Articles

The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity.

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On god, evolution and the mind
"I think you would have a hard time forging a new religion out of your "vision". It doesn't seem to offer much comfort or certainty... nor clarity. I don't think anyone would like your Angry Santa religion very much."

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On artificial life and genetics
"The combination of randomised creature design and derived behaviour makes the environment entirely procedural: there is an endless variation of individuals and therefore an endless variation of behaviour and ways creatures interact with each other."

 

Consciousness and behaviour
"If we accept the proposition that conscious behaviour is behaviour that you can do, by consequence you also have to accept that behaviour can only emerge in organisms that have a consciousness. But how can we know which organisms possess consciousness... do monkeys? Do snails?"

 

The ghost in the machine
"Where is the undefinable thing that makes me uniquely me? I am definitely different from you, I can feel this... there is something more to me than just a bunch of particles, isn't there? Is my soul floating around in between the atoms, a ghost in the machine?"

 

Learning learning
"A brain is a decentralised heap of intelligence, there is no central bureau in the chain of hierarchy that is declaring orders. Such a centre would need an intelligent brain to make intelligent decisions in the hierarchy - and that brain would need a central bureau that declares orders, which would need a brain - and so on."

 

On artificial creativity
"Artificial creativity tries to mimic the trial-and-error process in computer terms, tries to tell a computer algorithm how creativity works. Artificial creativity is closely related to something called emergence in the field of artificial intelligence."

 

On psychology, design and society
"Stuff is seen as pretty and beautiful because a group or society says so. The illusion that we have an individual opinion is quickly vaporised when we look at clothing from the 1980’s. They actually believed they looked awesome."

 

The Microsoft OpenType Muscle
"Recently, Dr. Kevin Larson, PhD in cognitive psychology, employed by Microsoft, spoke at the AtypI 2005 conference in Helsinki on readability and its supposed improvement with OpenType features."

  Hyperpolator
Hyperpolator is an online robot that summarises different sites across the web (White House, CNN, Cosmo, and more) in search for the essence of life. You can browse through it with an interactive Java-applet. War! President! Sex!
 

Omnigrapher
Omnigrapher maps words you type in to a world map by querying Google.
Where is Osama Bin Laden? New York! Where are the toilets? Helsinki!