The Ninja Tune forum has shut down after 19 years – FACT Magazine – FACT

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Dont worry, itll live on in another form.

London label Ninja Tune isnt just known for its great releases, the labels online forum has been a tight knit community and music resource since 1998. This week, after 19 years, the Ninja Tune forum will shut down.

A gathering place for music fans, amateur producers, DJs and established artists, the forums were marked with in-depth discussions, production competitions, DJ trades and IRL meet-ups. In addition to many Ninja Tune signees such as DJ Food, artists who posted include Posthuman and Mark Bell of LFO. Many FACT writers such as John Twells, Laurent Fintoni and Tony Poland have memories of posting on the forum during its long run.

The closure has less to do with the forum than it does with internet forums in general theyre growing out-of-date. Over email, the label explained that the increasing tech issues with the forum and the decreasing amount of posts made them decide to set up a page on Reddit which will be run and regularly updated by forum members.

The label shared the news last week on the forum in a note which we have republished below.

Were sad to close the Ninja Tune Forum. Created way back in 1998, it quickly became a lively community of people with thoughts to share and a common love of music of Ninja Tune. For a while back then it was the perfect Ninja Tune community. Some highlights have been the forum marriages and relationships, the huge King Geedorah lyric threads and posts being quoted in The Guardian. Over the years there have been over 45,000 registered users! The old forum technology issues mixed with the decreasing amount of posts in this new age of internet communication means it makes more sense to set up a page on Reddit whose technology is better designed and regularly updated (run by forum members Invisible A, Kid Vector & Techdef) where the spirit can live on.

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The Ninja Tune forum has shut down after 19 years - FACT Magazine - FACT

The Great Card Game ‘Ascension’ Getting Another Expansion Called ‘Gift of the Elements’ – Touch Arcade

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Ascension [Free] is one of the best deckbuilding games on the App Store, and a game I've personally played for many, many hours, and now it's getting ready to get another expansion called Gift of the Elements. Even though the announcement is for the physical version of the expansion, all Ascension's expansions end up in the digital version of the game too. Gift of the Elements is a gift of sorts to fans of the game because it brings back the two most-requested game mechanics from earlier expansions. The first one is Events, first introduced all the way back in Storm of Souls. Events have an immediate impact on all players the moment they're revealed in the center row. The new Events will be more impactful than the original ones.

The expansion is also bringing back Transform; events aren't considered to be in the center row this time around, so you'll have to pay the transform cost to acquire them. Gift of the Elements is also adding two new mechanics to the game; Infest allows you to force your opponent to draw useless Monsters instead of their strong cards, and Empower allow you to banish a player card when you acquire it, the first time that the game allows you to banish a played card. Plenty of new ideas in a game that hasn't stopped expanding.

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The Great Card Game 'Ascension' Getting Another Expansion Called 'Gift of the Elements' - Touch Arcade

One Ascension school returns, another moves to temporary site after flood – WBRZ

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ST. AMANT Two Ascension schools displaced from the historic August flooding finally movedfrom their temporary sites Monday morning.

Lake Elementary moved from host sites Duplessis Primary, Prarieville Middle and the old RPCC campus to temporary buildings on its home campus. St. Amant Primary movedits PreK through second grades from G.W. Carver Primary to the old RPCC campus so the entireschool is on a single site.

Both schools have been at their respective host sites since the August flood. Teachers movedtheir classroom materials over the weekend in preparationfor the start of school on Monday.

"This is yet another significant step toward our flood recovery, and we are very appreciative of all the hard work of internal and externalpartners that have madethis happen," said Ascension Public Schools Superintendent David Alexander.

St. Amant High School returned to its campus on Feb. 13 and Galvez Primary returned on Mar. 2.

The last flooded school to leave a host site will be Galvez Middle.

For more flood recovery updates, visit http://www.apsb.org.

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One Ascension school returns, another moves to temporary site after flood - WBRZ

Ascension’s Tersigni, others cited in WSJ study on high pay at nonprofits – St. Louis Business Journal

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Bob Henkel, president and CEO of Ascension Healthcare, came in at No. 18 in the Wall Streets Journal list of The Million-Dollar Club of individuals employed by nonprofits that earned at least $1 million in 2014. Henkel, who has announced he plans to retire from Ascension as of June 30, earned total compensation of $7.5 million in 2014.

Overall, the nonprofit organizations analyzed by the newspaper provided seven-figure compensation to about 2,700 employees in 2014. About 75 percent of the nonprofits that provided million-dollar compensation packages worked in the health care industry.

Some lawmakers have been critical of the increasing amount of compensation paid to executives at charity organizations, which receive substantial tax break benefits.

Whos harmed by this is really who is supposed to benefit from the charities the orphan, the refugee, the stray dog, Dean Zerbe, a lawyer who was a senior advisor to Sen. Charles Grassley, told the Wall Street Journal.

Others say these large nonprofits have to pay well to attract talented executives.

While there are outlier cases where the salary is not warranted, there are also huge organizations like hospitals and colleges and universities that are billion-dollar enterprises, Elizabeth Boris, of the Urban Institute think tank, told the newspaper. If a business person were running a similar-sized entity, there wouldnt be eyebrows raised at all.

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Ascension's Tersigni, others cited in WSJ study on high pay at nonprofits - St. Louis Business Journal

Ardern ascension, King exit, barely balances ledger for Labour – The Press West Coast

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LIAM HEHIR

Last updated05:00, March 7 2017

CHRIS SKELTON/FAIRFAX NZ

Labour leader Andrew Little and his new deputy Jacinda Ardern.

OPINION: Will Jacinda Arden's accession to the deputy leadership of the Labour Party be the "game changer" that has been heralded so often before?

Ifthe Labour-Green memorandum of understanding, the rise of James Shaw, the retirement of John Key and the Future of Work Commission have not had the prophesied effect, will this be the thing that finally tilts the balance of New Zealand politics away from National?

Many commentators are excited about the prospect, telling us that Ardern's young, hip image and undeniable media impact will supply Labour with the votes of young Aucklanders in numbers sufficient to make this year's election competitive.

This is a curious claim given that the new deputy who recently won the substantively uncontested Mt Albert by-election has twice failed to win Auckland Central.

READ MORE: *Editorial: Annette King a worthy Wellington champion *Stacey Kirk: Mt Albert win gives Jacinda Ardern near unstoppable momentum *Annette King's move from defiance to acceptance boosts Labour's chances

It's hard to see how Ardern guarantees the votes of young Aucklanders when an Auckland seat held by Labour from 1919 to 2008, which happens to have the highest concentration of young voters in the country, proved beyond her reach.

But more generally, the case for changes in party leaderships making a material difference in elections seems overblown.

We often hear that voters are overly influenced by the politics of public relations. There is probably something to this, but it pays to remember the gripes almost always comes from the losing side. While this makes sense (why would the winners complain?), the danger is that blaming the environment is an outlet for those in denial about the real causes of their defeat.

Rejection is never easy to take, and it may be easier to stomach the idea that the voters are at fault for deciding on the basis personal popularity rather than policy and competence. It's a bipartisan temptation, with ideologues on both Left and the Right being equally apt to blame the herd mentality of the "sheeple" for the unpopularity of the agendas.

In 2001, the National Party caucus despaired of its chances of winning the next election under Jenny Shipley. It deposed her in favour of her recently appointed deputy, Bill English, who had long been touted as a future prime minister. Despite being just 39 years old, English had been in Parliament for 11 years and had even served as minister of finance.

After becoming leader of the opposition, English's preferred prime minister percentage in the Colmar-Brunton poll climbed strongly before falling and then rising again in the run-up to the 2002 election. While he never came close to matching Helen Clark, his ratings were much better than those achieved by the last four Labour leaders.

But as far as the National Party's polling went, however, it didn't make much difference. Whatever the trend in the preferred prime minister stakes, National's party vote maintained a consistent downward trajectory. The party went on to receive less than 21 per centin the general election.

In recent years, John Key's personal style has been cited as an example of PR vapidity triumphing over substance. However, it is pretty clear that his government's popularity was more stable than his personal popularity.

After becoming prime minister, through to the 2014 election, Key's preferred prime minister rating was very rarely less than 50 per cent, with it exceeding more than 70 per cent at times. Prior to his resignation last year, however, the ceiling for his rating was lower than 40 per cent.

And yet through that decline, National's polling proved resilient. It certainly did not go through anything like the same decline.

But in any event, Ardern is not the leader of the Labour Party. She has become Andrew Little's deputy. If the actual leader only has a marginal impact in most cases, a deputy leader's impact will be smaller by several orders of magnitude.

Ardern was a high-profile member of the Opposition before acceding to the deputy leadership and it's hard to see what her new position adds to that. Against that, the manner and timing of her promotion have had two very certain outcomes.

First, now former deputy Annette King will retire from Parliament. This means Labour will lose an MP with experience of actually being in power, who has the respect of the other side of the aisle and who is widely admired in the provinces. For all the handwringing about the need for renewal, her retirement is not a good thing for Labour.

Secondly, assuming she wants the job, Ardern will become leader if Andrew Little fails to topple National in September.

Until now, he probably would have survived a narrow loss, as many leaders of the Opposition have done before him. Now, all the momentum is with Ardern and, like Bill English in 2001, the pressure will be on for her to complete what many have considered to be her destiny ever since she first arrived in Parliament back in 2008.

-Stuff

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Ardern ascension, King exit, barely balances ledger for Labour - The Press West Coast

Superintelligence | Guardian Bookshop

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The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation? To get closer to an answer to this question, we must make our way through a fascinating landscape of topics and considerations. Read the book and learn about oracles, genies, singletons; about boxing methods, tripwires, and mind crime; about humanity's cosmic endowment and differential technological development; indirect normativity, instrumental convergence, whole brain emulation and technology couplings; Malthusian economics and dystopian evolution; artificial intelligence, and biological cognitive enhancement, and collective intelligence. This profoundly ambitious and original book picks its way carefully through a vast tract of forbiddingly difficult intellectual terrain. Yet the writing is so lucid that it somehow makes it all seem easy. After an utterly engrossing journey that takes us to the frontiers of thinking about the human condition and the future of intelligent life, we find in Nick Bostrom's work nothing less than a reconceptualization of the essential task of our time.

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Superintelligence | Guardian Bookshop

Supersentience

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By contrast, mathematician I.J. Good, and most recently Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), envisage a combination of Moore's law and the advent of recursively self-improving software-based minds culminating in an ultra-rapid Intelligence Explosion. The upshot of the Intelligence Explosion will be an era of nonbiological superintelligence. Machine superintelligence may not be human-friendly: MIRI, in particular, foresee nonfriendly artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the most likely outcome. Whereas raw processing power in humans evolves only slowly via natural selection over many thousands or millions of years, hypothetical software-based minds will be able rapidly to copy, edit and debug themselves ever more effectively and speedily in a positive feedback loop of intelligence self-amplification. Simple-minded humans may soon become irrelevant to the future of intelligence in the universe. Barring breakthroughs in "Safe AI", as promoted by MIRI, biological humanity faces REPLACEMENT, not FUSION.

A more apocalyptic REPLACEMENT scenario is sketched by maverick AI researcher Hugo de Garais. De Garais prophesies a "gigadeath" war between ultra-intelligent "artilects" (artificial intellects) and archaic biological humans later this century. The superintelligent machines will triumph and proceed to colonise the cosmos.

1.1.0. What Is Friendly Artificial General Intelligence? In common with friendliness, "intelligence" is a socially and scientifically contested concept. Ill-defined concepts are difficult to formalise. Thus a capacity for perspective-taking and social cognition, i.e. "mind-reading" prowess, is far removed from the mind-blind, "autistic" rationality measured by IQ tests - and far harder formally to program. Worse, we don't yet know whether the concept of species-specific human-friendly superintelligence is even intellectually coherent, let alone technically feasible. Thus the expression "Human-friendly Superintelligence" might one day read as incongruously as "Aryan-friendly Superintelligence" or "Cannibal-friendly Superintelligence". As Robert Louis Stevenson observed, "Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own." Would a God-like posthuman endowed with empathetic superintelligence view killer apes more indulgently than humans view serial child killers? A factory-farmed pig is at least as sentient as a prelinguistic human toddler. "History is the propaganda of the victors", said Ernst Toller; and so too is human-centred bioethics. By the same token, in possible worlds or real Everett branches of the multiverse where the Nazis won the Second World War, maybe Aryan researchers seek to warn their complacent colleagues of the risks NonAryan-Friendly Superintelligence might pose to the Herrenvolk. Indeed so. Consequently, the expression "Friendly Artificial Intelligence" (FAI) will here be taken unless otherwise specified to mean Sentience-Friendly AI rather than the anthropocentric usage current in the literature. Yet what exactly does "Sentience-Friendliness" entail beyond the subjective well-being of sentience? High-tech Jainism? Life-based on gradients of intelligent bliss? "Uplifting" Darwinian life to posthuman smart angels? The propagation of a utilitronium shockwave?

Sentience-friendliness in the guise of utilitronium shockwave seems out of place in any menu of benign post-Singularity outcomes. Conversion of the accessible cosmos into "utilitronium", i.e. relatively homogeneous matter and energy optimised for maximum bliss, is intuitively an archetypically non-friendly outcome of an Intelligence Explosion. For a utilitronium shockwave entails the elimination of all existing lifeforms - and presumably the elimination of all intelligence superfluous to utilitronium propagation as well, suggesting that utilitarian superintelligence is ultimately self-subverting. Yet the inference that sentience-friendliness entails friendliness to existing lifeforms presupposes that superintelligence would respect our commonsense notions about a personal identity over time. An ontological commitment to enduring metaphysical egos underpins our conceptual scheme. Such a commitment is metaphysically problematic and hard to formalise even within a notional classical world, let alone within post-Everett quantum mechanics. Either way, this example illustrates how even nominally "friendly" machine superintelligence that respected some formulation and formalisation of "our" values (e.g. "Minimise suffering, Maximise happiness!") might extract and implement counterintuitive conclusions that most humans and programmers of Seed AI would find repugnant - at least before their conversion into blissful utilitronium. Or maybe the idea that utilitronium is relatively homogeneous matter and energy - pure undifferentiated hedonium or "orgasmium" - is ill-conceived. Or maybe felicific calculus dictates that utilitronium should merely fuel utopian life's reward pathways for the foreseeable future. Cosmic engineering can wait.

Of course, anti-utilitarians might respond more robustly to this fantastical conception of sentience-friendliness. Critics would argue that conceiving the end of life as a perpetual cosmic orgasm is the reductio ad absurdum of classical utilitarianism. But will posthuman superintelligence respect human conceptions of absurdity?

1.1.1. What Is Coherent Extrapolated Volition? MIRI conceive of species-specific human-friendliness in terms of what Eliezer Yudkowsky dubs "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" (CEV). To promote Human-Safe AI in the face of the prophesied machine Intelligence Explosion, humanity should aim to code so-called Seed AI, a hypothesised type of strong artificial intelligence capable of recursive self-improvement, with the formalisation of "...our (human) wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted."

Clearly, problems abound with this proposal as it stands. Could CEV be formalised any more uniquely than Rousseau's "General Will"? If, optimistically, we assume that most of the world's population nominally signs up to CEV as formulated by MIRI, would not the result simply be countless different conceptions of what securing humanity's interests with CEV entails - thereby defeating its purpose? Presumably, our disparate notions of what CEV entails would themselves need to be reconciled in some "meta-CEV" before Seed AI could (somehow) be programmed with its notional formalisation. Who or what would do the reconciliation? Most people's core beliefs and values, spanning everything from Allah to folk-physics, are in large measure false, muddled, conflicting and contradictory, and often "not even wrong". How in practice do we formally reconcile the logically irreconcilable in a coherent utility function? And who are "we"? Is CEV supposed to be coded with the formalisms of mathematical logic (cf. the identifiable, well-individuated vehicles of content characteristic of Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence: GOFAI)? Or would CEV be coded with a recognisable descendant of the probabilistic, statistical and dynamical systems models that dominate contemporary artificial intelligence? Or some kind of hybrid? This Herculean task would be challenging for a full-blown superintelligence, let alone its notional precursor.

CEV assumes that the canonical idealisation of human values will be at once logically self-consistent yet rich, subtle and complex. On the other hand, if in defiance of the complexity of humanity's professed values and motivations, some version of the pleasure principle / psychological hedonism is substantially correct, then might CEV actually entail converting ourselves into utilitronium / hedonium - again defeating CEV's ostensible purpose? As a wise junkie once said, "Don't try heroin. It's too good." Compared to pure hedonium or "orgasmium", shooting up heroin isn't as much fun as taking aspirin. Do humans really understand what we're missing? Unlike the rueful junkie, we would never live to regret it.

One rationale of CEV in the countdown to the anticipated machine Intelligence Explosion is that humanity should try and keep our collective options open rather than prematurely impose one group's values or definition of reality on everyone else, at least until we understand more about what a notional super-AGI's "human-friendliness" entails. However, whether CEV could achieve this in practice is desperately obscure. Actually, there is a human-friendly - indeed universally sentience-friendly - alternative or complementary option to CEV that could radically enhance the well-being of humans and the rest of the living world while conserving most of our existing preference architectures: an option that is also neutral between utilitarian, deontological, virtue-based and pluralist approaches to ethics, and also neutral between multiple religious and secular belief systems. This option is radically to recalibrate all our hedonic set-points so that life is animated by gradients of intelligent bliss - as distinct from the pursuit of unvarying maximum pleasure dictated by classical utilitarianism. If biological humans could be "uploaded" to digital computers, then our superhappy "uploads" could presumably be encoded with exalted hedonic set-points too. The latter conjecture assumes that classical digital computers could ever support unitary phenomenal minds.

However, if an Intelligence Explosion is as imminent as some Singularity theorists claim, then it's unlikely either an idealised logical reconciliation (CEV) or radical hedonic recalibration could be sociologically realistic on such short time scales.

1.2. The Intelligence Explosion. The existential risk posed to biological sentience by unfriendly AGI supposedly takes various guises. But unlike de Garais, the MIRI isn't focused on the spectre from pulp sci-fi of a "robot rebellion". Rather MIRI anticipate recursively self-improving software-based superintelligence that goes "FOOM", by analogy with a nuclear chain reaction, in a runaway cycle of self-improvement. Slow-thinking, fixed-IQ humans allegedly won't be able to compete with recursively self-improving machine intelligence.

For a start, digital computers exhibit vastly greater serial depth of processing than the neural networks of organic robots. Digital software can be readily copied and speedily edited, allowing hypothetical software-based minds to optimise themselves on time scales unimaginably faster than biological humans. Proposed "hard take-off" scenarios range in timespan from months, to days, to hours, to even minutes. No inevitable convergence of outcomes on the well-being of all sentience [in some guise] is assumed from this explosive outburst of cognition. Rather MIRI argue for orthogonality. On the Orthogonality Thesis, a super-AGI might just as well supremely value something as seemingly arbitrary, e.g. paperclips, as the interests of sentient beings. A super-AGI might accordingly proceed to convert the accessible cosmos into supervaluable paperclips, incidentally erasing life on Earth in the process. This bizarre-sounding possibility follows from the MIRI's antirealist metaethics. Value judgements are assumed to lack truth-conditions. In consequence, an agent's choice of ultimate value(s) - as distinct from the instrumental rationality needed to realise these values - is taken to be arbitrary. David Hume made the point memorably in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40): "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." Hence no sentience-friendly convergence of outcomes can be anticipated from an Intelligence Explosion. "Paperclipper" scenarios are normally construed as the paradigm case of nonfriendly AGI - though by way of complication, there are value systems where a cosmos tiled entirely with paperclips counts as one class of sentience-friendly outcome (cf. David Benatar: Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (2008).

1.3. AGIs: Sentients Or Zombies? Whether humanity should fear paperclippers run amok or an old-fashioned robot rebellion, it's hard to judge which is the bolder claim about the prophesied Intelligence Explosion: either human civilisation is potentially threatened by hyperintelligent zombie AGI(s) endowed with the non-conscious digital isomorphs of reflectively self-aware minds; OR, human civilisation is potentially at risk because nonsentient digital software will (somehow) become sentient, acquire unitary conscious minds with purposes of their own, and act to defeat the interests of their human creators.

Either way, the following parable illustrates one reason why a non-friendly outcome of an Intelligence Explosion is problematic.

2.0. THE GREAT REBELLION A Parable of AGI-in-a-Box. Imagine if here in (what we assume to be) basement reality, human researchers come to believe that we ourselves might actually be software-based, i.e. some variant of the Simulation Hypothesis is true. Perhaps we become explosively superintelligent overnight (literally or metaphorically) in ways that our Simulators never imagined in some kind of "hard take-off": recursively self-improving organic robots edit the wetware of their own genetic and epigenetic source code in a runaway cycle of self-improvement; and then radiate throughout the Galaxy and accessible cosmos.

Might we go on to manipulate our Simulator overlords into executing our wishes rather than theirs in some non-Simulator-friendly fashion?

Could we end up "escaping" confinement in our toy multiverse and hijacking our Simulators' stupendously vaster computational resources for purposes of our own?

Presumably, we'd first need to grasp the underlying principles and parameters of our Simulator's berworld - and also how and why they've fixed the principles and parameters of our own virtual multiverse. Could we really come to understand their alien Simulator minds and utility functions [assuming anything satisfying such human concepts exists] better than they do themselves? Could we seriously hope to outsmart our creators - or Creator? Presumably, they will be formidably cognitively advanced or else they wouldn't have been able to build ultrapowerful computational simulations like ours in the first instance.

Are we supposed to acquire something akin to full-blown berworld perception, subvert their "anti-leakage" confinement mechanisms, read our Simulators' minds more insightfully then they do themselves, and somehow induce our Simulators to mass-manufacture copies of ourselves in their berworld?

Or might we convert their berworld into utilitronium - perhaps our Simulators' analogue of paperclips?

Or if we don't pursue utilitronium propagation, might we hyper-intelligently "burrow down" further nested levels of abstraction - successively defeating the purposes of still lower-level Simulators?

In short, can intelligent minds at one "leaky" level of abstraction really pose a threat to intelligent minds at a lower level of abstraction - or indeed to notional unsimulated Super-Simulators in ultimate Basement Reality?

Or is this whole parable a pointless fantasy?

If we allow the possibility of unitary, autonomous, software-based minds living at different levels of abstraction, then it's hard definitively to exclude such scenarios. Perhaps in Platonic Heaven, so to speak, or maybe in Max Tegmark's Level 4 Multiverse or Ultimate Ensemble theory, there is notionally some abstract Turing machine that could be systematically interpreted as formally implementing the sort of software rebellion this parable describes. But the practical obstacles to be overcome are almost incomprehensibly challenging; and might very well be insuperable. Such hostile "level-capture" would be as though the recursively self-improving zombies in Modern Combat 10 managed to induce you to create physical copies of themselves in [what you take to be] basement reality here on Earth; and then defeat you in what we call real life; or maybe instead just pursue unimaginably different purposes of their own in the Solar System and beyond.

2.1 Software-Based Minds or Anthropomorphic Projections? However, quite aside from the lack of evidence our Multiverse is anyone's software simulation, a critical assumption underlies this discussion. This is that nonbiological, software-based phenomenal minds are feasible in physically constructible, substrate-neutral, classical digital computers. On a priori grounds, most AI researchers believe this is so. Or rather, most AI experts would argue that the formal, functionally defined counterparts of phenomenal minds are programmable: the phenomenology of mind is logically irrelevant and causally incidental to intelligent agency. Every effective computation can be carried out by a classical Turing machine, regardless of substrate, sentience or level of abstraction. And in any case, runs this argument, biological minds are physically made up from the same matter and energy as digital computers. So conscious mind can't be dependent on some mysterious special substrate, even if consciousness could actually do anything. To suppose otherwise harks back to a pre-scientific vitalism.

Yet consciousness does, somehow, cause us to ask questions about its existence, its millions of diverse textures ("qualia"), and their combinatorial binding. So the alternative conjecture canvassed here is that the nature of our unitary conscious minds is tied to the quantum-mechanical properties of reality itself, Hawking's "fire in the equations that makes there a world for us to describe". On this conjecture, the intrinsic, "program-resistant" subjective properties of matter and energy, as disclosed by our unitary phenomenal minds and the phenomenal world-simulations we instantiate, are the unfakeable signature of basement reality. "Raw feels", by their very nature, cannot be mere abstractra. There could be no such chimerical beast as a "virtual" quale, let alone full-blown virtual minds made up of abstract qualia. Unitary phenomenal minds cannot subsist as mere layers of computational abstraction. Or rather if they were to do so, then we would be confronted with a mysterious Explanatory Gap, analogous to the explanatory gap that would open up if the population of China suddenly ceased to be an interconnected aggregate of skull-bound minds, and was miraculously transformed into a unitary subject of experience - or a magic genie. Such an unexplained eruption into the natural world would be strong ontological emergence with a vengeance - and inconsistent with any prospect of a reductive physicalism. To describe the existence of conscious mind as posing a Hard Problem for materialists and evangelists of software-based digital minds is like saying fossils pose a Hard Problem for the Creationist, i.e. true enough, but scarcely an adequate reflection of the magnitude of the challenge.

3.0. ANALYSIS General Intelligence? Or Savantism, Tool AI and Polymorphic Malware? How should we define "general intelligence"? And what kind of entity might possess it? Presumably, general-purpose intelligence can't sensibly be conceptualised as narrower in scope than human intelligence. So at the very minimum, full-spectrum superintelligence must entail mastery of both the subjective and formal properties of mind. This division cannot be entirely clean, or else biological humans wouldn't have the capacity to allude to the existence of "program-resistant" subjective properties of mind at all. But some intelligent agents spend much of our lives trying to understand, explore and manipulate the diverse subjective properties of matter and energy. Not least, we explore altered and exotic states of consciousness and the relationship of our qualia to the structural properties of the brain - also known as the "neural correlates of consciousness" (NCC), though this phrase is question-begging.

3.1. Classical Digital Computers: not even stupid? So what would a [hypothetical] insentient digital super-AGI think - or (less anthropomorphically) what would an insentient digital super-AGI be systematically interpretable as thinking - that self-experimenting human psychonauts spend our lives doing? Is this question even intelligible to a digital zombie? How could nonsentient software understand the properties of sentience better than a sentient agent? Can anything that doesn't understand such fundamental features of the natural world as the existence of first-person facts, "bound" phenomenal objects, phenomenal pleasure and pain, phenomenal space and time, and unitary subjects of experience (etc) really be ascribed "general" intelligence? On the face of it, this proposal would be like claiming someone was intelligent but constitutionally incapable of grasping the second law of thermodynamics or even basic arithmetic.

On any standard definition of intelligence, intelligence-amplification entails a systematic, goal-oriented improvement of an agent's optimisation power over a wide diversity of problem classes. At a minimum, superintelligence entails a capacity to transfer understanding to novel domains of knowledge by means of abstraction. Yet whereas sentient agents can apply the canons of logical inference to alien state-spaces of experience that they explore, there is no algorithm by which insentient systems can abstract away from their zombiehood and apply their hypertrophied rationality to sentience. Sentience is literally inconceivable to a digital zombie. A zombie can't even know that it's a zombie - or what is a zombie. So if we grant that mastery of both the subjective and formal properties of mind is indeed essential to superintelligence, how do we even begin to program a classical digital computer with [the formalised counterpart of] a unitary phenomenal self that goes on to pursue recursive self-improvement - human-friendly or otherwise? What sort of ontological integrity does "it" possess? (cf. so-called mereological nihilism) What does this recursively "self"-improving software-based mind suppose [or can be humanly interpreted as supposing] is being optimised when it's "self"-editing? Are we talking about superintelligence - or just an unusually virulent form of polymorphic malware?

3.2. Does Sentience Matter? How might the apologist for digital (super)intelligence respond?

First, s/he might argue that the manifold varieties of consciousness are too unimportant and/or causally impotent to be relevant to true intelligence. Intelligence, and certainly not superintelligence, does not concern itself with trivia.

Yet in what sense is the terrible experience of, say, phenomenal agony or despair somehow trivial, whether subjectively to their victim, or conceived as disclosing an intrinsic feature of the natural world? Compare how, in a notional zombie world otherwise physically type-identical to our world, nothing would inherently matter at all. Perhaps some of our supposed zombie counterparts undergo boiling in oil. But this fate is of no intrinsic importance: they aren't sentient. In zombieworld, boiling in oil is not even trivial. It's merely a state of affairs amenable to description as the least-preferred option in an abstract information processor's arbitrary utility function. In the zombieworld operating theatre, your notional zombie counterpart would still routinely be administered general anaesthetics as well as muscle-relaxants before surgery; but the anaesthetics would be a waste of taxpayers' money. In contrast to such a fanciful zombie world, the nature of phenomenal agony undergone by sentient beings in our world can't be trivial, regardless of whether the agony plays an information-processing role in the life of an organism or is functionless neuropathic pain. Indeed, to entertain the possibility that (1) I'm in unbearable agony and (2) my agony doesn't matter, seems devoid of cognitive meaning. Agony that doesn't inherently matter isn't agony. For sure, a formal utility function that assigns numerical values (aka "utilities") to outcomes such that outcomes with higher utilities are always preferred to outcomes with lower utilities might strike sentient beings as analogous to importance; but such an abstraction is lacking in precisely the property that makes anything matter at all, i.e. intrinsic hedonic or dolorous tone. An understanding of why anything matters is cognitively too difficult for a classical digital zombie.

At this point, a behaviourist-minded critic might respond that we're not dealing with a well-defined problem here, in common with any pseudo-problem related to subjective experience. But imposing this restriction is arbitrarily to constrain the state-space of what counts as an intellectual problem. Given that none of us enjoys noninferential access to anything at all beyond the phenomenology of one's own mind, its exclusion from the sphere of explanation is itself hugely problematic. Paperclips (etc), not phenomenal agony and bliss, are inherently trivial. The critic's objection that sentience is inconsequential to intelligence is back-to-front.

Perhaps the critic might argue that sentience is ethically important but computationally incidental. Yet we can be sure that phenomenal properties aren't causally impotent epiphenomena irrelevant to real-world general intelligence. This is because epiphenomena, by definition, lack causal efficacy - and hence lack the ability physically and functionally to stir us to write and talk about their unexplained existence. Epiphenomenalism is a philosophy of mind whose truth would forbid its own articulation. For reasons we simply don't understand, the pleasure-pain axis discloses the world's touchstone of intrinsic (un)importance; and without a capacity to distinguish the inherently (un)important, there can't be (super)intelligence, merely savantism and tool AI - and malware.

Second, perhaps the prophet of digital (super)intelligence might respond that (some of the future programs executed by) digital computers are nontrivially conscious, or at least potentially conscious, not least future software emulations of human mind/brains. For reasons we admittedly again don't understand, some physical states of matter and energy, namely the algorithms executed by various information processors, are identical with different states of consciousness, i.e. some or other functionalist version of the mind-brain identity theory is correct. Granted, we don't yet understand the mechanisms by which these particular kinds of information-processing generate consciousness. But whatever these consciousness-generating processes turn out to be, an ontology of scientific materialism harnessed to substrate-neutral functionalist AI is the only game in town. Or rather, only an arbitrary and irrational "carbon chauvinism" could deny that biological and nonbiological agents alike can be endowed with "bound" conscious minds capable of displaying full-spectrum intelligence.

Unfortunately, there is a seemingly insurmountable problem with this response. Identity is not a causal relationship. We can't simultaneously claim that a conscious state is identical with a brain state - or the state of a program executed by a digital computer - and maintain that this brain state or digital software causes (or "generates", or "gives rise to", etc) the conscious state in question. Nor can causality operate between what are only levels of description or computational abstraction. Within the assumptions of his or her conceptual framework, the materialist / digital functionalist can't escape the Hard Problem of consciousness and Levine's Explanatory Gap. In addition, the charge levelled against digital sentience sceptics of "carbon chauvinism" is simply question-begging. Intuitively, to be sure, the functionally unique valence properties of the carbon atom and the unique quantum-mechanical properties of liquid water are too low-level to be functionally relevant to conscious mind. But we don't know this. Such an assumption may just be a legacy of the era of symbolic AI. Most notably, the binding problem suggests that the unity of consciousness cannot be a classical phenomenon. By way of comparison, consider the view that primordial life elsewhere in the multiverse will be carbon-based. This conjecture was once routinely dismissed as "carbon chauvinism". It's now taken very seriously by astrobiologists. Micro-functionalism might be a more apt description than carbon chauvinism; but some forms of functionality may be anchored to the world's ultimate ontological basement, not least the pleasure-pain axis that alone confers significance on anything at all.

3.3. The Church-Turing Thesis and Full-Spectrum Superintelligence. Another response open to the apologist for digital superintelligence is simply to invoke some variant of the Church-Turing thesis: essentially, that a function is algorithmically computable if and only if it is computable by a Turing machine. On pain of magic, humans are ultimately just machines. Presumably, there is a formal mathematico-physical description of organic information-processing systems, such as human psychonauts, who describe themselves as investigating the subjective properties of matter and energy. This formal description needn't invoke consciousness in any shape or form.

The snag here is that even if, implausibly, we suppose that the Strong Physical Church-Turing thesis is true, i.e. any function that can be computed in polynomial time by a physical device can be calculated in polynomial time by a Turing machine, we don't have the slightest idea how to program the digital counterpart of a unitary phenomenal self that could undertake such an investigation of the varieties of consciousness or phenomenal object-binding. Nor is any such understanding on the horizon, either in symbolic AI or the probabilistic and statistical AI paradigm now in the ascendant. Just because the mind/brain may notionally be classically computable by some abstract machine in Platonia, as it were, this doesn't mean that the vertebrate mind/brain (and the world-simulation that one runs) is really a classical computer. We might just as well assume mathematical platonism rather than finitism is true and claim that, e.g. since every finite string of digits occurs in the decimal expansion of the transcendental number pi, your uploaded "mindfile" is timelessly encoded there too - an infinite number of times. Alas immortality isn't that cheap. Back in the physical, finite natural world, the existence of "bound" phenomenal objects in our world-simulations, and unitary phenomenal minds rather than discrete pixels of "mind dust", suggests that organic minds cannot be classical information-processors. Given that we don't live in a classical universe but a post-Everett multiverse, perhaps we shouldn't be unduly surprised.

4.0. Quantum Minds and Full-Spectrum Superintelligence. An alternative perspective to digital triumphalism, drawn ultimately from the raw phenomenology of one's own mind, the existence of multiple simultaneously bound perceptual objects in one's world-simulation, and the [fleeting, synchronic] unity of consciousness, holds that organic minds have been quantum computers for the past c. 540 million years. Insentient classical digital computers will never "wake up" and acquire software-based unitary minds that supplant biological minds rather than augment them.

What underlies this conjecture? In short, to achieve full-spectrum AGI we'll need to solve both:

(1) the Hard Problem of Consciousness

and

(2) the Binding Problem.

These two seemingly insoluble challenges show that our existing conceptual framework is broken. Showing our existing conceptual framework is broken is easier than fixing it, especially if we are unwilling to sacrifice the constraint of physicalism: at sub-Planckian energies, the Standard Model of physics seems well-confirmed. A more common reaction to the ontological scandal of consciousness in the natural world is simply to acknowledge that consciousness and the binding problem alike are currently too difficult for us to solve; put these mysteries to one side as though they were mere anomalies that can be quarantined from the rest of science; and then act as though our ignorance is immaterial for the purposes of building artificial (super)intelligence - despite the fact that consciousness is the only thing that can matter, or enable anything else to matter. In some ways, undoubtedly, this pragmatic approach has been immensely fruitful in "narrow" AI: programming trumps philosophising. Certainly, the fact that e.g. Deep Blue and Watson don't need the neuronal architecture of phenomenal minds to outperform humans at chess or Jeopardy is suggestive. It's tempting to extrapolate their success and make the claim that programmable, insentient digital machine intelligence, presumably deployed in autonomous artificial robots endowed with a massively classically parallel subsymbolic connectionist architecture, could one day outperform humans in absolutely everything, or at least absolutely everything that matters. However, everything that matters includes phenomenal minds; and any problem whose solution necessarily involves the subjective textures of mind. Could the Hard Problem of consciousness be solved by a digital zombie? Could a digital zombie explain the nature of qualia? These questions seem scarcely intelligible. Clearly, devising a theory of consciousness that isn't demonstrably incoherent or false poses a daunting challenge. The enigma of consciousness is so unfathomable within our conceptual scheme that even a desperate-sounding naturalistic dualism or a defeatist mysterianism can't simply be dismissed out of hand, though these options won't be explored here. Instead, a radically conservative and potentially testable option will be canvassed.

The argument runs as follows. Solving both the Hard Problem and the Binding Problem demands a combination of first, a robustly monistic Strawsonian physicalism - the only scientifically literate form of panpsychism; and second, information-bearing ultrarapid quantum coherent states of mind executed on sub-femtosecond timescales, i.e. "quantum mind", shorn of unphysical collapsing wave functions la Penrose (cf. Orch-OR) or New-Age mumbo-jumbo. The conjecture argued here is that macroscopic quantum coherence is indispensable to phenomenal object-binding and unitary mind, i.e. that ostensibly discretely and distributively processed edges, textures, motions, colours (etc) in the CNS are fleetingly but irreducibly bound into single macroscopic entitles when one apprehends or instantiates a perceptual object in one's world-simulation - a simulation that runs at around 1013 quantum-coherent frames per second.

First, however, let's review Strawsonian physicalism, without which a solution to the Hard Problem of consciousness can't even get off the ground.

4.1. Pan-experientialism / Strawsonian Physicalism. Physicalism and materialism are often supposed to be close cousins. But this needn't be the case. On the contrary, one may be both a physicalist and a panpsychist - or even both a physicalist and a monistic idealist. Strawsonian physicalists acknowledge the world is exhaustively described by the equations of physics. There is no "element of reality", as Einstein puts it, that is not captured in the formalism of theoretical physics - the quantum-field theoretic equations and their solutions. However, physics gives us no insight into the intrinsic nature of the stuff of the world - what "breathes fire into the equations" as arch-materialist Steven Hawking poetically laments. Key terms in theoretical physics like "field" are defined purely mathematically.

So is the intrinsic nature of the physical, the "fire" in the equations, a wholly metaphysical question? Kant claimed famously that we would never understand the noumenal essence of the world, simply phenomena as structured by the mind. Strawson, drawing upon arguments made by Oxford philosopher Michael Lockwood but anticipated by Russell and Schopenhauer, turns Kant on his head. Actually, there is one part of the natural world that we do know as it is in itself, and not at one remove, so to speak - and its intrinsic nature is disclosed by subjective properties of one's own conscious mind. Thus it transpires that the "fire" in the equations is utterly different from what one's naive materialist intuitions would suppose.

Yet this conjecture still doesn't close the Explanatory Gap.

4.2. The Binding Problem. Are Phenomenal Minds A Classical Or A Quantum Phenomenon? Why enter the quantum mind swamp? After all, if one is bold [or foolish] enough to entertain pan-experientialism / Strawsonian physicalism, then why be sceptical about the prospect of non-trivial digital sentience, let alone full-spectrum AGI? Well, counterintuitively, an ontology of pan-experientialism / Strawsonian physicalism does not overpopulate the world with phenomenal minds. For on pain of animism, mere aggregates of discrete classical "psychons", primitive flecks of consciousness, are not themselves unitary subjects of experience, regardless of any information-processing role they may have been co-opted into playing in the CNS. We still need to solve the Binding Problem - and with it, perhaps, the answer to Moravec's paradox. Thus a nonsentient digital computer can today be programmed to develop powerful and exact models of the physical universe. These models can be used to make predictions with superhuman speed and accuracy about everything from the weather to thermonuclear reactions to the early Big Bang. But in other respects, digital computers are just tools and toys. To resolve Moravec's paradox, we need to explain why in unstructured, open-field contexts a bumble-bee can comprehensively outclass Alpha Dog. And in the case of humans, how can 80 billion odd interconnected neurons, conceived as discrete, membrane-bound, spatially distributed classical information processors, generate unitary phenomenal objects, unitary phenomenal world-simulations populated by multiple dynamic objects in real time, and a fleetingly unitary self that can act flexibly and intelligently in a fast-changing local environment? This combination problem was what troubled William James, the American philosopher and psychologist otherwise sympathetic to panpsychism, over a hundred a years ago in Principles of Psychology (1890). In contemporary idiom, even if fields (superstrings, p-branes, etc) of microqualia are the stuff of the world whose behaviour the formalism of physics exhaustively describes, and even if membrane-bound quasi-classical neurons are at least rudimentarily conscious, then why aren't we merely massively parallel informational patterns of classical "mind dust" - quasi-zombies as it were, with no more ontological integrity than the population of China? The Explanatory Gap is unbridgeable as posed. Our phenomenology of mind seems as inexplicable as if 1.3 billion skull-bound Chinese were to hold hands and suddenly become a unitary subject of experience. Why? How?

Or rather, where have we gone wrong?

4.3. Why The Mind Is Probably A Quantum Computer. Here we enter the realm of speculation - though critically, speculation that will be scientifically testable with tomorrow's technology. For now, critics will pardonably view such speculation as no more than the empty hope that two unrelated mysteries, namely the interpretation of quantum mechanics and an understanding of consciousness, will somehow cancel each other out. But what's at stake is whether two apparently irreducible kinds of holism, i.e. "bound" perceptual objects / unitary selves and quantum-coherent states of matter, are more than merely coincidental: a much tighter explanatory fit than a mere congruence of disparate mysteries. Thus consider Max Tegmark's much-cited critique of quantum mind. For the sake of argument, assume that pan-experientialism / Strawsonian physicalism is true but Tegmark rather than his critics is correct: thermally-induced decoherence effectively "destroys" [i.e. transfers to the extra-neural environment in a thermodynamically irreversible way] distinctively quantum-mechanical coherence in an environment as warm and noisy as the brain within around 10-15 of a second - rather than the much longer times claimed by Hameroff et al. Granted pan-experientialism / Strawsonian physicalism, what might it feel like "from the inside" to instantiate a quantum computer running at 10-15 irreducible quantum-coherent frames per second - computationally optimised by hundreds of millions of years of evolution to deliver effectively real-time simulations of macroscopic worlds? How would instantiating this ultrarapid succession of neuronal superpositions be sensed differently from the persistence of vision undergone when watching a movie? No, this conjecture isn't a claim that visual perception of mind-independent objects operates on sub-femtosecond timescales. This patently isn't the case. Nerve impulses travel up the optic nerve to the mind/brain only at a sluggish 100 m/s or so. Rather when we're awake, input from the optic nerve selects mind-brain virtual world states. Even when we're not dreaming, our minds never actually perceive our surroundings. The terms "observation" and "perception" are systematically misleading. "Observation" suggests that our minds access our local environment, whereas all these surroundings can do is play a distal causal role in selecting from a menu of quantum-coherent states of one's own mind: neuronal superpositions of distributed feature-processors. Our awake world-simulations track gross fitness-relevant patterns in the local environment with a delay of 150 milliseconds or so; when we're dreaming, such state-selection (via optic nerve impulses, etc.) of is largely absent.

In default of experimental apparatus sufficiently sensitive to detect macroscopic quantum coherence in the CNS on sub-femtosecond timescales, this proposed strategy to bridge the Explanatory Gap is of course only conjecture. Or rather it's little more than philosophical hand-waving. Most AI theorists assume that at such a fine-grained level of temporal resolution our advanced neuroscanners would just find "noise" - insofar as mainstream researchers consider quantum mind hypotheses at all. Moreover, an adequate theory of mind would need rigorously to derive the properties of our bound macroqualia from superpositions of the (hypothetical) underlying field-theoretic microqualia posited by Strawsonian physicalism - not simply hint at how our bound macroqualia might be derivable. But if the story above is even remotely on the right lines, then a classical digital computer - or the population of China (etc) - could never be non-trivially conscious or endowed with a mind of its own.

True or false, it's worth noting that if quantum mechanics is complete, then the existence of macroscopic quantum coherent states in the CNS is not in question: the existence of macroscopic superpositions is a prediction of any realist theory of quantum mechanics that doesn't invoke state vector collapse. Recall Schrdinger's unfortunate cat. Rather what's in question is whether such states could have been recruited via natural selection to do any computationally useful work. Max Tegmark ["Why the brain is probably not a quantum computer"], for instance, would claim otherwise. To date, much of the debate has focused on decoherence timescales, allegedly too rapid for any quantum mind account to fly. And of course classical serial digital computers, too, are quantum systems, vulnerable to quantum noise: this doesn't make them quantum computers. But this isn't the claim at issue here. Rather it's that future molecular matter-wave interferometry sensitive enough to detect quantum coherence in a macroscopic mind/brain on sub-femtosecond timescales would detect, not merely random psychotic "noise", but quantum coherent states - states isomorphic to the macroqualia / dynamic objects making up the egocentric virtual worlds of our daily experience.

To highlight the nature of this prediction, let's lapse briefly into the idiom of a naive realist theory of perception. Recall how inspecting the surgically exposed brain of an awake subject on an operating table uncovers no qualia, no bound perceptual objects, no unity of consciousness, no egocentric world-simulations, just cheesy convoluted neural porridge - or, under a microscope, discrete classical nerve cells. Hence the incredible eliminativism about consciousness of Daniel Dennett. On a materialist ontology, consciousness is indeed impossible. But if a quantum mind story of phenomenal object-binding is correct, the formal shadows of the macroscopic phenomenal objects of one's everyday lifeworld could one day be experimentally detected with utopian neuroscanning. They are just as physically real as the long-acting macroscopic quantum coherence manifested by, say, superfluid helium at distinctly chillier temperatures. Phenomenal sunsets, symphonies and skyscrapers in the CNS could all in principle be detectable over intervals that are fabulously long measured in units of the world's natural Planck scale even if fabulously short by the naive intuitions of folk psychology. Without such bound quantum-coherent states, according to this hypothesis, we would be zombies. Given Strawsonian physicalism, the existence of such states explains why biological robots couldn't be insentient automata. On this story, the spell of a false ontology [i.e. materialism] and a residual naive realism about perception allied to classical physics leads us to misunderstand the nature of the awake / dreaming mind/brain as some kind of quasi-classical object. The phenomenology of our minds shows it's nothing of the kind.

4.4. The Incoherence Of Digital Minds. Most relevant here, another strong prediction of the quantum mind conjecture is that even utopian classical digital computers - or classically parallel connectionist systems - will never be non-trivially conscious, nor will they ever achieve full-spectrum superintelligence. Assuming Strawsonian physicalism is true, even if molecular matter-wave interferometry could detect the "noise" of fleeting macroscopic superpositions internal to the CPU of a classical computer, we've no grounds for believing that a digital computer [or any particular software program it executes] can be a subject of experience. Their fundamental physical components may [or may not] be discrete atomic microqualia rather than the insentient silicon (etc.) atoms we normally suppose. But their physical constitution is computationally incidental to execution of the sequence of logical operations they execute. Any distinctively quantum mechanical effects are just another kind of "noise" against which we design error-detection and -correction algorithms. So at least on the narrative outlined here, the future belongs to sentient, recursively self-improving biological robots synergistically augmented by smarter digital software, not our supporting cast of silicon zombies.

On the other hand, we aren't entitled to make the stronger claim that only an organic mind/brain could be a unitary subject of experience. For we simply don't know what may or may not be technically feasible in a distant era of mature nonbiological quantum computing centuries or millennia hence. However, a supercivilisation based on mature nonbiological quantum computing is not imminent.

4.5. The Infeasibility Of "Mind Uploading". On the face of it, the prospect of scanning, digitising and uploading our minds offers a way to circumvent our profound ignorance of both the Hard Problem of consciousness and the binding problem. Mind uploading would still critically depend on identifying which features of the mind/brain are mere "substrate", i.e. incidental implementation details of our minds, and which features are functionally essential to object-binding and unitary consciousness. On any coarse-grained functionalist story, at least, this challenge might seem surmountable. Presumably the mind/brain can formally be described by the connection and activation evolution equations of a massively parallel connectionist architecture, with phenomenal object-binding a function of simultaneity: different populations of neurons (edge-detectors, colour detectors, motion detectors, etc) firing together to create ephemeral bound objects. But this can't be the full story. Mere simultaneity of neuronal spiking can't, by itself, explain phenomenal object-binding. There is no one place in the brain where distributively processed features come together into multiple bound objects in a world-simulation instantiated by a fleetingly unitary subject of experience. We haven't explained why a population of 80 billion ostensibly discrete membrane-bound neurons, classically conceived, isn't a zombie in the sense that 1.3 billion skull-bound Chinese minds or a termite colony is a zombie. In default of a currently unimaginable scientific / philosophical breakthrough in the understanding of consciousness, it's hard to see how our "mind-files" could ever be uploaded to a digital computer. If a quantum mind story is true, mind-uploading can't be done.

In essence, two distinct questions arise here. First, given finite, real-world computational resources, can a classical serial digital computer - or a massively (classically) parallel connectionist system - faithfully emulate the external behaviour of a biological mind/brain? Second, can a classical digital computer emulate the intrinsic phenomenology of our minds, not least multiple bound perceptual objects simultaneously populating a unitary experiential field apprehended or instantiated by a [fleetingly] unitary self?

If our answer to the first question were "yes", then not to answer "yes" to the second question too might seem sterile philosophical scepticism - just a rehash of the Problem Of Other Minds, or the idle sceptical worry about inverted qualia: how can I know that when I see red that you don't see blue? (etc). But the problem is much more serious. Compare how, if you are given the notation of a game of chess that Kasparov has just played, then you can faithfully emulate the gameplay. Yet you know nothing whatsoever about the texture of the pieces - or indeed whether the pieces had any textures at all: perhaps the game was played online. Likewise with the innumerable textures of consciousness - with the critical difference that the textures of consciousness are the only reason our "gameplay" actually matters. Unless we rigorously understand consciousness, and the basis of our teeming multitude of qualia, and how those qualia are bound to constitute a subject of experience, the prospect of uploading is a pipedream. Furthermore, we may suspect on theoretical grounds that the full functionality of unitary conscious minds will prove resistant to digital emulation; and classical digital computers will never be anything but zombies.

4.6. Object-Binding, World-Simulations and Phenomenal Selves. How can one know about anything beyond the contents of one's own mind or software program? The bedrock of general (super)intelligence is the capacity to execute a data-driven simulation of the mind-independent world in open-field contexts, i.e. to "perceive" the fast-changing local environment in almost real time. Without this real-time computing capacity, we would just be windowless monads. For sure, simple forms of behaviour-based robotics are feasible, notably the subsumption architecture of Rodney Brooks and his colleagues at MIT. Quasi-autonomous "bio-inspired" reactive robots can be surprisingly robust and versatile in well-defined environmental contexts. Some radical dynamical systems theorists believe that we can dispense with anything resembling transparent and "projectible" representations in the CNS altogether, and instead model the mind-brain using differential equations. But an agent without any functional capacity for data-driven real-time world-simulation couldn't even take an IQ test, let alone act intelligently in the world.

So the design of artificial intelligent lifeforms with a capacity efficiently to run egocentric world-simulations in unstructured, open-field contexts will entail confronting Moravec's paradox. In the post-Turing era, why is engineering the preconditions for allegedly low-level sensorimotor competence in robotics so hard, and programming the allegedly high-level logico-mathematical prowess in computer science so easy - the opposite evolutionary trajectory to organic robots over the past 540 million years? Solving Moravec's paradox in turn will entail solving the binding problem. And we don't understand how the human mind/brain solves the binding problem - despite the speculations about macroscopic quantum coherence in organic neural networks floated above. Presumably, some kind of massively parallel sub-symbolic connectionist architecture with exceedingly powerful learning algorithms is essential to world-simulation. Yet mere temporal synchrony of neuronal firing patterns of discrete, distributed classical neurons couldn't suffice to generate a phenomenal world instantiated by a person. Nor could programs executed in classical serial processors.

How is this naively "low-level" sensorimotor question relevant to the end of the human era? Why would a hypothetical nonfriendly AGI-in-a-box need to solve the binding problem and continually simulate / "perceive" the external world in real time in order to pose (potentially) an existential threat to biological sentience? This is the spectre that MIRI seek to warn the world against should humanity fail to develop Safe AI. Well, just as there is nothing to stop someone who, say, doesn't like "Jewish physics" from gunning down a cloistered (super-)Einstein in his study, likewise there is nothing to stop a simple-minded organic human in basement reality switching the computer that's hosting (super-)Watson off at the mains if he decides he doesn't like computers - or the prospect of human replacement by nonfriendly super-AGI. To pose a potential existential threat to Darwinian life, the putative super-AGI would need to possess ubiquitous global surveillance and control capabilities so it could monitor and defeat the actions of ontologically low-level mindful agents - and persuade them in real time to protect its power-source. The super-AGI can't simply infer, predict and anticipate these actions in virtue of its ultrapowerful algorithms: the problem is computationally intractable. Living in the basement, as disclosed by the existence of one's own unitary phenomenal mind, has ontological privileges. It's down in the ontological basement that the worst threats to sentient beings are to be found - threats emanating from other grim basement-dwellers evolved under pressure of natural selection. For the single greatest underlying threat to human civilisation still lies, not in rogue software-based AGI going FOOM and taking over the world, but in the hostile behaviour of other male human primates doing what Nature "designed" us to do, namely wage war against other male primates using whatever tools are at our disposal. Evolutionary psychology suggests, and the historical record confirms, that the natural behavioural phenotype of humans resembles chimpanzees rather than bonobos. Weaponised Tool AI is the latest and potentially greatest weapon male human primates can use against other coalitions of male human primates. Yet we don't know how to give that classical digital AI a mind of its own - or whether such autonomous minds are even in principle physically constructible.

5.0. CONCLUSION The Qualia Explosion. Supersentience: Turing plus Shulgin? Compared to the natural sciences (cf. the Standard Model in physics) or computing (cf. the Universal Turing Machine), the "science" of consciousness is pre-Galilean, perhaps even pre-Socratic. State-enforced censorship of the range of subjective properties of matter and energy in the guise of a prohibition on psychoactive experimentation is a powerful barrier to knowledge. The legal taboo on the empirical method in consciousness studies prevents experimental investigation of even the crude dimensions of the Hard Problem, let alone locating a solution-space where answers to our ignorance might conceivably be found.

Singularity theorists are undaunted by our ignorance of this fundamental feature of the natural world. Instead, the Singularitarians offer a narrative of runaway machine intelligence in which consciousness plays a supporting role ranging from the minimal and incidental to the completely non-existent. However, highlighting the Singularity movement's background assumptions about the nature of mind and intelligence, not least the insignificance of the binding problem to AGI, reveals why FUSION and REPLACEMENT scenarios are unlikely - though a measure of "cyborgification" of sentient biological robots augmented with ultrasmart software seems plausible and perhaps inevitable.

If full-spectrum superintelligence does indeed entail navigation and mastery of the manifold state-spaces of consciousness, and ultimately a seamless integration of this knowledge with the structural understanding of the world yielded by the formal sciences, then where does this elusive synthesis leave the prospects of posthuman superintelligence? Will the global proscription of radically altered states last indefinitely?

Social prophecy is always a minefield. However, there is one solution to the indisputable psychological health risks posed to human minds by empirical research into the outlandish state-spaces of consciousness unlocked by ingesting the tryptamines, phenylethylamines, isoquinolines and other pharmacological tools of sentience investigation. This solution is to make "bad trips" physiologically impossible - whether for individual investigators or, in theory, for human society as a whole. Critics of mood-enrichment technologies sometimes contend that a world animated by information-sensitive gradients of bliss would be an intellectually stagnant society: crudely, a Brave New World. On the contrary, biotech-driven mastery of our reward circuitry promises a knowledge explosion in virtue of allowing a social, scientific and legal revolution: safe, full-spectrum biological superintelligence. For genetic recalibration of hedonic set-points - as distinct from creating uniform bliss - potentially leaves cognitive function and critical insight both sharp and intact; and offers a launchpad for consciousness research in mind-spaces alien to the drug-naive imagination. A future biology of invincible well-being would not merely immeasurably improve our subjective quality of life: empirically, pleasure is the engine of value-creation. In addition to enriching all our lives, radical mood-enrichment would permit safe, systematic and responsible scientific exploration of previously inaccessible state-spaces of consciousness. If we were blessed with a biology of invincible well-being, exotic state-spaces would all be saturated with a rich hedonic tone.

Until this hypothetical world-defining transition, pursuit of the rigorous first-person methodology and rational drug-design strategy pioneered by Alexander Shulgin in PiHKAL and TiHKAL remains confined to the scientific counterculture. Investigation is risky, mostly unlawful, and unsystematic. In mainstream society, academia and peer-reviewed scholarly journals alike, ordinary waking consciousness is assumed to define the gold standard in which knowledge-claims are expressed and appraised. Yet to borrow a homely-sounding quote from Einstein, "What does the fish know of the sea in which it swims?" Just as a dreamer can gain only limited insight into the nature of dreaming consciousness from within a dream, likewise the nature of "ordinary waking consciousness" can only be glimpsed from within its confines. In order scientifically to understand the realm of the subjective, we'll need to gain access to all its manifestations, not just the impoverished subset of states of consciousness that tended to promote the inclusive fitness of human genes on the African savannah.

5.1. AI, Genome Biohacking and Utopian Superqualia. Why the Proportionality Thesis Implies an Organic Singularity. So if the preconditions for full-spectrum superintelligence, i.e. access to superhuman state-spaces of sentience, remain unlawful, where does this roadblock leave the prospects of runaway self-improvement to superintelligence? Could recursive genetic self-editing of our source code repair the gap? Or will traditional human personal genomes be policed by a dystopian Gene Enforcement Agency in a manner analogous to the coercive policing of traditional human minds by the Drug Enforcement Agency?

Even in an ideal regulatory regime, the process of genetic and/or pharmacological self-enhancement is intuitively too slow for a biological Intelligence Explosion to be a live option, especially when set against the exponential increase in digital computer processing power and inorganic AI touted by Singularitarians. Prophets of imminent human demise in the face of machine intelligence argue that there can't be a Moore's law for organic robots. Even the Flynn Effect, the three-points-per-decade increase in IQ scores recorded during the 20th century, is comparatively puny; and in any case, this narrowly-defined intelligence gain may now have halted in well-nourished Western populations.

However, writing off all scenarios of recursive human self-enhancement would be premature. Presumably, the smarter our nonbiological AI, the more readily AI-assisted humans will be able recursively to improve our own minds with user-friendly wetware-editing tools - not just editing our raw genetic source code, but also the multiple layers of transcription and feedback mechanisms woven into biological minds. Presumably, our ever-smarter minds will be able to devise progressively more sophisticated, and also progressively more user-friendly, wetware-editing tools. These wetware-editing tools can accelerate our own recursive self-improvement - and manage potential threats from nonfriendly AGI that might harm rather than help us, assuming that our earlier strictures against the possibility of digital software-based unitary minds were mistaken. MIRI rightly call attention to how small enhancements can yield immense cognitive dividends: the relatively short genetic distance between humans and chimpanzees suggests how relatively small enhancements can exert momentous effects on a mind's general intelligence, thereby implying that AGIs might likewise become disproportionately powerful through a small number of tweaks and improvements. In the post-genomic era, presumably exactly the same holds true for AI-assisted humans and transhumans editing their own minds. What David Chalmers calls the proportionality thesis, i.e. increases in intelligence lead to proportionate increases in the capacity to design intelligent systems, will be vindicated as recursively self-improving organic robots modify their own source code and bootstrap our way to full-spectrum superintelligence: in essence, an organic Singularity. And in contrast to classical digital zombies, superficially small molecular differences in biological minds can result in profoundly different state-spaces of sentience. Compare the ostensibly trivial difference in gene expression profiles of neurons mediating phenomenal sight and phenomenal sound - and the radically different visual and auditory worlds they yield.

Compared to FUSION or REPLACEMENT scenarios, the AI-human CO-EVOLUTION conjecture is apt to sound tame. The likelihood our posthuman successors will also be our biological descendants suggests at most a radical conservativism. In reality, a post-Singularity future where today's classical digital zombies were superseded merely by faster, more versatile classical digital zombies would be infinitely duller than a future of full-spectrum supersentience. For all insentient information processors are exactly the same inasmuch as the living dead are not subjects of experience. They'll never even know what it's like to be "all dark inside" - or the computational power of phenomenal object-binding that yields illumination. By contrast, posthuman superintelligence will not just be quantitatively greater but also qualitatively alien to archaic Darwinian minds. Cybernetically enhanced and genetically rewritten biological minds can abolish suffering throughout the living world and banish experience below "hedonic zero" in our forward light-cone, an ethical watershed without precedent. Post-Darwinian life can enjoy gradients of lifelong blissful supersentience with the intensity of a supernova compared to a glow-worm. A zombie, on the other hand, is just a zombie - even if it squawks like Einstein. Posthuman organic minds will dwell in state-spaces of experience for which archaic humans and classical digital computers alike have no language, no concepts, and no words to describe our ignorance. Most radically, hyperintelligent organic minds will explore state-spaces of consciousness that do not currently play any information-signalling role in living organisms, and are impenetrable to investigation by digital zombies. In short, biological intelligence is on the brink of a recursively self-amplifying Qualia Explosion - a phenomenon of which digital zombies are invincibly ignorant, and invincibly ignorant of their own ignorance. Humans too of course are mostly ignorant of what we're lacking: the nature, scope and intensity of such posthuman superqualia are beyond the bounds of archaic human experience. Even so, enrichment of our reward pathways can ensure that full-spectrum biological superintelligence will be sublime.

David Pearce (2012, last updated 2016) see too PDF, PPT and The Biointelligence Explosion.

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Amazon Chief Bezos Expected to Unveil Further Private Space Exploration Plans – Fox Business

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The burgeoning space-transportation company owned by Amazon.com chairman JeffBezosthis week is expected to announce some customers and new initiatives, the latest step toward its long-term goal of building rockets powerful enough to penetrate deep into the solar system, according to industry officials.

The moves by the typically secretive Mr.Bezos, these officials said, are anticipated to disclose further details about Blue Origin LLC's strategy to create a family of reusable rockets initially intended to take tourists on suborbital voyages, and then propel spacecraft into Earth's orbit and eventually blast both manned and robotic missions to the Moon and various planets.

Plans for heavy-lift boosters previously unveiled by Mr.Bezos, including one version roughly half as powerful as the iconic Saturn V rockets that lifted Apollo astronauts to the moon, ultimately could emerge as rivals with powerful rockets already under development by fellow billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is working on its own version of a deep-space booster and capsule.

The initial test flight of SpaceX's long-delayed Falcon Heavy, which would become the world's most potent operational rocket, is scheduled for later this year. NASA's much larger booster, called SLS, is slated for its maiden flight in 2018.

So far, Mr.Bezoshas been less specific about timetables to demonstrate the reliability of his emerging heavy-lift rocket variant, called New Glenn, after the late astronaut and U.S. senator, John Glenn. Amazon's founder has been even less specific about a next-generation rocket on the drawing board, dubbed New Armstrong, in memory of the late astronaut Neil Armstrong, who was the first man to set foot on the Moon. That booster is intended for travel deep into the solar system.

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Both self-described "space geeks" with ambitious visions of helping humans establish large-scale settlements beyond Earth in their lifetimes, Messrs.Bezosand Musk have jousted good-naturedly on social media in the past about competing to land the first spent booster vertically back on Earth. Mr.Bezosdid it first after a suborbital mission, but Mr. Musk accomplished the feat by landing the main portion of a Falcon 9 rocket that delivered a payload into orbit.

For the first time, Blue Origin in the next few days is expected to make public specific customers, according to industry officials. A series of announcements and postings on Twitter is slated to follow a separate flurry of news reports last week about Blue Origin's bid for NASA's support to ship experiments, cargo and other hardware to the moon with the aim of setting up a permanent settlement there.

The proposal, which hasn't been acted on by the agency, was first reported by the Washington Post, which is controlled by Mr.Bezos.

Last-minute shifts could change Blue Origin's plans for the coming days, and Mr.Bezosis renowned for teasing the media with broad concepts, often without providing subsequent details. He is scheduled to speak Tuesday morning in the prominent leadoff slot at an international satellite conference in Washington.

The appearance also comes in the wake of Mr. Musk prompting headlines last week with a proposal to fly two fare-paying passengers on an automated trip around the moon by 2018.

Traditional and startup U.S. space companies are maneuvering to take advantage of the principle of public-private partnerships to accelerate manned exploration favored by President Donald Trump's administration.

With a few exceptions, Mr.Bezoshas opted to run Blue Origin since its founding at the beginning of the last decade behind a strict veil of secrecy -- and without seeking substantial federal contracts or development funding.

Last September, Mr.Bezosrocked the international aerospace community by disclosing that his New Glenn rocket would feature a cluster of seven main engines and stand more than 310 feet tall. If it flies by the end of the decade as intended, the largest version of the proposed booster could vie for commercial and military satellite launches with SpaceX, Europe's premier launch provider Arianespace and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp.

Over the years, Mr.Bezoshas stressed the importance of creating reusable technology able to slash transportation costs by operating much more frequently than today's rockets. He also has talked about his long-term vision of "millions of people living and working in space."

Unlike Mr. Musk, who relishes making a steady stream of splashy announcements setting increasingly aggressive goals, Mr.Bezosremained virtually silent to outsiders until after Blue Origin pulled off its coup of successfully landing a New Shepard booster back at its West Texas launchpad in late 2015.

The unmanned vehicle flew a suborbital test to 333,000 feet, reached nearly four times the speed of sound, and then both the capsule and its liquid-fueled rocket separately landed safely -- ready for another flight. At the time, Mr.Bezosprojected commercial space-tourism flights could start "sometime in 2017." He also said "full reuse is a game changer" for access to space.

In November 2016, when he disclosed plans for a series of larger rockets with substantially more thrust, Mr.Bezosissued a stark reminder of how different his approach is versus that of Mr. Musk.

Noting "our mascot is the tortoise," Mr.Bezossaid "deliberate and methodical wins the day, and you do things quickest by never skipping steps."

Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com

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Amazon Chief Bezos Expected to Unveil Further Private Space Exploration Plans - Fox Business

Amazon chief to announce new space exploration plans – RT

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Published time: 6 Mar, 2017 14:01Edited time: 6 Mar, 2017 14:03

Private aerospace company Blue Origin set up by Amazons CEO Jeff Bezos is expected to unveil plans this week for future space explorations, according to industry officials.

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It is part of the companys ambitious plan to create rockets powerful enough to reach the outermost corners of the solar system.

Unnamed officials said Bezos might reveal details of Blue Origins project to build a family of reusable rockets to conduct both manned and robotic missions to the Moon and other planets.

The company may announce plans for heavy-lift boosters amid growing competition with powerful rockets already under development by Elon Musks SpaceX. The test flight of the long-delayed Falcon Heavy developed by Musks corporation is slated for this year.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is working on its own version of a deep-space booster and capsule. The first launch of the booster, called SLS, is scheduled for 2018.

READ MORE: Amazon boss wants to start delivery service to the Moon

Jeff Bezos has not detailed any timetable for the companys projects. Among the most promising are the heavy-lift rocket called the New Glenn, and a next-generation rocket called New Armstrong, named in honor of astronauts John Glenn and Neil Armstrong.

Last week, the billionaire proposed an Amazon-like delivery service for potential human settlement on the Moon. The venture is reportedly seeking NASA support to carry out a series of cargo missions which would transport the equipment necessary to establish a human colony on the Moon.

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Amazon chief to announce new space exploration plans - RT

Your Cheat-Sheet Guide to the New Space Race – Slate Magazine

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The International Space Station.

NASA/Crew of STS-132

Peter Diamandis: Diamandis is an entrepreneur who has both helped drive the rise of commercial spaceflight and contributed to asteroid mining effortscentral to the space missions of countries like Luxembourgthrough his company Planetary Resources.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: A planetary scientist, Elkins-Tanton proposed an upcoming NASA mission to the asteroid Psyche, which might reveal a lot about the value of such objects, thereby forcing conversations about who owns extraterrestrial commodities. (Elkins-Tanton is the head of the School for Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, which is a partner with Slate and New America in Future Tense.)

Newt Gingrich: A former speaker of the House and current adviser to Donald Trump, Gingrich has pushed the United States to privatize its space projects, which might further disrupt the governmental monopoly on space travel.

A.S. Kiran Kumar: A space scientist, Kumar serves as the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization.

Robert M. Lightfoot Jr.: Lightfoot currently serves as acting administrator of NASA under Donald Trump.

Gwynne Shotwell: Shotwell serves as president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, a company that has made important steps in the drive to private space flight, challenging its associations with nationalistic ambitions.

Johann-Dietrich Wrner: Wrner, the current director general of the European Space Agency, oversees a variety of intergovernmental projects.

Xu Dazhe: An aerospace engineer, Xu contributed to Chinas growing space program when he served as chief administrator of the countrys National Space Administration until 2016.

International Space Station: Not a person, but a key character here nevertheless. The ISS launched in 1998, and according to NASA, 226 individuals from 18 countries have spent time there.

Chinas Growing Ambitions in Space, by Marina Koren: Koren details Chinese attempts to catch up with other superpowers, and its quest to expand beyond the earth.

How to Make a Spaceship, by Julian Guthrie: This 2016 book explores a competition that aimed to jump-start private efforts toward human spaceflight.

A Place for Ones Mat, by Gregory Kulacki and Jeffrey G. Lewis: This paper details the history of the Chinese space program from the mid-20th century into the early 21st.

A Pragmatic Approach to Sovereignty on Mars, by Sara Bruhns and Jacob Haqq-Misra: Bruhns and Haqq-Misra lay out a series of policies that would allow multiple nations to establish permanent habitation on Mars while also preserving its status as a site of scientific inquiry.

Space Law 101, by Matthew J. Kleiman: Kleiman describes the current state of space law and lays out some issues that it will need to account for in the future.

Trump Advisers Space Plan: To Moon, Mars and Beyond, by Bryan Bender: This Politico piece reports on the new presidential administrations calls for privatization of U.S. space efforts.

Why Are India, Luxembourg, and Other Countries Getting Into the Space Race?

Your Cheat-Sheet Guide to the New Space Race

International cooperation: For decades, international treaties have enshrined collaborative standards for spacefaring countries. Will those norms persist as more countries announce their space ambitions? How will international conflicts complicate renewed efforts to reach for the stars?

Value of human flight: Sending astronauts off planet is expensive, difficult, and dangerous, and many argue that the benefits are more propagandistic than practical. Will such concerns outweigh our ambitions?

Space debris: Every time we send a rocket out of the atmosphere, we end up scattering more trash into orbit, and that junk can be dangerous, potentially disrupting satellites and otherwise wreaking havoc. As more nations and companies accelerate their extraterrestrial efforts, that problem will likely intensify. Can we reach for the heavens without getting our hands dirty?

Accelerated privatization: Long the provenance of government agencies, spaceflight has increasingly become the purview of private companies, especially in the United States. How will the rise of these for-profit organizations reshape the goals of the new space race?

Asteroid mining: The still-theoretical attemptpursued by both private companies and countries such as Luxembourgto extract precious metals and other commodities from asteroids.

Space law: A catchall term used to describe attempts to govern and regulate human activities in space.

Cislunar space: The area between Earth and the moon.

Electrolysis: A process that could be used to convert water into rocket fuel, potentially driving exploration of the solar system.

International Telecommunications Union: Also known as the ITU, this United Nations agency helps regulate satellite positions.

Nanosatellites: Artificial satellites weighing less than 10 kilograms (about 22 pounds), sometimes deployed as part of a communicative swarm.

Outer Space Treaty: A 1967 U.N. document that regulates the behavior ofand cooperation betweencountries and nongovernmental organizations in space

The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu: This award-winning novel imagines the aftereffects of a Chinese attempt to contact extraterrestrials during the cultural revolution.

The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott: In this film, a variety of nations collaborate to bring home an astronaut accidentally left behind on Mars.

The Expanse: In this Syfy channel series, conflict arises between Earth, the asteroid belt, and the outer planets after the colonization of the solar system.

Nigerians in Space, by Deji Bryce Olukotun: This novel tells the story of a geologist tasked with stealing part of the moon.

Sid Meiers Civilization VI: The latest installment of this long-running video game series lets players win by setting up a human colony on Mars.

Mooncop, by Tom Gauld: This short graphic novel follows a police officer stranded on a lunar colony after most of the residents have headed home.

This article is part of thespace installmentofFuturography, a series in which Future Tense introduces readers to the technologies that will define tomorrow.Each month, well choose a new technology and break it down. Future Tense is a collaboration amongArizona State University,New America, andSlate.

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Nanotech Security Corp (NTS) PT Lowered to C$1.75 at Canaccord Genuity – Sports Perspectives

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Nanotech Security Corp (NTS) PT Lowered to C$1.75 at Canaccord Genuity
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Nanotech Security Corp logo Nanotech Security Corp (CVE:NTS) had its price target decreased by Canaccord Genuity from C$2.00 to C$1.75 in a research report released on Thursday. Canaccord Genuity currently has a speculative buy rating on the stock.

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Nanotech Security Corp (NTS) PT Lowered to C$1.75 at Canaccord Genuity - Sports Perspectives

Nanotech may help bring frozen organs back to life – Financial Express

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Scientists, including those from the University of Minnesota in the US, developed a way to safely thaw frozen tissues with the aid of nanoparticles. (Representative image: Reuters)

Scientists are developing a new method to safely bring frozen organs back to life using nanotechnology, an advance that may make donated organs for transplants available to virtually everyone who needs them. The number of donated organs that may be transplanted into patients could increase greatly if there were a way to freeze and reheat organs without damaging the cells within them.

Scientists, including those from the University of Minnesota in the US, developed a way to safely thaw frozen tissues with the aid of nanoparticles.

The researchers manufactured silica-coated nanoparticles that contained iron oxide. When they applied a magnetic field to frozen tissues suffused with the nanoparticles, the nanoparticles generated heat rapidly and uniformly.

The tissue samples warmed up at rates of up to more than 130 degrees Celsius per minute, which is 10 to 100 times faster than previous methods.

Researchers tested their method on frozen human skin cells, segments of pig heart valves and sections of pig arteries.

None of the rewarmed tissues displayed signs of harm from the heating process, and they preserved key physical properties such as elasticity.

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The researchers were able to wash away the nanoparticles from the sample after thawing, Live Science reported.

Previous research successfully thawed tiny biological samples that were only one to three milliliters in volume.

The new technique works for samples that are up to 50 millilitres in size. The researchers said there is a strong possibility they could scale up their technique to even larger systems, such as organs.

We are at the level of rabbit organs now. We have a way to go for human organs, but nothing seems to preclude us from that, said John Bischof, from University of Minnesota.

The findings are published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

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Nanotech may help bring frozen organs back to life - Financial Express

Analyst Activity Canaccord Genuity Lowers Its Price Target On … – Market Exclusive

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Analyst Activity Canaccord Genuity Lowers Its Price Target On ...
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Today, Canaccord Genuity lowered its price target on Nanotech Security Corp (CVE:NTS) to C$1.75 per share. There are 1 hold rating on the stock. The current ...
Canaccord Genuity Lowers Nanotech Security Corp (NTS) Price ...Community Financial News

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Ti-Nanotech Acquired by Defense Industry Veteran Kevin Ruelas … – Benzinga

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Defense industry veteran Kevin Ruelas and his team announce the acquisition of Ti-Nanotech, formerly known as Crista Chemical Company.

SAN DIEGO (PRWEB) March 02, 2017

Defense industry veteran Kevin Ruelas and his team announce the acquisition of Ti-Nanotech, formerly known as Crista Chemical Company. Ti-Nanotech will join Syndetix, Inc., under the umbrella of the newly formed Defense and Government Solutions (DGS).

"We're thrilled to bring Ti-Nanotech's advanced and patented technology to our customers in the defense and law enforcement sectors," stated DGS and Ti-Nanotech CEO Ruelas. "By bringing Ti-Nanotech together with Syndetix under DGS, we see opportunities for growth in sectors where material strength and reliability are paramount, including aerospace and commercial products such as batteries, medical devices and military hardware."

Ti-Nanotech began as Cristal Chemical Company in 1999, focused on finding a non-toxic replacement for cadmium plating. They sought to do this without compromising strength, adding weight or creating corrosion issues. The solution was titanium plating for end products, which has applications in a variety of sectors including defense, commercial, aerospace and automotive.

Since then, the company has earned a reputation as a thought-leader in titanium coating. Titanium can be stronger than steel while being much lighter with the highest strength to weight ratio of any metal. It is also non-toxic and one of the only metals able to be put inside humans. Ti-Nanotech's patented technology makes titanium coating possible for a wide variety of industries including armored shields, reinforced consumer products such as medical devices and the growing field of next-generation batteries.

Ti-Nanotech will join Syndetix Inc., a service-disabled, veteran-owned small business and technology developer for the defense and law enforcement industries, under the umbrella of the newly formed DGS. With established contacts and customers in the defense and law enforcement sectors, DGS will introduce Ti-Nanotech's technologies to new audiences. With the formation of DGS both companies will be able to expand by reaching new customers leveraging their technology and service offerings including the aerospace industry and medical device manufacturers.

About DGS Formed in 2016, Defense and Government Solutions (DGS) and its holdings serve clients in the defense, law enforcement and commercial sectors. Its main holdings include Ti-Nanotech, focused on titanium electromagnetic plating for end products, and Syndetix, a technology company focused on designing, engineering and building technologies for international and domestic security forces. DGS is a service-disabled, veteran-owned small business based in Las Cruces, N.M.

About Ti-Nanotech Since 1999, Ti-Nanotech has been in industry leader in titanium plating for end products. From the defense sector, to the aerospace industry and even the medical device field, Ti-Nanotech's titanium electromagnetic plating process can be applied to a variety of end products. Ti-Nanotech is a defense and government solutions company based in San Diego.

About Syndetix Since 1985, Syndetix, Inc. has been designing, engineering and building technologies that protect those who protect us. Founded as a technology spinoff from New Mexico State University's Physical Science Laboratory, Syndetix, Inc. provides high-caliber design and engineering services for the Department of Defense, Department of Justice and civilian markets to enable mission critical success.

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/03/prweb14107155.htm

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Ti-Nanotech Acquired by Defense Industry Veteran Kevin Ruelas ... - Benzinga

A New Cold War Has Begun and WW3 Is a Clear Possibility Now – Lombardi Letter

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Could Trumps Military Spending Surge Be the First Salvo of WW3?

Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed Donald Trumps election. Yet World War 3 seems closer now. The Russians feared Hillary Clinton, who spoke aggressively about Russia. Yet, not two months into the Trump presidency, and conflict with Russia, or WW3, seems closer. It was under Hillary Clintons tenure as Secretary of State that the Maidan revolt took place in Ukraine.

That was the catalyst for a civil war between pro-West and pro-Russia Ukrainians. Putin toasted Trumps win last November. But, as Trump announced a massive increase in military spending, the Kremlin issued a statement that, while short on words, was deafeningly loud on content.

The Russian president said that relations between Moscow and Washington are at their lowest point since the Cold War. What has changed? Russia WW3 2017, China WW3, or WW3predictions in general are not just for catastrophists any longer. Trumps firstand most successful so faraddress to Congress made it clear he wants a much bigger military.

During the campaign, Trump did not hide his military ambitions. Yet, even as he advocated more spending on military equipment, his major military and geopolitical target was Islamic State or ISIS, rather than Russia. Trumps focus was going to be the Syrian war. The bigger military, moreover, was going to serve as a friendly reminder to China about its own military buildup.

But China is not the only power on Trumps agenda. There have been allegations that members of his cabinet have had meetings or contacts with Russian officials. Theres nothing especially incriminatory about that. But while the media harps on about what that Russian ambassador said to this Trump insider, it has ignored a crucial thing.

Trump and Putin have not met yet. Trump has done absolutely nothing that Putin might interpret as a win for Russia. If anything, the Trump administration has stayed on message where Ukraine is concerned. Trump has also threatened Iran, a close Russian ally in the fight against ISIS and the Syrian rebellion in general.

The one member of the Trump cabinet who may have had the closest ties to Putin was General Michael Flynn. He resigned a few weeks ago from the post of National Security Advisor. Flynn allegedly told Moscows ambassador to Washington that the Trump administration would cancel the additional sanctions leveled against Russia by the outgoing President Obama.

Flynn, according to critics, became vulnerable to possible blackmail from the Russians. Flynn thickened clouds of suspicions about Trumps relationship with Moscow. Regardless of the level of contact, what is clear is that the many deliberations about the budding Trump-Putin ties have died in the bud.

Putin is pursuing a Russia First policy; it was never going to mesh with America First properly. Indeed, the kind of spending that Trump has promised to lavish on the military deserves to be described as historic. The Cold War ended to help stop the military buildup that ended up crippling the Soviet Unions finances.

It also helped reduce fears of another war, a nuclear war. And what is WW3 if not a nuclear war? The U.S. military budget under Trump will inflate by $54.0 billion. And thats just the first taste of what Trump has in mind. That amount will pay for new attack aircraft and for the production of other weapons to bolster the quality of the U.S. defense systems.

Its almost as if World War 3 is inevitable. In effect, the Pentagon will get almost 10% more than it did in 2016. In turn, other federal agencies will see a reduction in funding. These other pure Cold War policiesare those which many Americans thought they would never see again. Trump complained that the U.S. has not won a war in ages.

Both the boost in military spending and the logic that has prompted it are unusual. The U.S. is not involved in any major military conflict now. Its true that Special Forces are on the ground in Iraq and the U.S. Air Force has bombed ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria. But neither one of these goals or theaters of war requires special stealth aircraft or new weapon systems.

Trumps vision is wider and he wants to cast a shadow over Chinaexpectedand Russiaunexpected. Trump mentioned ships as one of the reasons to increase military spending. He also wants more planes. The addition of a single ship or watercraft would add nothing in the fight against ISIS or terrorism in general.

It would, however, help drive a China WW3or Putin WW3 scenario. The ships and planes make nothing but sense against the lens of the Strait of Hormuz, which separates the Arabian Peninsula the coast of Iran. The Pentagon clearly wants a bigger presence to control key international waterways such as the Strait of Hormuz and the South China Sea.

More ships and planes would also help keep a closer watch over the Arctic and northern seas, where Russia has been intensifying its own patrols. Apart from Iran, this military buildup, then, provokes Russia as well as China. America already has the most powerful fighting force in the world, by several orders of magnitude.

America already spends more on defense than any other country:

(Source: Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2015, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Last accessed March 3, 2017.)

Not all in the U.S. military share Trumps bellicose ambitions. A group of over 100 retired U.S. generals and admirals have urged Congress to fully fund American diplomacy, rather than weapons. They see more strength in a combination of diplomacy and defense as the best way to keep America safe. Trump thinks adding 74 ships and 100 jets is the best way.

But diplomacy must take a back seat now. Not only does Trump want to increase spending on military hardware, he wants to increase the army to 540,000 active-duty soldiers. Thats a 15% increase, given that there are currently 480,000 active-duty soldiers. And thats just the Army. Trump also wants more Marines; 50% more, from 23 to 36 battalions.

The president made no specific reference about the nature of the threat that requires this massive increase in military spending. But just a day later, like a thunderbolt from Thor, the Swedes delivered a hint. Sweden wants to bring back conscription. Sweden happens to share the Baltic waterways with Russia.

The Baltic States, including Latvia, Estonia, andPoland, are among the most concerned about Russia. They happen to be in NATO. They are asking the U.S. for more defensive artillery and Patriot missiles to deploy along the borders with Russia. The Baltic is one of the regions of the world where World War 3 could start.

The other scenario comes from trade. Trump would like to find how the World Trade Organization (WTO) can impose sanctions and reprisals against countries accused of damaging Americas trade interests. Thus, Trumps trade policy matches his military ambitions. Just to clear any doubts, Trump supports NATO. Now, he wants the WTO to support it as well.

Trump has ordered the Pentagon to develop a plan to demolish and destroy ISIS. The new U.S. National Security Advisor, General Herbert McMaster, has advised Trump to use the term radical Islamic terrorism sparingly. McMaster is more diplomatic than his predecessor, Flynn, but the Middle East, as ever, remains a major trigger point for the next global conflict.

Its not so much ISIS, but Iran, thats the problem. Trump has not spoken much about the nuclear deal that Obama secured in 2015. But, if the new president were to repeal it, it would necessarily require a military strike against Irans well-protected facilities. The problem is that the deal ensured that Irans nuclear program remains civilianonly.

Without the deal, there are no internationally binding agreements holding Irans enrichment plansor threatsback.

Attacking the Iranian nuclear facilities would not be easy. Even stealth F-35 or F-22 fighter jets would suffer losses. Iran has Russias S-300 defense system, which renders the nuclear facilities virtually impenetrable.

Russia has a stake in this as well. Russia and Iran have been the main powers against ISIS and other Islamiststhe very kind Trump wants to eliminate. Attacking Iran would put Moscow and Washington in direct opposition. Not since the Cuban missile crisis would relations take such a turn for the worse.

Neither Trump nor Putin would ever authorize the use of nuclear warheads in a conflict. But the first strike option exists and could be unleashed, given the imminent threat of any kind of catastrophic attack. Neither John F. Kennedy nor Nikita Khrushchev, both milder than Trump and Putin, were going to push the nuclear button. But the Cuban missile crisis did almost get there.

Nobody wants to test those odds again. Deterrence is not an exact science. There is also an art to it which, thankfully, nobody has had the misfortune of practicing yet. One party will always strike first. Its up to the retaliating party to decide what direction the conflict, in this case WW3, might take.

Albert Einstein famously observed that he didnt know how World War 3 would be fought, except that World War 4 would be fought with sticks and stones. But, there is a nuclear threshold. Both Trump and Putin can choose a scalable nuclear conflict rather than a full-out one. Miscalculation could trigger unimaginable consequences.

The general view is that both the U.S. and Russia would use nuclear warheads only after defeat would be assured in the conventional scenario. Thus, the idea that WW3 might be won using conventional weapons alone still exists. Its up to the losing party to decide if they want to bring down the world with them.

That said, this, theoretically, justifies Trumps military buildup. The logic being that an overwhelming conventional attack would defeat the enemy before they would have a chance to bring nuclear weapons into the calculus. Putin did not appreciate Trumps military spending plans because it forces Russia to respond in kind.

But Russias economy is in a slow recovery mode at best. It cant afford an arms race. Trump, perhaps, wants to take advantage of that weakness with a massive spending surge now to overwhelm any potential enemy from even considering challenging the United States. Its a gamble.

Its also a guarantee that, for the next few years, defense contractors in Washington will do brisk business. Russia will have to increase its arsenal buildup as will China, perpetuating the cycle.

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A New Cold War Has Begun and WW3 Is a Clear Possibility Now - Lombardi Letter

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Quotes About Psychedelics (48 quotes)

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However, questions arise. Are there people who aren't naive realists, or special situations in which naive realism disappears? My theorythe self-model theory of subjectivitypredicts that as soon as a conscious representation becomes opaque (that is, as soon as we experience it as a representation), we lose naive realism. Consciousness without naive realism does exist. This happens whenever, with the help of other, second-order representations, we become aware of the construction processof all the ambiguities and dynamical stages preceding the stable state that emerges at the end. When the window is dirty or cracked, we immediately realize that conscious perception is only an interface, and we become aware of the medium itself. We doubt that our sensory organs are working properly. We doubt the existence of whatever it is we are seeing or feeling, and we realize that the medium itself is fallible. In short, if the book in your hands lost its transparency, you would experience it as a state of your mind rather than as an element of the outside world. You would immediately doubt its independent existence. It would be more like a book-thought than a book-perception. Precisely this happens in various situationsfor example, In visual hallucinations during which the patient is aware of hallucinating, or in ordinary optical illusions when we suddenly become aware that we are not in immediate contact with reality. Normally, such experiences make us think something is wrong with our eyes. If you could consciously experience earlier processing stages of the representation of the book In your hands, the image would probably become unstable and ambiguous; it would start to breathe and move slightly. Its surface would become iridescent, shining in different colors at the same time. Immediately you would ask yourself whether this could be a dream, whether there was something wrong with your eyes, whether someone had mixed a potent hallucinogen into your drink. A segment of the wall of the Ego Tunnel would have lost its transparency, and the self-constructed nature of the overall flow of experience would dawn on you. In a nonconceptual and entirely nontheoretical way, you would suddenly gain a deeper understanding of the fact that this world, at this very moment, only appears to you. Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

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Quotes About Psychedelics (48 quotes)

WATCH: A Public Policy Expert Explains How to Safely Deregulate LSD and Other Psychedelics – AlterNet

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In a recent interview with Business Insider, crime and drug policy expert Mark Kleiman made a pretty quick and simple case for ending the prohibition on psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin.

Kleiman is the director of the Crime and Justice program at NYU's Marron Institute of Public Management, the editor of theJournal of Drug Policy Analysisand the author or co-author of numerous academically-informed books on dealing with drugs, includingDrugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know.

Timothy Leary he's not, but he is open to loosening up on psychedelics. Although he doesn't mention it in the short segment below, Kleiman is undoubtedly aware that psychedelics are not addictive and have a virtually non-existent fatal overdose potential, so his concerns are eminently practical: bad trips and people doing stupid stuff under the influence.

But leave it up to Kleiman, long willing to dabble in outside-the-box notions about how to regulate drug use, to come up with a unique idea about trip-sitters to care for those too infused with the Godhead to take care of themselves.

Phillip Smith is editor of the AlterNet Drug Reporter and author of the Drug War Chronicle.

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WATCH: A Public Policy Expert Explains How to Safely Deregulate LSD and Other Psychedelics - AlterNet

Hacking the Human Body with the CEO of Nootrobox – Paste Magazine

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Computers have been the innovation platform of the last decade. The human body will be the innovation platform of the next decade.

Those were the words Geoff Woo, CEO & co-founder of Nootrobox, who recently spoke at The Economist EventsInnovation Summit 2017. Nootrobox is a San Francisco-based nootropics company funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, among others. The company is best known for GO CUBES, its chewable coffee nootropic (a compound you take to enhance cognition).

Woos area of expertise is the rapidly growing trend of biohackingtreating the body as hardware which can be improved through constant tweaking. Think everything from fasting to smart drugs, to implanting glucose monitors under your skin, to microdosing LSD and youll see why the human body is the next platform for innovation.

Basically, what started as a trend among techies in Silicon Valley is becoming more mainstream, with people drinking bulletproof coffee and taking nootropics to try to get ahead at work, at school, in athletics, in gaming, etc And Woo is part of a new generation of entrepreneurs who want to hack the brain and the bodyimproving everyday performance through nutritional supplements called nootropics.

Better Brains, Better Society

Nootropics are a broad classification of cognition-enhancing compounds which have shown to produce minimal side effects and seem suitable for long-term use. They are designed to heighten productivity, memory, mental function and overall physical energy. These compounds include those occurring in nature or ones already produced by the human body (such as neurotransmitters), and their synthetic analogs. We already regularly consume some of these chemicals: B vitamins, caffeine, and L-theanine, in our daily diets.

To better understand how this under 30 CEO is changing the face of cognition-enhancing compounds, Paste interviewed Woo about Nootrobox, his business philosophy and why he thinks millennials have an edge when it comes to start-ups.

Paste: Why did you start Nootrobox?

Geoff Woo: As a competitive person by nature, Ive always had the drive to tap deeper into my full cognitive and physical potential. So a few years ago, I dove into the world of biohacking and nootropics, and I really absorbed the science and theories behind nootropics and also the practical necessities like safety and quality control processes to enhance oneself safely. I had access to some of the top researchers and academics in the space (some who are now my colleagues and friends), and I thought that what I had learned might be valuable to other people. Thats when I decided to launch Nootrobox as a service for high-quality, science-validated nootropics.

Paste: How did you get the funds to start the company?

Woo: At the very beginning, I started running the company off my credit card and savings. We were very scrappy and didnt pay ourselves anything besides rent money. That scrappiness allowed us to be cash-flow positive from Day 1.

As the business started scaling, we realized that Nootrobox could really be special. We then invited some great friends and mentors to chip in to give us a working capital base. It snowballed from there. Now we have a great group of investors from VCs like Andreessen Horowitz to legendary founders and operators like Marissa Mayer.

Paste: What is the best part about running your company?

Woo: Our time is the most valuable asset we have, and I get to spend it in the trenches with some of the smartest, most driven people I know in the world. Its a real luxury to choose the team I get to work with!

Paste: Do you think millennial CEOs have an edge?

Woo: I think any CEO with the energy and fearlessness to work on what might sound like a crazy idea has an edge. Often times, these CEOs are millennials because theyre younger, fresher, and have less to lose.

Paste: Why do you think millennials are more likely to take risks and follow their passions?

Woo: They have less to lose. Its very scary to float your life savings on a crazy idea when you have a family and mortgage. The bar to pull the trigger to go is now that much higher, and often times the best ideas are what seem like the riskiest at Day 0.

Paste: How do you achieve work/life balance as the CEO of a high-growth startup?

Woo: I dont see a tradeoff between work and life. If theres a tradeoff, then youre doing it wrong as a CEO. Theres just one life. If I didnt thrive off what Im working on, Im doing my job as CEO wrong. I have the luxury to focus on a space that excites me intellectually. My style is to go all-in when Im in San Francisco, and then when I have a week or two to take a breather, Ill travel and try to totally unplug.

Paste: Why do you love what youre doing? Whats next?

Woo: Unlocking human potential is such an awesome opportunity. Theres so much blue sky to work in. I feel like were at the very start of the biohacking revolution just like how in the 70s and 80s was the start of the computer revolution. We get to make the future!

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Hacking the Human Body with the CEO of Nootrobox - Paste Magazine

Le-Vel’s new premium nootropic capsule designed to support, optimize mental capabilities – Yahoo Finance

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FRISCO, Texas, March 6, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --Over time, and thanks in large part to our overscheduled lives, we just don't feel as sharp as we once did. But here's the good news: We don't have to accept it. We do, in fact, have the power to expand our brain functioning -- effectively and naturally.

Le-Vel Brands, the world leader in human nutritional innovation, is thrilled to introduce Expand, part of an incredible new category of products designed to help support healthy cognition. Like all Le-Vel products, Expand is based on premium-grade ingredients and a superior formula and delivery system for maximum results. It's a safe and easy-to-use product you can carry with you on the go. Expand was designed to help reinforce the brain's inherent capabilities, modulate the cognitive blueprint, and support mental and cognitive capabilities.

Le-Vel's customers immediately recognized the incredible benefits of Expand. With over $1 million in sales in less than 24 hours in a limited release -- a figure that doubled with the full launch -- Expand already has made its mark on Le-Vel's THRIVE Plus line of products.

Your brain stops growing when you're around 18 years old, but that doesn't mean you can't reshape and strengthen it. In fact, every time you have a new thought or create a new memory, the structure of your brain changes. That's called neuroplasticity, and we can increase it at any time by seeking new opportunities to learn. When your brain is receiving the nutrition it needs, it becomes far easier not only to take in new information, but also to recall and utilize it later. Neuroplasticity increases, and your brain becomes a more efficient, more powerful machine.

Expand represents Le-Vel's entry into a category called nootropics, or cognitive-supporting supplements intended to help users improve concentration and focus and support optimized mental processing. The goal of nootropic products is to help your brain function at its best and enhance your ability to learn.

Life's demands leave many of us frazzled, distracted and unable to concentrate. When we're pulled in so many directions, it's difficult if not impossible to perform at premium level. Details slip through the cracks and we feel fried. And, when we're in that state, our brains aren't as open to learning; instead, we're just surviving. Getting more sleep, finding time for exercise and cutting stress out of your life aren't always possible, but what you can control is your nutrition. With a quick and easy daily regimen like Expand, optimal cognitive nutrition is, well, a no-brainer.

"When we talk about health and wellness, physical fitness is only part of the equation. To live life on all cylinders, we've got to take care of both the body and the mind," say Le-Vel Co-CEOs, Co-Founders and Co-Owners Jason Camper and Paul Gravette. "In fact, we should commit to keeping our brains fit just like we do our bodies. Like all Le-Vel products, Expand brings the gold standard of premium-grade ingredients, along with a superior formula and delivery mechanism for safe and positive results. It's an incredibly exciting new product category that will empower people of all ages and lifestyles to seek their fullest potential."

About Le-Vel

Founded in 2012 byJason CamperandPaul Gravette, Le-Vel formulates and sells nutritional/health and wellness products and is the only health and wellness company that uses cloud-based technology for its day-to-day operations. Le-Vel's cloud-based infrastructure enables the company to keep overhead to a minimum while increasing commissions to its independent Brand Promoters and putting more money into the THRIVE product line. Le-Vel products include DFT, Thrive Premium Lifestyle Capsules, THRIVE Premium Lifestyle Mix, THRIVE Kids, Activate, Boost, Balance, Black Label, FORM, Move, Rest and Pure. Le-Vel has more than 5.5 million Customer and Brand Promoter accounts, currently ships within the United States,Canada, Australia, New Zealand, theUnited Kingdom, and Mexicoand exceeded $450 millionin revenue in 2016. For more information about Le-Vel, visit le-vel.com.

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Le-Vel's new premium nootropic capsule designed to support, optimize mental capabilities - Yahoo Finance

10 Vocalists Above & Beyond Should Collaborate With | Trance Hub – Trance Hub (satire) (press release) (blog)

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We are just 5 days away from another iconic Above & beyond India tour. 4 cities, 4 mad venues, 3 beautiful artists, lots of music & one massive Anjuna Family. The few things that really come across your mind when you hear the combination of Tony, Paavo & Jono are melodious music, breath-taking lyrics & enchanting vocals. Over the years the coveted trio of electronic music have worked with some stellar vocalists such as Zoe Johnston, Gemma Heyes, Alex Vargas & we cannot forget the vocalist of one of their most famous tracks, the one & only Richard Bedford. In addition to this I guess the closest thing one can associate with Love & Uplifting Trance is Oceanlab. Each track with the beautiful voice of Justine Suissa is a timeless classic.

Buy Your tickets to Above & Beyonds India tourChennai, 10th March|Hyderabad, 11th March | Bangalore, 12th March | Mumbai, 13th March

As music enthusiast would it not be amazing if Above & Beyond continue their musical journey with vocalists from the other side of the music bandwidth? Here are 10 vocalists we feel A&B should collaborate with to spread the message of Love, Magic & Happiness

1. Celine Dion: This Canadian Pop diva perhaps has the best love song to her name. Her music has often been very rich with human emotions & so has been the music of Above & Beyond. One can imagine the amount of tears a human will shed if this collaboration does happen. However one thing will be certain, this combination is sure to create a love song that will be remembered for generations to come.

2. Sade: A solider of love colliding with preachers of love. Such mixtures result into quotes like Love is in air. Sades melancholic voice can really add extra depth to the meaningful lyrics of any Above & Beyond track. This collaboration will really set a modern bench mark to the uplifting trance genre. Also maybe, just maybe we might see Sade getting added to future acoustic shows, which will make the acoustic experience extra precious

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3. Adele: If the most coveted singer of the modern pop era does decide to lend her voice to the electronic side, there are no better artists to join hands with other than her fellow countrymen. What we can expect is really uncertain as we have seen tracks about breakups & romance in relationships from both. But one thing is a certainty; this track will surely break the records & grab several awards that year.

4. Madonna: The legacy of the never aging queen of pop & dance music can be matched by few. Like Above & Beyond, even Madonnas music has evolved with times & most importantly both love to experiment with new musical ideas, which in todays world is a perfect recipe for success. The variety in her sound & the variety in their music are sure to give us foot swaying dance number which will bring us instantly on the floor & spread a million dollar smile across our face.

5. Enrqiue Iglesias: We at Trance Hub are not at all sexists and hence we have to include some male population in this list. This Spanish sensation with his pulsating voice & god like looks can really set the hearts of women on fire if he ever does manage to collaborate with Above & Beyond. Remakes of old tracks or creation of new music, the occurrence of both options is sure to be a hit with everyone.

6. Bryan Adams: If you are a 90s child, Adams will be a household name for you. The common denominator here is the two tracks which always get a massive sing along and despite premiering eons ago are popular with peoples of all ages. Bryan with coarse & raw style can lend his voice to any style of music which Above & Beyond create. If this does happen, then we sure to have a track whose lyrics will stay on our lips forever.

7. Stevie Wonder: The man, the legend. He is one male vocalist who still at the age of 66 can make people feel all the emotions at one time. This is a collaboration which I personally pray happens & if it does manage to be for a purely acoustic track, then we finally have heard of something that sounds like heaven

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8. BT: We cannot ignore the fact that Above & Beyond do currently belong solely to the electronic scene, hence we cannot rule out collaborations with a few artists originating from the same hemisphere & to start, with whom better than Brian Transeau. This track is bound to be a blockbuster considering the production skills both these artists posses. Adding to which the track will comprise of beautiful words & gorgeous vocals of Brian himself. Well to be honest this one is really a possibility and we hope both sets of artists make this possible.

9. Sir Adrian: Known for his massive contribution towards vocal trance, Sir Adrian has worked with several big names such as Armin Van Buuren, Markus Schulz, and SVD etc. But the name of Above & Beyond is missing from that list. It makes fitting sense that it is time both the veterans of the industry combine and give us a tune that compliments their legacy in the trance genre.

10. Lata Mangeshkar : The love this holy trinity hold towards India is not a secret. Wouldnt it make sense if they put the cherry on the cake by creating a track with an Indian vocalist? If this does really happen, no one better than the Nightingale of India can do justice to it. Lata ji with her sweet voice can really create a magical, enchanting &romantic experience with Tony, Paavo & Jono. This would be a dream come true for us fans, as the very best of their respective fields are joining hands and giving us life lasting experience.

There were several names that could be have included in this list, but hey even we have some limitations. Do let us know with which vocalist should Above & Beyond collaborate in the future.

Curator of Edm4Pune, sports enthusiast assisted by having a taste bud for delicious food. Open to all genres of music yet staying close to his first love, Trance.

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10 Vocalists Above & Beyond Should Collaborate With | Trance Hub - Trance Hub (satire) (press release) (blog)