Thursday, May 20, 2010

Link Dump 05/20/2010

  • It’s time detensers stand up for themselves and challenge the claim that experience favors tenses. After arguing that there is no "experience of the present" as contemporary metaphysicians conceive it, the paper turns to the main topic: explaining why people have the powerful intuition that there is a mind-independent Now and don't believe the same about the spatial Here. The paper offers a new theory explaining this difference. Oddly, given the central role temporal experience plays in philosophy of time, empirical work on time perception is virtually absent from this literature. When this neglect is rectified, one sees resources emerging in recent experiments in cognitive neuroscience and psychology that bear on the problem. If I am right, we already have enough information to fill out significantly the best explanation of the difference between the Here and Now.

    tags: time

  • Chalmers's John Locke Lectures on Constructing the World.

    tags: Chalmers

  • Gualtiero Piccinini is taking over from John Bickle the editorship of Synthese's annual Philosophy of Neuroscience issue.

    tags: philosophy of neuroscience

  • The user can rotate around the hypercube, or perform direct-manipulation rotations in 4D.

    For a 4D rotation, the 3D vector described by the dragging of the mouse in the plane of the screen combined with the 4D unit vector (0 0 0 1) specify two basis vectors of a four-dimensional plane of rotation.

    This is a lot more intuitive than a set of sliders.

    Before I show an example of the 4D rotation, wrap your head around this simple 3D rotation of a regular old cube.

            

    tags: alternate minds

  • Eighty years in the future, Earth becomes aware of an alien presence when thousands of micro-satellites surveil the Earth; through good luck, the incoming alien vessel is detected, and the ship Theseus, with its artificial intelligence captain and crew of five, are sent out to engage in first contact with the huge alien vessel called Rorschach. As they explore the vessel and attempt to analyze it and its inhabitants, the narrator considers his life and strives to understand himself and ponders the nature of intelligence and consciousness, their utility, and what an alien mind might be like. Eventually the crew realizes that they are greatly outmatched by the vessel and its unconscious but extremely capable inhabitants.

    tags: alternate minds


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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