Positional Distortion

Project Kara via BoingBoing

The video kick I’m on today continues. This one goes well with the Waking Life scene I posted earlier, bringing up the concept of identity and free will. Sadly for Kara (the robot in this video), her free will is identified as a flaw. Maybe free will is the flaw in us too?

Waking Life - Free Will and Physics

One of my favorite scenes from the psychedelic 2001 animated movie Waking Life. It’s a three minute journey through the modern dialogue surrounding free will and how it relates to physics, personal identity and morality.

Me? I’m an old fashioned determinist, but even that comes with its own set of problems.

Transcendenz: Metaphysical Immersion

“Transcendenz offers to connect our everyday life to an invisible reality, the one of ideas, concepts and philosophical questionings which the world is full of but that our eyes cant’ see. By bringing together the concepts of augmented/altered reality, Brain Computer Interface (BCI) and social networks, Transcendenz offers to live immersive philosophical experiences.”

Upon receiving word of this from my friend and fellow philosopher-in-arms, Steve Cavrak, I couldn’t help but compare this project to the movie of an oddly similar name and premiss, eXistenZ.

Michaël Harboun’s idea is not yet a reality, but there’s no question that this is where we are soon headed. Probably the most fantastical technological hurdle presented in Harboun’s vision is the ability for the device to decipher the content of a wearer’s thoughts, yet even this is already possible. That’s right, some crazy researchers in California have already proven that it is possible for computers to decipher our internal monologue with alarming accuracy.

It’s as cool as it is spooky.

The Problem of Choice

via Edw Lynch at Laughing Squid:

In “Choice” by RSA, Professor Renata Salecl asks whether the ability to make limitless choices helps or hinders our lives and our society. The lecture is part of the brilliant animated eductional series, RS Animate.

Wonderfully animated and thought-provoking. It brings depth and insight into the increasingly common dialogue concerning malaise in modern life.

via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing:

I’m at the Personal Democracy Forum at NYU today, and the morning plenary has been a series of fascinating short talks. But one talk, by Jim Gilliam’s “The Internet is My Religion,” brought the house down. Jim worked in many early and influential Internet firms, went on to produce Robert Greenwald’s extraordinary films, and do many other notable things. Among them was surviving two bouts of cancer and a double-lung transplant. The story of how he went from a Jerry Falwell born-again to an Internet advocate and film producer ended with a standing ovation and not a dry eye in the house. Watch this, please, I’d consider it a favor.

Mr. Gilliam is viscerally passionate about the topic of God, but his approach to worship is unconventional by traditional standards. His argument is profound in its simplicity - that God exists within the interactions of people, and the internet, with it’s millions of users, is the new congregation.

I usually vear away from topics religious, especially when it borders on proselytizing. Still, I find it hard not to agree with Gilliam on the point that the amalgamated actions of people are hugely powerful, of which there is no question that the internet is a grand facilitator.

There are some people who would write off religion as delusional hocus-pocus. Instead, I’d like to think that the author and scientist Arthur C. Clarke was right when he posited his third law of prediction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”