Comments on: Ray Kurzweil, a brief history of the singularity

By: Colleen

Colleen — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 05:08:11 +0000

I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.

Recently read another incredible book that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil’s work. The book is “”My Stroke of Insight”" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor’s talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It’s spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I’m not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I’ve read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they’re making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven’t heard Dr Taylor’s TEDTalk, that’s an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it’s 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).

There’s a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best “”Fantastic Voyage”" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!

By: Bill Betz

Bill Betz — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:37:38 +0000

Imagine a direct connection between your brain and the internet. You zoom through electronic space and gobble up vast amounts of storage and processing power.
Soon you have an expanded mentality that is twice as powerful, three times, ten times, a thousand times. Then one day that organic brain that is less than one percent of your mentallity dies…
Would you even notice?

By: Daryl Scroggins

Daryl Scroggins — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:00:42 +0000

I agree, Gavan. I’m always surprised to see thinkers who are willing to carry the brain=computer model to such extremes. I’m pretty much a materialist when it comes to questions of how consciousnes might best be explained, but the idea of “downloading” yourself to just any old vessel leaves out lots of important considerations. Are the voices in the recordings in my flash drive in there singing to themselves? Isn’t there an inportant relation between the body and consciousness–or are the video tapes of your life somehow as good at being you as you are? I think physical sensation is an intricate part of what would have to be understood and mimiced before the information of your consciousness could ever be recognized–by you are anybody else–as you. And that task strikes me as more difficult than converting induced synaptic responces to 1s and 0s. A built in desire for identity seems to be the longest bridge to cross.

By: Gavan Watson

Gavan Watson — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:07:11 +0000

I read this last night in Wired and it would seem to me we don’t really have a good enough grasp about what consciousness is to download our brains in fifty years.