This week, I am going to talk about something I have puzzled about ever since I was a child but never really taken seriously: the search for extra terrestrial intelligence. SETI, like AI, is one of those elusive, almost dream…
This week’s newsletter continues last week’s discussion of tradition. Some years ago, when I was a graduate student, I mentioned to a maverick cognitive scientist that I was beginning to look at Indian philosophy as a way of breaking through…
I am not much of a traditionalist. As far as I am concerned, the future is more important than the past. At the same time, human beings are shaped by history and geography; our past both constrains us and sets…
I have been fascinated with abstraction for as long as I can remember. The disciplines I am drawn to instinctively — mathematics, physics, philosophy, programming, literature, design, cognition, religion; to name a few — are all disciplines that truck in abstractions. Good abstractions make…
We think of apps as pieces of software; things that help us get things done or avoid getting things done. But they’re also excellent props for story telling. Just as we leaven our conversations with interjections, proverbs and idioms, why…
Crowdsourcing usually refers to the aggregation of small decisions made by a lot of people. For example, aggregating the votes on a singer on American Idol is crowdsourcing. While much judgement might have gone behind the decision, the decision itself…
I apologize in advance if this weeks email is too abstruse or technical. Consciousness is a difficult topic and there’s only so much one can do without jargon. As a famous man once said, “make things as simple as possible,…
The world is like an impression left by the telling of a story — Yoga Vasishtha. Summer is waning in Boston. The days are visibly shorter than they were in June and July. My daughter’s thoughts are turning toward school. She will…