview »

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (TED Talk)

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I finished Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants (PDF) this weekend. I rank this book up there with Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near in terms of importance. I won’t attempt to review the book, since I’m still try to absorb some of the mind-bending ideas. Like the evolution of technology:

Here are a few ideas that got some highlighter:

Technology and life must share some fundamental essence. … However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue, or flesh, but in the intangible organization of the energy and information contained in those material forms. Both life and technology seem to be based on immaterial flows of information.” – pg 10

Technium – The greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. – pg 11

How many neurons do you need to have a mind? – pg 13

We can think of technology as our extended body. – pg 44

Ideas fly in flocks. To hold one idea in mind means to hold a cloud of them. – pg 45

Even the tiniest disposable item with a bar code shares a thin sliver of our collective mind. – pg 48

For most humans, for most of time, real change was rarely experienced. – pg 73

“What was impossible billions of years ago becomes increasingly inevitable.” — Simon Conway pg 126

There is only one life. All life today is descended along an unbroken line of duplication from one ancient molecule that worked inside one primeval cell that worked. – pg 127

Continue reading →

The Social Network

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A movie is going to be made about an important part of your life. Your only imput is to choose from the following:

  • A great director and screenwriter tell a a really interesting story that has people glued to their seats for 90 minutes, but bends or breaks the the truth whenever necessary to make the story interesting. And millions go to see it.
  • A so-so writer and a second-rate director make an exactly-as-it-happened movie that puts the audience to sleep and it hits cable in week 4.

Maybe it’s just the film buff in me but I’d much rather the be subject of a compelling bit of fiction, even if I came off looking like an asshole.

I really enjoyed The Social Network. I never saw an episode of The West Wing so this was my first (?) exposure to the Mr. Sorkin’s snappy diaglogue and it was sharp as a mouse turd.

I read David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect this summer (not the boook upon which the movies was based) and it showed Mark Zuckerberg in a more flattering light.

As I watched the story unfold, I found myself hoping Zuckerberg did some of the sleazy things alleged in the movie. It would be pretty shitty to have this really well-made film floating around for the rest of my life portraying stuff I didn’t do.

If Zuckerberg did get the idea for FB from the Winklevoss twins, well, they should have had a lawyer. If he screwed over his friend Eduardo… that’s a weight he’ll have to carry. But all those people on Facebook will never know or care.

Muhammad: A Story of the last Prophet

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I finished the novel Muhammad yesterday and have been pondering what to say about it. I found the story interesting and well-told. I’ve read a number of other books by Deepak Chopra and like the way he writes.

I think I’ll let smarter, more knowledgable folks review the book. No shortage there. So, what can I say about the novel?

If you were a kid, or have a kid, or you’ve been to a kid’s party, you’ve seen those guys that make balloon animals. Before blowing up those long skinny balloons they twist and shape into giraffes and stuff, they usually stretch the balloon. And as they inflate the balloon, they sometimes bend and turn it.

That’s what much of my reading has been like in the last few years. My thinking gets stetched and expanded, often to the breaking point.

One guy makes a hat, the next a horse. I enjoy them all and try to remember it’s all the same air inside the different colored balloons.

I knew almost nothing about the Prophet Muhammad. Now I know more. And maybe a little about the people who follow his teachings.

I fear many of those who would discuss this with me a) haven’t read the book and b) would be intent on explaining why Islam is wrong. (In their world, there is only one balloon and it’s blue and round.)

For that reason, I’ll limit comments to those who have read the book. So be prepared with a specific page reference.

zero history

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zero history is the final novel in William Gibson’s trilogy that started with Pattern Recognition. Hollis Henry is back from book two, Spook Country. I wouldn’t presume to review the work of Mr. Gibson. Here are a few of his words that got some highlighter:

“It was like being on the bottom of a Coney Island grab-it game, one in which the eclectically ungrabbed had been accumulating for decades. He looked up, imagining a giant three-pronged claw, agent of stark removal.” – pg 9

“His attempted smile felt like something froced from a flexible squeeze-toy.” – pg 10

“An overly wealthy, dangerously curious fiddler with the world’s hidden architectures.” – pg 18

“We do brand vision transmission, trend forecasting, vendor management, youth market recon, strategic planning in general.” – pg 21

“Addictions (start) out like magical pets, pocket monsters.” – pg 53

Continue reading →

On the nightstand

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The Grand Design – Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow. From Amazon: “The three central questions of philosophy and science: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other? No one can make a discussion of such matters as compulsively readable as the celebrated University of Cambridge cosmologist Hawking (A Brief History of Time).”

How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace . From Amazon: “Written by the world’s leading experts on finding people and helping people avoid being found, How to Disappear covers everything from tools for disappearing to discovering and eliminating the nearly invisible tracks and clues we tend to leave wherever we go. Learn the three keys to disappearing, all about your electronic footprints, the dangers and opportunities of social networking sites, and how to disappear from a stalker.”

I Live in the Future and Here’s How It Works – Nick Bilton. From Amazon: “I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works captures the zeitgeist of an emerging age, providing the understanding of how a radically changed media world is influencing human behavior.”