Lifeboat Foundation

Abstract.

If all aspects of the mind-brain relationship were adequately explained by classical physics, then there would be no need to propose alternatives. But faced with possibly unresolvable puzzles like qualia and free will, other approaches are required. In alignment with a suggestion by Heisenberg in 1958, we propose a model whereby the world consists of two elements: Ontologically real Possibles that do not obey Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle, and ontologically real Actuals that do. Based on this view, which bears resemblance to von Neumann’s 1955 proposal (von Neumann, 1955), and more recently by Stapp and others (Stapp, 2007; Rosenblum and Kuttner, 2006), measurement that is registered by an observer’s mind converts Possibles into Actuals. This quantum-oriented approach raises the intriguing prospect that some aspects of mind may be quantum, and that mind may play an active role in the physical world. A body of empirical evidence supports these possibilities, strengthening our proposal that the mind-brain relationship may be partially quantum.

A new CRISPR tool corrected a genetic mutation that causes vision loss, in an experiment in mice — and its creators at the Wuhan University of Science and Technology (WUST) in China think it could be a safe way to treat countless other genetic diseases in people.

The challenge: Vision starts with light entering the eye and traveling to the retina. There, light-sensitive cells, called photoreceptors, convert light into electrical signals that are sent to the brain.

Retinitis pigmentosa is a rare — and, currently, incurable — genetic disease that can be caused by mutations in more than 100 different genes. These mutations destroy the cells of the retina, leading to vision loss, and for most people, there’s no way to stop the disease or reverse its damage (the exception is a gene therapy approved to treat mutations in the RPE65 gene).

Primordial black holes older than the big bang could rewrite cosmology by providing evidence for a previous universe. It’s a wild idea, but some physicists think we’ve got a chance of finding them.

By Bernard Carr

A Paperclip Maximizer is an example of artificial intelligence run amok performing a job, potentially seeking to turn all the Universe into paperclips. But it’s also an example of a concept called Instrumental Convergence, where two entities with wildly different ultimate goals might end up acting very much alike. This concept is very important to preparing ourselves for future automation and machine minds, and we’ll explore that today.

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When we cooperate on certain tasks, our brainwaves might synchronize. This finding could upend the current understanding of consciousness.

Neuroscientist Sergiu P. Pasca has made it his life’s work to understand how the human brain builds itself — and what makes it susceptible to disease. In a mind-blowing talk laden with breakthrough science, he shows how his team figured out how to grow “organoids” and what they call brain “assembloids” — self-organizing clumps of neural tissue derived from stem cells that have shown the ability to form circuits — and explains how these miniature parts of the nervous system are bringing us closer to demystifying the brain.

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Continue reading “How We’re Reverse Engineering the Human Brain in the Lab | Sergiu P. Pasca | TED” »

Can you imagine if we had computer/brain interfaces what would happen? We’ll need brain firewalls and antivirus.

Android apps digitally signed by China’s third-biggest e-commerce company exploited a zero-day vulnerability that allowed them to surreptitiously take control of millions of end-user devices to steal personal data and install malicious apps, researchers from security firm Lookout have confirmed.

The malicious versions of the Pinduoduo app were available in third-party markets, which users in China and elsewhere rely on because the official Google Play market is off-limits or not easy to access. No malicious versions were found in Play or Apple’s App Store. Last Monday, TechCrunch reported that Pinduoduo was pulled from Play after Google discovered a malicious version of the app available elsewhere. TechCrunch reported the malicious apps available in third-party markets exploited several zero-days, vulnerabilities that are known or exploited before a vendor has a patch available.

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For decades, mathematicians have been inching forward on a problem about which sets contain evenly spaced patterns of three numbers. Last month, two computer scientists blew past all of those results.

It is well-known that an ordinary high frequency electromagnetic (EM) wave radiated into the ionosphere at the Spitze angle is totally transformed at the reflection height (z₀) into the Z-mode. This mode, in turn, penetrates deeper into the ionosphere and it is reflected at some height (z_ref) usually significantly higher than the O-mode reflection height. This result is reconsidered in the present paper. It is argued that the wave appearing as a continuation of the propagating upward quasi-electrostatic wave changes the direction of motion along the vertical axis slightly above z₀ and takes the form of the down-going wave. This wave is excited in the vicinity of the height z₀ due to the phase resonance with the up-going O-mode wave which transforms into the Z-mode propagating upward. Thus, the ionospheric window is not totally transparent for the O-mode radiated at the Spitze angle. The up-going O-mode wave loses some part of its energy due to excitation of the down-going EM wave. This wave, in turn, propagates to the ground as the O-mode wave.