The eventual theoretical foundation of Internet Studies ™ combines the collapse of ontology with an integrated and consistent set of nudges and an active and self-sustaining community of spimes. Let’s call these the Three Pillars of the Internet Age. These pillars are bound together by what I will call a participatory framework. Internet studies differ [...]

This is really old in internet time, but I just watched it now and it is definitely worth it. David Weinberger is a philosopher by training, and tells basically the same Aristotle to Heidegger story I tell in my own class.

See also: Ontology is Overrated and Information R/Evolution.
Coming up: The Three Pillars of [...]

Ran into this quote from Whitehead:
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without [...]

From A Robot in Every Home by Bill gates
One such technology will help solve one of the most difficult problems facing robot designers: how to simultaneously handle all the data coming in from multiple sensors and send the appropriate commands to the robot’s motors, a challenge known as concurrency. A conventional approach is to write [...]

There Is ‘Design’ In Nature, Biologist Argues
“The idea that there is ‘design’ in nature is very appealing,” Miller said. “People want to believe that life isn’t purposeless and random. That’s why the intelligent design movement wins the emotional battle for adherents despite its utter lack of scientific support.
“To fight back, scientists need to reclaim the [...]

Reading through old Dennettalia, I stumbled on this:
Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds
(3) Robots are artifacts, and consciousness abhors an artifact; only something natural, born not manufactured, could exhibit genuine consciousness.
…
If consciousness abhors an artifact, it cannot be because being born gives a complex of cells a property (aside from that historic property itself) [...]

From Norms, Networks, and Trails by Adrian Cussins
If the ‘rules’ don’t pre-empt what is properly possible in the ‘game’, then the ‘rules’ become part of what is negotiated by the ‘players’. If the ‘rules’ become part of what is negotiated by the ‘players’, then we end up with the comical but also absurd activity [...]

From What is it like to be a Thermostat? by David Chalmers.
What Lloyd’s approach brings out is that when we try to isolate the kind of processing that is required for conscious experience, the requirements are remarkably hard to pin down, and a careful analysis does not throw up processing criteria that are more than [...]

Awesome new vid by the creator of The machine is us/ing us. Link via BoingBoing.
This works perfectly to counteract the arguments Dreyfus uses in his On the Internet.

This plus this brings the metaverse that much closer.
We are literally one technological convergence step away from a world entirely marked up by metadata. This basically means that we are one killer gadget away from a world where continuous, real-time access to that metadata is assumed as part of an individual’s basic equipment set, [...]