2. Opera & Transhumanism II

   
   

   [][The NBIC Report] (click for full .pdf) was the published result of a U.S. government sponsored conference on converging technologies applicable to improving human performance: “The chief areas of application include: expanding human cognition and communication, improving human health and physical capabilities, enhancing group and societal outcomes, strengthening national security, and unifying science and education. Convergence will be based on the material unity of nature at the nanoscale, technology integration from the nanoscale, key transforming tools, the concept of reality as closely coupled hierarchical complex systems, and the goal to improve human performance.”

   It was released in 2002, so those of you who are up-to-date on current research should skip ahead to the more current research articles I will post below. Everybody else, I highly recommend at least flipping through the table of contents and reading the more interesting articles, such as “Spatial Cognition and Converging Technologies”, “Sociable Technologies: Enhancing Human Performance When the Computer is not a Tool but a Companion”, and “Brain-Machine Interfacing”. Other papers included in the NBIC Report are borderline frightening, for instance, “High Performance Warfighter”, “DARPA’s Programs in Enhancing Human Performance”, or “Socio-Tech…The Predictive Science of Societal Behavior” and its comments on government usage of using predictive sociological algorithms to stop “terrorism” before it occurs. Obviously, it is extremely important for us radically-minded anti-government individuals to be well versed in current technological research: these are the tools which will be used to subjugate us tomorrow. If we learn about them now, we may influence their usage and possibly even effectively use them for positive change.

   More information and current research articles after the jump!

   Now that you’re busy with that 482-page monster of a pdf, here’s some more recent research. I realize I might get in trouble for this, so I’m going to say in advance: “Oops, sorry, I didn’t realize these were copyrighted.” I have the privilege of research access to numerous academic journals, and, unfortunately for the publishers, I do not believe that only those with disposable finances should have access to knowledge and educational materials. So here you go, read up!

   Also, in keeping with the topic, I would highly recommend listening to opera while reading this stuff. Or Wagner. I’m kidding, I think.

   Bioinformatics(click for downloadable .pdfs)

   [(2010) Bioinformatic and experimental survey of 14-3-3-binding sites]

   (2010) Bioinformatic workflow system for large data sets

   [(2010) Functional Impact of Transposable Elements Using Bioinformatic Analysis]

   (2010) GMOD Drupal Bioinformatics Server

   Implants and Prosthetics (click for downloadable .pdfs)

   (2009) Feasibility Study of a Retinal Prosthesis

   Nanotechnology (click for downloadable .pdfs)

   (2010) MEMS, Sensors, and Nanotechnology

   (2010) Responsibility and Nanotechnology

   (2010) Nanotechnology in textiles

   (2010) Nanotechnology: Molecular robots on the move

   (2010) New Products: Focus on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

   (2010) Nanotechnology and its applications in surgery

   (2010) Nanotechnology Makes Strides in Quantum Dots, Medicine

   [(2010) Nanotechnology, Bionanotechnology and Microbial Cell Factories]

   [(2010) Research Advances: Nanotechnology Research Attacks Cancer, Offers Big Development in Light Harvesting, and Addresses the …

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3. Famous Physicists on Mysticism #2: “The Debate Between Plato and Democritus” by Werner Heisenberg

   
   

   

   It was here in this part of the world, on the coast of the Aegean Sea, that the philosophers Leucippus and Democritus pondered about the structure of matter, and down there in the marketplace, where twilight is now falling, that Socrates disputed about the basic difficulties in our modes of expression and Plato taught that the Idea, the form, was the truly fundamental pattern behind the phenomena. The problems first formulated in this country two and a half thousand years ago have occupied the human mind almost unceasingly ever since and have been discussed again and again in the course of history whenever new developments have altered the light in which the old lines of thought appeared.

   If I endeavor today to take up some of the old problems concerning the structure of matter and the concept of natural law, it is because the development of atomic physics in out own day has radically altered our whole outlook on nature and the structure of matter. It is perhaps not an improper exaggeration to maintain that some of the old problems have quite recently found a clear and final solution. So it is permissible today to speak about this new and perhaps conclusive answer to questions that were formulated here thousands of years ago.

   There is, however, yet another reason for renewing consideration of these problems. The philosophy of materialism, developed in antiquity by Leucippus and Democritus, has been the subject of many discussions since the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century and, in the form of dialectical materialism, has been one of the moving forces in the political changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If philosophical ideas about the structure of matter have been able to play such a role in human life, if in European society they have operated almost like an explosive and may yet perhaps do so in other parts of the world, it is even more important to know what our present scientific knowledge has to say about this philosophy. To put it in rather general and precise terms, we may hope that a philosophical analysis of recent scientific developments will contribute to a replacement of conflicting dogmatic opinions about the basic problems we have broached, by a sober readjustment to a new situation, which, in itself, can even now be regarded as a revolution in human life on this earth. But even aside from this influence of science upon our time, it may be of interest to compare the philosophical discussions in ancient Greece with the findings of experimental science and modern atomic physics. If I may already anticipate at this point the outcome of such a comparison; it seems that, in spite of the tremendous success that the concept of the atom has achieved in modern science, Plato was very much nearer to the truth about the structure of matter than Leucippus or Democritus. But it will doubtless be necessary to begin by repeating some of the most important arguments adduced …

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4. Famous Physicists On Mysticism #1: “Scientific and Religious Truths” by Werner Heisenberg

   
   

   This is going to be an ongoing reprint series of mystical writings by famous physicists. The view expressed herein are presented merely for consideration and are not necessarily those of the blogger.

   [caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”280” caption=”Werner Heisenberg”][/caption]

   Scientific and Religious Truths

   By Werner Heisenberg

   In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point. In what follows, then, we shall first of all deal with the unassailability and value of scientific truth, and then with the much wider field of religion; finally—and this will be the hardest part to formulate—we shall speak of the relationship of the two truths.

   Of the beginnings of modern science, the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, it is usually said that the truth of religious revelation, laid down in the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers and dominant in the thought of the Middle Ages, was at that time supplemented by the reality of sensory experience, which could be checked by anyone in possession of his normal five senses and which—if enough care was taken—could, therefore, not in the end be doubted. But even this first approach to a description of the new way of thought is only half correct; it neglects decisive features without which its power cannot be understood. It is certainly no accident that the beginnings of modern science were associated with a turning away from Aristotle and a reversion to Plato. Even in antiquity, Aristotle, as an empiricist, had raised the objection—I cite more or less his own words—that the Pythagoreans (among whom Plato must be included) did not seek for explanations and theories to suit the facts, but distorted the facts to fit certain theories and favored opinions, and set themselves up, one might say, as co-arrangers of the universe. In fact, the new science led away from immediate experience in the manner criticized by Aristotle. Let us consider the understanding of the planetary motions. Immediate experience teaches that the earth is at rest and that the sun goes around it. In the more precise terms of our own day, we might even say that the word “rest” is defined by the statement that the earth is at rest, and that we call every body at rest that no longer moves relative to the earth. If …

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