People often need to adapt to unexpected and sudden events, such as a road construction or a road accident while driving, a broken automatic payment or ATM machine, and changes in weather. To effectively deal with these events, they must possess what is known as behavioral flexibility, or the ability to deviate from routine and well-establish behavioral patterns.
To adapt their behavior based on unforeseen events, humans need to encode and retrieve reward-related memories and use them to inform their present or future choices. This process entails the integration of different cognitive abilities that are supported by different regions of the brain.
Past studies found that patients with different neuropsychiatric disorders and those suffering from an addiction tend to have a scarce behavioral flexibility. This often adversely affects their quality of living, as it makes dealing with the uncertainty of daily life particularly challenging.
For spooky october, here is an exploration of the future of biological 3D printing, it’s implications on alien life, and how fantasy could become reality.
Inspired by insects, robotic engineers are creating machines that could aid in search and rescue, pollinate plants and sniff out gas leaks.
Cyborg cockroaches that find earthquake survivors. A “robofly” that sniffs out gas leaks. Flying lightning bugs that pollinate farms in space.
These aren’t just buzzy ideas, they’re becoming reality.
Robotic engineers are scouring the insect world for inspiration. Some are strapping 3D-printed sensors onto live Madagascar hissing cockroaches, while others are creating fully robotic bugs inspired by the ways insects move and fly.
While these people were enjoying their rollercoaster ride, their phones were calling emergency services like 911.
Crash Detection, a new feature in Apple’s iPhone 14 lineup of phones as well as new Apple Watch devices, is designed to be triggered in a car crash and help the phone’s user call emergency services in case they’re incapacitated. When Apple launched the feature, it said it’s only going to work if you’re actually driving and if you experienced a crash, so simply dropping the phone or falling shouldn’t trigger it.
Going on a rollercoaster and bringing your phone with you, however, might falsely trigger Crash Detection in some cases.
Norn, the brainchild of a former leading Microsoft developer, feels like a human and is integrated with software previously used for hunting terrorists.
Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) scientists working on CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing technology have developed a method to increase efficiency of editing while minimizing DNA deletion sizes, a key step toward developing gene editing therapies to treat genetic diseases.
CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology is used to alter DNA sequences and modify gene function. CRISPR/Cas9 is an enzyme that is used like a pair of scissors to cut two strands of DNA at a specific location to add, remove or repair bits of DNA. By modifying gene function, scientists hope to treat genetic diseases by halting a diseased cell’s ability to continue replicating the defective DNA. CRISPR/Cas9 is the most versatile genetic manipulation available and has a wide range of potential applications. While CRISPR/Cas9 mainly generates short insertions or deletions at the target site, it may also make large DNA deletions around the specific target site. These large deletions cause safety concerns and may decrease functional editing efficiency.
The WFIRM team is looking for ways to reduce the chances of this happening. The research described in their recent paper, published recently in Nucleic Acids Research, sought to address the generation of unpredictable on-target long DNA deletions and find a way to guard against them, said lead author Baisong Lu, Ph.D., of WFIRM.
Dr. Ben Goertzel, a self-described Cosmist and Singularitarian, is one of the world’s leading researchers in artificial general intelligence (AGI), natural language processing, cognitive science, data mining, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, and virtual worlds and gaming He has published a dozen scientific books, 100+ technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles.
Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist focused on cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and learning.
Currently the Principal AI Engineer, Cognitive Computing at Intel Labs, having authored the book “Principles of Synthetic Intelligence”, his focus is how to build machines that can perceive, think and learn.
In this video you can watch his keynote presentation at the AGI-22 Conference, on the topic of “It from no Bit: Basic Cosmology from an AI Perspective”.
In this episode we explore a User Interface Theory of reality. Since the invention of the computer virtual reality theories have been gaining in popularity, often to explain some difficulties around the hard problem of consciousness (See Episode #1 with Sue Blackmore to get a full analysis of the problem of how subjective experiences might emerge out of our brain neurology); but also to explain other non-local anomalies coming out of physics and psychology, like ‘quantum entanglement’ or ‘out of body experiences’. Do check the devoted episodes #4 and #28 respectively on those two phenomena for a full breakdown. As you will hear today the vast majority of cognitive scientists believe consciousness is an emergent phenomena from matter, and that virtual reality theories are science fiction or ‘Woowoo’ and new age. One of this podcasts jobs is to look at some of these Woowoo claims and separate the wheat from the chaff, so the open minded among us can find the threshold beyond which evidence based thinking, no matter how contrary to the consensus can be considered and separated from wishful thinking. So you can imagine my joy when a hugely respected cognitive scientist and User Interface theorist, who can cut through the polemic and orthodoxy with calm, respectful, evidence based argumentation, agreed to come on the show, the one and only Donald D Hoffman.
Hoffman is a full professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine, where he studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. His research subjects include facial attractiveness, the recognition of shape, the perception of motion and colour, the evolution of perception, and the mind-body problem. So he is perfectly placed to comment on how we interpret reality.
Hoffman has received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for early career research into visual perception, the Rustum Roy Award of the Chopra Foundation, and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences. So his recognition in the field is clear.
He is also the author of ‘The Case Against Reality’, the content of which we’ll be focusing on today; ‘Visual Intelligence’, and the co-author with Bruce Bennett and Chetan Prakash of ‘Observer Mechanics’.
How likely is it that we live in a simulation? Are virtual worlds real?
In this first episode of the 2nd Series we delve into the fascinating topic of virtual reality simulations and the extraordinary possibility that our universe is itself a simulation. For thousands of years some mystical traditions have maintained that the physical world and our separated ‘selves’ are an illusion, and now, only with the development of our own computer simulations and virtual worlds have scientists and philosophers begun to assess the statistical probabilities that our shared reality could in fact be some kind of representation rather than a physical place. As we become more open to these possibilities, other difficult questions start to come into focus. How can we create a common language to talk about matter and energy, that bridges the simulated and simulating worlds. Who could have created such a simulation? Could it be an artificial intelligence rather than a biological or conscious being? Do we have ethical obligations to the virtual beings we interact with in our virtual worlds and to what extent are those beings and worlds ‘real’? The list is long and mind bending.
Fortunately, to untangle our thoughts on this, we have one of the best known philosophers of all things mind bending in the world, Dr. David Chalmers; who has just released a book ‘Reality+: virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy’ about this very topic. Dr. Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specialising in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a Professor of Philosophy and Neuroscience at New York University, as well as co-director of NYU’s Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness. He’s the founder of the ‘Towards a Science of Consciousness Conference’ at which he coined the term in 1994 The Hard Problem of Consciousness, kicking off a renaissance in consciousness studies, which has been increasing in popularity and research output ever since.
