Having one of those radical presentism moments. Via Singularity Hub; Aaron Saenz writes:

While we haven’t covered the Vgo robot in the past, it reminds me of several other telerobots we have seen, especially Anybot’s QB. Only Vgo is supposedly retailing for around $6000 (including ~$1200/year for the service contract), considerably less than the QB’s $15k price tag. Differences in maneuverability, reliability, and video quality may make the cost difference appropriate, but that’s not really my concern. Vgo is representative of the telerobotics market as a whole right now: reasonable run times (battery life is between 6-12 hours depending on upgrade options), Skype-level video quality, and compatible with standard WiFi. If you can afford the $6k (or $15k) price tag, you can probably have this setup in your home or office right now. In other words, this isn’t the technology of tomorrow, it’s here today and ready to go. Vgo launched sales in 2010 and has been marketing their product to a variety of applications, as you’ll see in the following video:

Not to sound cynical, but I’m guessing that Lyndon Baty’s use of Vgo is just another part of that marketing plan. I’m totally fine with that, by the way. Giving a child (and a school district) a reasonable solution for a terrible predicament is great. If it comes with a moderate price tag, so be it. So, while Lyndon’s personal story of perseverance and increasing freedom is exceptional, the underlying technological implications are pretty mundane: telepresence is gearing up to try to make a big splash in the market.

We’ve seen plenty of indications of this. South Korea is testing telerobots in their schools. They could have one of these devices in every kindergarten classroom by 2013. Researchers in Japan are experimenting with robots aimed towards emotional connections (with mixed results). As we said above, Anybots has their own platform on the market already. iRobot recently unveiled a prototype robotic platform that would transform any teleconference-enabled tablet computer into a telerobot. I’m guessing that in the next five years, one or more of these attempts at telerobotics is going to actually gain some traction and start moving some serious product.

Education may be a natural market. As we learned from Fred Nikgohar, head of telerobotics firm RoboDynamics, there are some big hurdles in other applications of telepresence robots. Offices value secrecy. Medical facilities worry about patient privacy. There’s a lot of bureaucracy standing in the way of widespread adoption of telerobotics. Schools have some of the same problems, but (to be perfectly honest) they also have sick kids who you can’t say no to. Or they’re run by governments who have nationalistic goals in science and technology (exemplified by South Korea). Get the price of telerobotics low enough, and we could see it expand into different niches of education including homeschooling, remote expert instructors (like the English tutors in South Korea), or online universities.

Read more.

In other telerobotics news, Anybots QB is now shipping.

A group of physicists from the University of Kansas are concerned that there's been virtually no work done to date on developing a messaging protocol to assist in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Their approach, which is the non-passive METI approach (i.e. sending messages to outer space in hopes of interception), would include constraints and guidelines for signal encoding, message length, and information content. It would also specify a transmission strategy suggesting a simple physical or mathematical language with the signal repeated regularly to avoid being overlooked as noise.

Among their suggestions, the physicists noted that transmissions should use either 1.42 GHz or 4.46 GHz frequencies to coincide with radio frequencies commonly observed in nature, while assuming "modest technical capabilities" of an extraterrestrial receiver. Frequency, pulse and polarisation signal modulation techniques should also be considered to maximise the probability of detection.

They also suggested the establishment of a website through which members of the public could create sample messages that conformed to the protocol, and retrieve and attempt to decrypt messages by other users.

"A METI protocol is needed in order for a unified and international effort to be made in messaging extraterrestrials," they conclude, "By carefully constructing a framework by which to write and send messages, we will optimize the quality of messages as they are broadcast and increase the probability that we are understood."

Check out the abstract as seen in the journal, Space Policy:

Messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence (METI) is a branch of study concerned with constructing and broadcasting a message toward habitable planets. Since the Arecibo message of 1974, the handful of METI broadcasts have increased in content and complexity, but the lack of an established protocol has produced unorganized or cryptic messages that could be difficult to interpret. Here we outline the development of a self-consistent protocol for messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence that provides constraints and guidelines for the construction of a message in order to maximize the probability that the message effectively communicates. A METI protocol considers several factors including signal encoding, message length, information content, anthropocentrism, transmission method, and transmission periodicity. Once developed, the protocol will be released for testing on different human groups worldwide and across cultural boundaries. An effective message to extraterrestrials should at least be understandable by humans, and releasing the protocol for testing will allow us to improve the protocol and develop potential messages. Through an interactive website, users across the world will be able to create and exchange messages that follow the protocol in order to discover the types of messages better suited for cross-cultural communication. The development of a METI protocol will serve to improve the quality of messages to extraterrestrials, foster international collaboration, and extend astrobiology outreach to the public.

Link to PDF.

Mark Walker's latest piece is up in the Journal of Well-Being: "Happy-People-Pills For All." Abstract:

It is argued that we have a moral duty to create, and make available, advanced pharmacological agents to boost the happiness of those in the normal, i.e., the non-depressed, range of happiness. Happiness, conceived as a propensity to positive moods, is a quantitative trait with a sizeable genetic component. One means to boost the happiness of those in the normal range is to test the efficacy of antidepressants for enhancement. A second possibility is to model new pharmacologicals based on the genetics of the happiest amongst us, that is, the hyperthymic. The suggestion, in other words, is to “reverse engineer” the hyperthymic: to investigate what makes the hyperthymic genetically and physiologically different and then put what they have into pill form. To the ‘Brave New World’ objection, that there is more to wellbeing than happiness and that taking happy-people-pills will require the sacrifice of these other aspects of wellbeing, it is countered that contemporary social science research supports the view that happiness promotes achievement in the ‘higher’ endeavors of humanity, including work, love and virtue. In other words, happiness promotes acquisition of traits valued by perfectionists. Those born with genes for hyperthymia, on average, tend to be doubly blessed: they are happier and achieve more than the rest of the population. Happy-people-pills are a means to allow everyone else to share in this good fortune. The paper seeks to rebut two further criticisms: that happy-people-pills will lead to emotional inappropriateness and inauthentic happiness. Finally, it is argued that depending on the view about the role of government in individual welfare, either government has a positive duty to develop happy-people-pills, or government has a duty not to interfere with private companies that seek to develop such pharmacological agents.

Link to PDF.

Lou Friedman's yawn-inducing article about the 100-Year Starship Study workshop has at least one interesting snippet of information:

One really provocative idea using information technology was advanced by microbiologist Craig Venter: sending signals from Earth with information to create synthetic life out of constituents on a complex Earth-like planet in another star system. That would be interstellar flight at the speed of light, so long as that synthetic life could signal us about their success. It is pretty way out—but maybe less so than sending actual humans on the voyage.

Despite this very visionary idea, the article makes me laugh, especially when Friedman notes, "If we are creating the future for humans in the universe, we must occasionally look at where we are going." I don't really think we're creating the future for humans in the universe—and NASA and DARPA of all institutions should be aware of this. As I`ve noted on this blog to the point of nausea, space will be explored by our post-biological descendants—if at all.

Check out the Chinese megabus: Also referred to as a mega-straddle bus, it will straddle the road allowing it to pass over the normal road traffic on China’s busy city streets. The buses will be 6 meters (18 feet) wide and 4.5 meters (13.5 feet) high which means they'll take up two road lanes, while still being low enough to get under most of the cities overpasses.

Each of these mega-buses will carry up to 1,200 passengers while blanketing other commuters. They will be electric powered, using a relay charging system that would recharge the bus as it is traveling by maintaining contact with at least one high-power electrical conductor that makes contact with the roof of the bus. The mega-bus either be on a railway style system (similar to trolly cars) or equipped with laser sensing cameras using regular tires following a painted line. The cost savings of this opposed to underground methods are over 90%.

The Chinese are serious about rolling this project out. The Mentougou district of Beijing laid out 186 km of tracks at the end of 2010 for a pilot program. If all goes according to plan, mega-buses will make an appearance in the many megacities right across China. And the good news is that it’s expected to save up to 860 tons of fuel per year, and reducing 2,640 tons of carbon emissions.

Via.

Beer van Geer - Project Dagaz from Quantified Self Amsterdam on Vimeo.

From the Amsterdam QS Show&Tell Meetup group: Beer van Geer explains his award-winning Dagaz Project. His application uses the Neurosky EEG headset to quantify brainwaves during meditation on Mandala symbols. Meditation students and practitioners can observe their progress in real-time.

This is very cool considering the recent news indicating that meditation can change the structure of the brain.

Via Quantified Self.

Via Singularity Hub:

Never question the resolve of an artist. First off, they are crazy enough to do anything. More importantly, some of them are secretly cyborgs. NYU Professor Wafaa Bilal announced his intent to install a camera on the back of his head earlier this season, and, true to his word, he is now walking around with the device surgically implanted. Bilal, an Iraq-born artist, has a history of controversial projects aimed at getting audiences to explore the limits and boundaries of society. Now, his backwards facing camera will stream the part of the world he never sees to visitors at the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar. The art project, entitled “The 3rd I” will go live on December 15th and continue for a year. Take a look at the cybernetic camera and listen to Bilal explain his work in the video from the Associated Press below. Two hours of surgery with nothing but local anesthesia – well, no one said becoming a cyborg (or an artist) was easy.

Check out Bilal's website.

It's widely known that regular exercise has metabolic and cardiovascular benefits, but until recently scientists weren't exactly sure why this is the case. A recent study, however, offers some of the first molecular-level insights.

Studies on mice indicate that exercise turns on a genetic program that leads the heart to grow as heart muscle cells divide. The shift in activity is driven in part by a single transcription factor--a gene that controls other genes. This gene, called C/EBPb, was known to play important roles in other parts of the body, but this is the first evidence for its influence in the heart.

"We've identified a pathway involved in beneficial cardiac hypertrophy – the good kind of heart growth," said Bruce Spiegelman of Harvard Medical School.

"This is yet another reason to keep on exercising," said Anthony Rosenzweig of Harvard Medical School. "In the longer term, by understanding the pathways that benefit the heart with exercise, we may be able to exploit those for patients who aren't able to exercise. If there were a way to modulate the same pathway in a beneficial way, it would open up new avenues for treatment."

Researchers also suspect that there may also be ways to optimize training regimens such that they tap into this natural mechanism more efficiently.

It was previously known that heart muscle adapts to increased pressure and volume by increasing in size. That's true in the case of exercise as it is in pathological conditions including high blood pressure. But in disease states, as opposed to exercise, those changes to the heart can ultimately lead to heart failure and arrhythmias.

The new evidence also gives important biological insights into the heart's potential for regeneration of muscle.

Rosenzweig said it will be important in future studies to explore all of the players in the pathway and to provide even more definitive evidence that exercise leads to an increased rate of cell proliferation in heart muscle.

Source.

DARPA is working to create a unified mathematical language for everything the military sees or hears:

The armed forces are overwhelmed by all the data its various sensors are sniffing out. They want a single data stream that combines drone video feeds, cell phone intercepts, and targeting radar. Darpa’s solution, found in the brand-new Mathematics of Sensing, Exploitation, and Execution program is to design an algorithm that teaches the sensors how to interpret the world — how to think, how to learn and what data, accordingly to collect.

Sensors “process their signals as if they were seeing the world anew at every instant,” Darpa laments in its call for algorithms. To put it in Philosophy 101 terms, existence is, to a sensor, what William James called a “blooming, buzzing confusion“: an unmediated series of events to be vacuumed up, leaving an analyst overloaded with unsorted data. Wouldn’t it be better if a sensor could be taught how to filter the world through a perceptual prism, anticipating what the analyst needs to know?

That’s the specific military application of MSEE. But to get there, Darpa takes a rather unconventional path. To get the “economy and efficiency that derives from an intrinsic, objective-driven unification of sensing and exploitation,” it wants to create an “intrinsically integrated” algorithm for the machines to interpret reality. “All proposed research must describe a unifying mathematical formalism that incorporates stochasticity fundamentally,” Darpa tells would-be designers.

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Seoul Commune 2026: Reconfiguring Towers in the Park, by the Korean office for architecture Mass Studies. Source.

Genetic architecture is an exciting, promising, and highly conceptual field that suggests we can bridge the gap between biology, artificial intelligence, and architecture. The end of result would see not just the integration of living and inert matter, but the transformation of the entire planet itself. Karl Chu, a leading figure in this area, calls it the "architecture of possible worlds." And he isn't thinking small.

Chu acknowledges that a future in which genetic architecture exists will be one in which humanity has gone through a number of paradigm shifts. He envisions a future in which humans have migrated to post-humanity and exist as "multiple beings" who take part in the emergent collective that is the "global brain." Because Chu considers architecture as an extension of the human and post-human being, he sees great potential for architecture to radically evolve along with its inhabitants and designers. The possibilities are staggering.

Genetic architecture can incorporate creative surroundings. Source.

As part of this vision, Chu and other genetic architects imagine buildings and other objects of our design as being transformed into living entities (if not beings) endowed with certain levels of intelligence and capacities. It will twist our notions of what we have traditionally considered to be lifeless objects, as much of our environment will become endowed with life and even intelligence.

Future "genetic buildings" could, for example, be self-assessing, self-healing and self-modifying, thus minimizing their need to be repaired or maintained by external sources. They will morph, process, and react. These buildings could even meet the needs of its inhabitants by sensing the moods or health of its occupants and act accordingly. Needless to say, the potential for sustainability is substantial.

Concept research: New skin living material. Source.

Chu also notes that genetic architects are not trying to imitate or copy biology. Rather, they are looking to significantly expand the space of possible intentional design through the integration of artificial intelligence and biological processes. He looks at our planet as eventually becoming a massive computing system—a very literal take on the concept of the global brain. The role of architecture is to facilitate and conceptualize this transformation.

The end result could potentially see the Earth as a massive computational and "self-aware" system in which all its components, inhabitants and systems are endowed with intelligence.

Check out this video of Karl Chu giving a talk at TEDxBrooklyn:

Says Don Tapscott:

The existence of lifelong neuroplasticity is no longer in doubt. The brain runs on a "use it or lose it" motto. So could we "use it to build it right?" Surely if we are proactive, the demands of our information rich, multi-stimuli, fast paced, multitasking, digital existence can be shaped to our advantage. In fact, psychiatrist Dr. Stan Kutcher, an expert on adolescent mental health who has studied the effect of digital technology on brain development, says "There is emerging evidence suggesting that exposure to new technologies may push the Net Generation brain past conventional capacity limitations."

My own research suggests that when the straight A student is doing her homework at the same time as five other things online she is not actually multitasking. Rather she has developed a better active working memory and better switching abilities. Personally I can't read my email and listen to iTunes at the same time, but she can. She has a brain more appropriate to the demands of the digital age than I do.

How could we use design thinking to change the way we think? Good design typically begins with some principles and functional objectives.

Read more.

According to the New York Times, voluntary wheel running with a load increases muscular adaptation and enhances gene expression in rat brains indicating that this kind of exercise may have the identical or even more useful neurological effects than endurance training.

Whether the same mechanisms occur in humans who undertake resistance training of one kind or another is not yet fully clear, but “the data look promising,” said Teresa Liu-Ambrose, a principal investigator at the Brain Research Center at the University of British Columbia. In results from her lab, older women who lifted weights performed significantly better on various tests of cognitive functioning than women who completed toning classes. Ms. Liu-Ambrose has also done brain scans of people who lifted weights to determine whether neurogenesis is occurring in their brains, and the results, still unpublished, are encouraging, she said.

Just how resistance training initiates changes in cognition remains somewhat mysterious. Ms. Liu-Ambrose said that “we now know that resistance training has significant benefits on cardiovascular health” and reduces “cardiovascular risk factors,” which otherwise would raise “one’s risk of cognitive impairment.” She speculates that resistance training, by strengthening the heart, improves blood flow to the brain generally, which is associated with better cognitive function. Perhaps almost as important, she added, resistance training at first requires an upsurge in brain usage. You have to think about “proper form and learning the technique,” she said, “while there generally is less learning involved in aerobic training,” like running.

The brain benefits from being used, so that, in a neat circle, resistance training may both demand and create additional brain circuitry. Imagine what someone like Einstein might have accomplished if he had occasionally gone to the gym.

More.

The value of the cosmological constant suggests that the laws of nature could not have been fine-tuned for life by an omnipotent being, says a cosmologist:

Here's the thinking. The cosmological constant is a number that determines the energy density of the vacuum. It acts like a kind of pressure that, depending on its value, acts against gravity to push the universe apart or acts with gravity to pull the universe together towards a final Big Crunch.

Until recently, cosmologists had assumed that the constant was zero, a neat solution. But the recent evidence that the universe is not just expanding but accelerating away from us, suggests that the constant is positive.

But although positive, the cosmological constant is tiny, some 122 orders of magnitude smaller than Planck's constant, which itself is a small number.

So Page and others have examined the effects of changing this constant. It's straightforward to show that if the the constant were any larger, matter would not form into galaxies and stars meaning that life could not form, at least not in the form we know it.

So what value of the cosmological constant best encourages galaxy and star formation, and therefore the evolution of life? Page says that a slightly negative value of the constant would maximise this process. And since life is some small fraction of the amount of matter in galaxies, then this is the value that an omnipotent being would choose.

In fact, he says that any positive value of the constant would tend to decrease the fraction of matter that forms into galaxies, reducing the amount available for life.

Therefore the measured value of the cosmological constant, which is positive, is evidence against the idea that the constants have been fine-tuned for life.

My thoughts:

• As observers, we don't necessarily have to reside within a universe that is perfectly optimized for life—it just needs to be good enough to foster the emergence and sustenance of life. In the space of all possible life sustaining universes, ours may be but one example of many other viable models.
• Our universe may not be fine-tuned for life, but it may be optimized for something else. Our universe, for example, may actually be an exquisite black hole generator. Or something we don't yet know. 

Now that we've officially launched the Rights of Nonhuman Persons program at the IEET, you can expect to see more of these discussions right here at Sentient Developments. Specifically, the questions we're asking right now include:

• What is a person?
• What are the criteria for personhood? And why should these capacities matter and/or confer a higher degree of moral consideration?
• When it comes to human-level rights and protections, what exactly are we talking about? What aren't we talking about?
• How do we actually go about changing the laws?

There are obviously many more questions to ask, but this should give you an idea of some of our launching points.

Looking at the big picture, I'd like to see it such that all nonhuman persons are protected from such things as torture, experimentation, slavery, confinement, and threat of unnatural death (i.e. hunting and murder). Ideally, I'd like to see the day when elephants are no longer forced to perform at circuses, great apes gawked upon at zoos, or dolphins confined to unacceptably small tanks at oceanariums. And so on. Essentially, the rule of thumb should be: If you wouldn't do it to a human, you shouldn't do it to a nonhuman person.

Speaking of actual species, my initial short list of (suspected) nonhuman persons includes:

• Great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans); it's worth noting that humans are classified as a great ape
• Cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises)
• Elephants
• Cephalopods (especially the octopus)
• Grey parrots

Given how many species live on this planet, it's a pretty exclusive club. And I'm somewhat on the fence about the last two, but we have to perform our due diligence to ensure that these particular species get the protections we think they may deserve.

It's also worth noting that this is a starting point. I suspect that more species will be added to this list over time. This will be an iterative process as we (1) gain public acceptance on the issue and normalize the concept of nonhuman personhood, (2) create legal precedents and enact laws, and (3) learn more about the neurology and behavior of other nonhuman person candidate species so that they can also be included.

And although not a priority right now, we will also be considering the potential for nonbiological personhood. We foresee the day when an AI or brain emulation ceases to become an object of experimentation and instead becomes an agent worthy of moral consideration. We're not there yet, but we want to be ready for that eventuality.

It's also important to think about realizable and tangible goals. While we have a lot of work to do—and lots of minds to change—we should strive for nothing less than the actual achievement of our mission. I'm confident we'll get there. I suspect that the initial breakthrough will see great apes protected first, followed by dolphins. We're pretty much ready to conceptualize and accept these species as being persons; it's a relatively easy sell.

And from there, we'll move on the next species until we're done.

Susan Jacoby, author of "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism," has penned a piece for Big Questions Online in which she asks the question: Can—and should—science and religion avoid each other's turf.

Taking the late Stephen Jay Gould's to task on his description of the two disciplines as "non-overlapping magisteria," Jacoby wonders why so many intellectuals now pay obeisance to the "historically absurd idea of separate domains for science and religion."

...scientists use embryonic stem cells in research aimed at developing treatments for currently incurable scourges of the body. Some church leaders, primarily Roman Catholics and conservative American Protestants, are doing everything they can to impede the research because their faith tells them that a six-day-old embryo is the equivalent of a person — and that destroying the cells for scientific purposes is murder.

The biomedical researcher who wants to continue working with embryonic stem cells is making a moral as well as a scientific judgment, and the cleric is making a judgment that constrains science. The domains have overlapped since science first began making discoveries that could promote, or, for that matter, threaten human welfare. When Dr. Edward Jenner developed an early form of vaccination against smallpox in 1796, many orthodox Christians — the most notable of whom was Yale’s president, the Rev. Timothy Dwight — considered vaccination an intrusion on God’s plan, which supposedly required the ancient killer disease.

Citing Sam Harris's recent book, "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values," she lauds the recent insights brought forth by the neurosciences, and suggests that we should reject both religious notions of revealed truth and the secular veneration of moral relativism. Instead, argues Jacoby, we should look to science which has a crucial role to play in assessing moral values according to their observable earthly consequences:

Numerous social science studies have shown, for example, that countries where women are forbidden to educate themselves, earn a living, or control their sexual lives are the poorest societies on earth by any objective measure of well-being — from health to poverty rates. How, then, can it be morally sound — regardless of whether people believe they are doing the will of God — to subjugate women?

In this instance, the cop-out for the separate magisteria establishment is that religions restricting the freedom of women must be “false.” Those who uphold the notion of separate domains want domain over values for their religion — not all religion.

Neuroscience raises a red flag because it attempts to explain human behavior by studying the physical brain rather than by evoking the existence of a independent, non-physical soul. The idea that humans may not possess free will in the religious or secular senses — at least not to the degree we would like — is as threatening to our sense of human specialness today as Darwin’s theory of evolution was in his time.

Read more.

Thomas Peter, Retuers

There's an interesting and thought-provoking article by Lawrence A. Hansen over at The Chronicle: Animal Research: Groupthink in Both Camps. Hansen, who is an animal researcher himself, makes the case that both animal researchers and defenders of animals are guilty of groupthink, a mode of thought that people engage in when they are profoundly involved in a cohesive in-group. This typically happens when members of a group strive for unanimity and override their motivations to realistically appraise alternative courses of action:

We faculty members with deep concerns for animal welfare are often viewed by our groupthink scientific colleagues as untrustworthy or even treasonous agents provocateurs, since we are inclined to raise both ethical and scientific objections to invasive and lethal animal experimentation, especially when it involves primates and companion animals—that is, dogs and cats.

Meanwhile, our animal-rights associates suspect us of insufficient ardor for animal welfare, since we acknowledge that not all research involving animals is torture, and many of us do not object when transgenic mice are painlessly euthanized after being well cared for during their short lives.

Groupthink among animal advocates, unless it leads to violence, is harmless enough, but it's self-defeating when the goal is to rally public opposition to vivisection (a term that encompasses both the dissection of living animals for teaching, and performing invasive, intentionally mutilating or maiming surgeries on living animals as a way to do research). A huge reservoir of empathy for our fellow primates and for companion animals goes untapped when PETA demonstrators protest biomedical research on mice or trivia like presidential fly swatting. It may well be that a Gandhi-like respect for all animal life represents the ultimate in human ethical evolution, but until that "consummation devoutly to be wished" is realized, apes and monkeys and dogs and cats are being confined, vivisected, and killed while animal advocates are ignored as a lunatic fringe.

But when it comes to animal vivisection in particular, Hansen paints a particularly grim picture of what goes on behind the scenes and the attitudes that perpetuate unethical research practices:

One especially disturbing example of primate vivisection repeatedly approved by many university animal-care-and-use committees is a decades-long series of highly invasive experiments performed on rhesus monkeys to learn more about the neuronal circuitry of visual tracking in the brain. The luckless monkeys undergo multiple surgeries to have coils implanted in both eyes; holes drilled in their skulls to allow researchers to selectively destroy some parts of their brains and put recording electrodes in others; and head-immobilization surgeries in which screws, bolts, and plates are directly attached to their skulls. The monkeys are anesthetized during these surgeries. After a recovery period, they are intentionally dehydrated to produce a water-deprivation "work ethic" so that they will visually track moving objects for the reward of a sip of water.

First impressions are usually correct in questions of cruelty to animals, and most of us cannot bear to even look at pictures of these monkeys, with their electrode-implanted brains and bolted heads, being put through their paces in a desperate attempt to get a life-sustaining sip of water. Such treatment is justified in the corresponding grant application by invoking the possibility that the resulting data may allow us to find the cause and cure for human diseases such as Alzheimer's.

But those of us who have spent decades in research on Alzheimer's disease recognize that such a justification is an ethical bait and switch, since the neural pathway being investigated in these experiments is not even involved in Alzheimer's disease. These experiments in the basic neuroscience of visual tracking are so thoroughly unrelated to the neuropathology of Alzheimer's disease that in more than 28 years of research in the neuroscience of the disease, I have never come across a single reference to them in any scientific literature on neurodegenerative disease.

Since most invasive monkey research is not directly linked to alleviating human suffering, argues Hansen, what is the real motivation of scientists doing such things to our cousin primates? "The investigators are not sadists, although they may seem to be from the monkey's point of view," he writes, "Researchers simply see themselves as doing neuroscience, reasoning that if you want to learn about how brains are wired, the easiest and most direct way is to selectively damage a living brain and see what happens."

Hansen's analysis is both fair and tempered; he concludes on a rather encouraging and enlightened note:

All these efforts reflect a growing awareness that neuroscientists wedded to primate vivisection as a way to conduct research are simply too biased by their own training, research agendas, and career considerations to objectively perform the kind of ethical cost-benefit analysis required before permitting primate vivisection. The trend toward outside supervision of animal vivisection parallels the point made by Georges Clemenceau, a French statesman and physician, who said, "War is too important to be left to the generals." Ethically aware citizens are increasingly concluding that primate vivisection is too important to be left to the researchers who dominate their university animal-care-and-use committees.

Physicist Brian Clegg, author of "Armageddon Science: The Science of Mass Destruction", was recently interviewed by Salon. Among the various threats to humanity discussed—a list that includes nuclear weapons, global warming, particle accelerators, nanobots, and apparently autistics—Clegg also discusses the possibility of a technological singularity. But like so many other so-called experts, he gets this one completely wrong. Fair warning, as this next quote is full of fail:

The Singularity came from the ideas of science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge. It's like the Borg in "Star Trek": something that is a combination of living creature and machine. Followers of the Singularity believe the machine will become more and more intelligent, and that this new creature will be the next step. Homo sapiens will either be subjugated or wiped out.

Frankly, I think the time scales are unrealistic. There is no doubt that technology is going to be used to enhance human beings. We've been doing this for a long time. You could say that the dog enhanced human ability; we created dogs from the wolf and used them for our benefit. In the modern sense, we use technology inside our bodies. But technology always jumps in a different direction than you might expect. The people who talk about the Singularity look at computer technology and medical technology that puts stuff in our bodies and assume the technology will continue to progress in the exact same direction. I think we're much more likely to end up with technology that interacts with us rather than becoming a part of us.

The Singularity is a rather crude idea, and the 2040 prediction is ridiculous, especially if you look at how little cybertechnology has actually developed. Ray Kurzeil has this idea of wanting to live forever, and hoped to keep himself going until the technology developed, so the Singularity is a kind of wish fulfillment. Most of the scientific community, frankly, views him as an eccentric. He gives himself blood transfusions and eats vast numbers of supplements every day, and these are things that actually have very little scientific basis for prolonging life. The Singularity is popular because everyone wants to live forever. It's a very appealing idea.

Once again the cult of Ray Kurzweil is invoked, and as is frustratingly typical of these outside commentaries, transhumanism is conflated with the singularity (not to mention the use of ad hominen to dismiss Ray's predictions). Nowhere in this analysis does Clegg discuss the potential for a runaway superintelligence or an "intelligence explosion" outside of human enhancement. So needless to say, his assessment of the singularity risk is grossly understated.

We are in the midst of the biotechnology revolution and Gina Kolata of the New York Times knows it:

“I’ve learned over the years that the best predictor for what will be new and exciting is, ‘Expect the unexpected,’ ” said Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein, a Nobel laureate who is professor and chairman of the department of medical genetics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

Dr. David Baltimore of CalTech, another Nobel laureate, said, “If you could predict it, it wouldn’t be a breakthrough.”

But even if it’s impossible to predict a particular major discovery, one can sometimes sense when a particular area of science is taking off, says Dr. Richard Klausner, a former head of the National Cancer Institute who is now a managing partner in the Column Group, a venture capital firm. “It gets on a Moore’s Law curve,” he said, referring to an observation in computer science that the speed of computing keeps increasing exponentially.

When that happens, Dr. Klausner said, “barriers and unknowns seem to be falling,” and it is pretty much predictable that even more exciting discoveries will be made.

Read more.

Cool book by Robert Lanza and Rob Berman: Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe. Those unfamiliar with Lanza's particular take on biocentric theory should read this, but he essentially suggests that the Universe is a consequence and construct of conscious observers and not the other way around; it's the quantum realm and the subjective perception of time that "creates" a comprehensible Universe to dwell in. Consequently, argues Lanza, there may be a link to cosmological immortality.

Robert Lanza writes in the Huffington Post:

Critics claim that this behavior is limited to the quantum world. But this "two-world" view (that is, the view that there is one set of laws for quantum objects and another for the rest of the universe, including us) has no basis in reason and is being challenged in labs around the world. Last year, researchers published a study in Nature suggesting that quantum behavior extends into the everyday realm. Pairs of ions were coaxed to entangle, and then their properties remained bound together when separated by large distances ("spooky action at a distance," as Einstein put it) as if there were no time or space. And in 2005, KHCO3 crystals exhibited entanglement ridges half an inch high, demonstrating that quantum behavior could nudge into the ordinary world of human-scale objects.

In the Oct. 2010 issue of Discover, theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow state, "There is no way to remove the observer -- us -- from our perceptions of the world ... In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities."

That night, while lying awake at my neighbor's house, I had found the answer -- that the missing piece is with us. As I see it, immortality doesn't mean perpetual (linear) existence in time but resides outside of time altogether. Life is a journey that transcends our classical way of thinking. Experiment after experiment continues to suggest that we create time, not the other way around. Without consciousness, space and time are nothing. At death, there's a break in the continuity of space and time; you can take any time -- past or future -- as your new frame of reference and estimate all potentialities relative to it. In the end, even Einstein acknowledged that "the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." Life is just one fragment of time, one brushstroke in a picture larger than ourselves, eternal even when we die. This is the indispensable prelude to immortality.

Probably more metaphysics than physics at this point, but interesting food for thought. I've always been fascinated by theories and philosophical systems that start from the presence of the observer—perspectives like Buddhism and even fine tuning arguments. Indeed, as Buddhism suggests, the most important phenomenon in the Universe is subjective awareness: if nothing is observed there is nothing.

Flame away, commenters, flame away.