Full Steam Ahead

Novel device records, senses and manipulates 'mini-brains'

Mar 2021, phys.org

Behold, the most hardcore scifi illustration you've ever seen. 

I call it the kufizoid, because I envision it as a hat we will all wear, and it will be alive on its own, and we will live with it in symbiosis as it instantiates our autopoetic anthropic amalgam of splinter-selves. You might call it an embroidered lace jellyfish biobot that sucks itself to your head to control your brain. But no need to be afraid; you'll love it. 

But what exactly are we looking at in this picture above? Scientists first made mini-brains-in-a-dish, and then created this kufi-probe, outfitted with electrodes, heating elements, oxygen sensors and light fibers to perform optogenetic experiments where they can control genes with light pulses. This probe-hat fits nice and snug right on top of that little brain bubble that lives in a dish. 

One day, somewhere between now and the day we become brains in a dish ourselves, we will wear these devices on our heads, to monitor and control our cortical activity, and to synchronize us with each other, so we can build a fully dematerialized anthroposphere, and live there happily together. 

But let's continue: 

This platform then enabled scientists to perform complex studies of human tissue without directly involving humans or performing invasive testing. 

-source: phys.org

Obviously the value of such a device is that we can study the human brain while it's not inside a human head. But in reading this, we get a glimpse of what this investigative approach will really do for us in the future -- we will use it in tandem with synthetic body doubles, running simulations by the billions every second, and in real-time, to aid us in planning and executive function. Your synthetic body double will be networked to every other person's double, so that eventually, all our doubles will become more and more enmeshed with each other, not in the physical world with all its physical limitations, but in the network, aka the anthroposphere, where the only limitation is the speed of light. And then, there will be no more doubles; we will become the double. 

image credit: Northwestern University

Post Script:

Cortical spheroids used to be called cerebral organoids, so it now sounds a lot less heavy on the ethics scale. You might call it etymological camouflage. And "engineered assembloids" is even better. 

Justify My Heart

The Readymade Mashup

INSTRUCTIONS
- take Alicia Keys' "Listen to Your Heart" and Madonna's "Justify My Love"

-- (I have one open in a media player, the other in youtube, and toggle between them w a keyboard controller, as one shuts off, the other starts)

--- start Alicia Keys and have them both ready to toggle by 0:21 seconds, AK time (Alicia Keys)

---- at AK 0:28, switch to Madonna, and let it run for a bit
-------- at MD 0.27, switch
---- at AK 0.39
-------- at MD 0.37
---- at AK 0.48
-------- at MD 0.56
---- at AK 0.58
-------- at MD 1.15

- if done right, the Madonna 1:15 switch to Alicia Keys 0.58 comes out as "Justify My Heart"

Sync or Swarm

On Entrainment

Svjetlana Tepavcevic

Means of Reproduction no. 627

Svjetlana Tepavcevic

Means of Reproduction no. 701

Steven Strogatz on Sync, TED2004

Mathematician Steven Strogatz shows how flocks of creatures (like birds, fireflies and fish) manage to synchronize and act as a unit -- when no one's giving orders. The powerful tendency extends into the realm of objects, too.

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_strogatz_on_sync.html

“What do you need to produce spontaneous synchronization? Do you need to be alive? No. [There is a] Deep tendency towards order in nature that opposes what we've been taught about entropy. [The tendency towards spontaneous order is a counter force.]”

How swarms work, 3 (+1) rules:
1. all the individuals are only aware of their nearest neighbors
2. all the individuals have a tendency to line up
3. they're all attracted to each other, but they try and keep a small distance apart
(4.) when a predator is coming, get away

video still:

at ~14 minutes, he entrains de-synchronized metronomes via a common substrate

Entrainment (physics)

Entrainment has been used to refer to the process of mode locking of coupled driven oscillators, which is the process whereby two interacting oscillating systems, which have different periods when they function independently, assume a common period. The two oscillators may fall into synchrony, but other phase relationships are also possible. The system with the greater frequency slows down, and the other speeds up.

Entrainment (biomusicology)

Entrainment in the biomusicological sense refers to the synchronization of organisms to an external rhythm, usually produced by other organisms with whom they interact socially. Examples include firefly flashing, mosquito wing clapping as well as human music and dance such as foot tapping.

Brainwave entrainment

Brainwave entrainment or "brainwave synchronization," is any practice that aims to cause brainwave frequencies to fall into step with a periodic stimulus having a frequency corresponding to the intended brain-state (for example, to induce sleep), usually attempted with the use of specialized software.

see also:

Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age, David Borgo, 2006

syncbots - MIT firerly robot swarm

Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly ... and cooperate, TED2012

In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams -- for construction, surveying disasters and far more.

How Music Works

David Byrne, in describing a process of whittling-down potential dancers in his group, recounts the following experience

Noemie began with an exercise I’ve never forgotten. It consisted of four simple rules:

1. Improvise moving to the music and come up with an eight-count phrase. (In dance, a phrase is a short series of moves that can be repeated.)
2. When you find a phrase you like, loop (repeat) it.
3. When you see someone else with a stronger phrase, copy it.
4. When everyone is doing the same phrase the exercise is over.

It was like watching evolution on fast-forward, or an emergent lifeform coming into being. At first the room was chaos, writhing bodies everywhere. Then one could see that folks had chosen their phrases, and almost immediately one could see a pocket of dancers who had all adopted the same phrase. The copying had begun already, albeit just in one area. This pocket of copying began to expand, to go viral, while yet another one now emerged on the other side of the room. One clump grew faster than the other, and within four minutes the whole room was filled with dancers moving in perfect unison. Unbelieavable! It only took four minutes for this evolutionary process to kick in, and for the “strongest” (unfortunate word, maybe) to dominate. It was one of the most amazing dance performances I’ve ever seen. Too bad it was over so quickly, and that one did have to know the rules that had been laid out to appreciate how such a simple algorithm could generate unity out of chaos.

After this rigorous athletic experiment, the dancers rested while we compared notes. I noticed a weird and quite loud wind like sound, rushing and pulsing. I didn’t know what it was; it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. It was like no sound I’d ever heard before. I realized it was the sound of fifty people catching their breath, breathing in and out, in an enclosed room. It then gradually faded away. For me that was part of the piece, too.

How Music Works, David Byrne, 2012, pp. 67-68

https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/how-music-works

  

On Syntropy and the Illusion of Precogntion

The Law of Syntropy

 “…Syntropic phenomena, which are instead represented by those strange solutions of the “anticipated potentials”, should obey two opposite principles of finality (moved by a final cause placed in the future, and not by a cause which is placed in the past)…”

-Luigi Fantappiè, taken from a letter to a friend circa 1940’s(?)

http://www.sintropia.it/sse/syntropy.htm

Relevance:

“Advanced Waves, Retrocausality and Consciousness”

Antonella Vannini , Ph.D Student in Cognitive Psychology – University of Rome “La Sapienza”, 2005(?)

http://www.hessdalen.org/sse/program/Antonella.pdf

Population Explosion and Precognition

Dreams which appear to be precognitive may in fact be the result of the "Law of Large Numbers". Robert Todd Carroll, author of "The Skeptic's Dictionary" put it this way: "Say the odds are a million to one that when a person has a dream of an airplane crash, there is an airplane crash the next day. With 6 billion people having an average of 250 dream themes each per night, there should be about 1.5 million people a day who have dreams that seem clairvoyant."

“Law of Truly Large Numbers (Coincidence)”

May 26, 2012

http://skepdic.com/lawofnumbers.html