Lyrics and Badges

Today I received Royal Mail.
Inside the sand colored envelope were the following:





If you do not know who Thea Gilmore is, you must not hesitate in visiting her website in order to become acquainted with her music. Her lyrics do not disappoint.

Thea's website
Thea's myspace page with samples of her music
My uncannily embarrassing interview with the poor girl

Clone Thought Experiment: The Dilemma

This is supplementary material to the question posed in Clone Thought Experiment.

We'll presume our situation to be exactly the way it was in the previous thought experiment, except this time, as you and your clone are being lead into the room, you are instead seated next to each other.
Sitting on the other side of the table is a tall, thin, and serious looking man in his 50's.

He explains that overnight there was a power surge that deleted all of the facilities documentation and files.
Every security camera tape had been erased and in the darkness there was much confusion.

His point being, the facility has lost track of which room you were placed in and which room the clone was placed in.

How can you go about telling yourselves apart?

Clone Thought Experiment

PREFACE
For the sake of this thought experiment, we will use the marvels of Science Fiction to create a Clone that is an exact duplicate of you right now, with all your same features and memories.


One evening you enter a cloning facility.
Upon entering you are greeted by an orderly and escorted to a plain room with a single bed.
You lie down on the bed and fall asleep.
The following morning you are awoken by the same orderly and lead into a white room.
Centered in the white room is a square table with two chairs.
Each chair has in front of it one sheet of paper and one sharpened number two pencil.
Across the room you notice another orderly, looking exactly like your orderly, simultaneously guide your clone into the room and towards the table.
You and your clone are then seated at the table and left alone.
A disembodied voice instructs you and your clone to draw a picture.


Will you and your clone draw the same picture?

Google is... Round 2

While wasting more time typing random phrases and questions into the Google search bar something occurred to me.
The aggregate of searches typed into Google is a window into the human condition.
The questions people ask, their desperation for answers about the unknown; these are the similarities about being human that might be exactly what people need to get past the shallow differences that are created by our post-modern world.

What are people searching for when they turn to the Internet...

Self reflection


Express feelings


Review morality


Search for help


Probe the unknown


Speculate on the mysteries that surround them


Question the limits of the physical world


Make statements about life


Discuss the Universe


Figure out who that dude in tights is

The Mood of the Internet

A little while back I posted the seemingly outrageous idea that the Internet may be conscious and that we may have given it consciousness by accident.
The question was, "How do we go about figuring out if it actually is?"

This is a difficult question for humans to answer about each other, nevermind bits of information being shared across an international computer network, the majority of which are pictures of cats and silly videos.

Sometimes I can't even tell if the slow moving ape hunched over its shopping cart blocking the cereal aisle in the supermarket is a conscious being or not, but what I can tell is that this particular ape is miserable.

Aha! That's something. Emotions are a clear indication that something conscious-like is going on behind those slow-moving glassy eyes. A something that not only gives it the ability to poorly navigate a shopping cart in front of people that know what they want, but a something that tells it exactly how it feels about it.

Someone on the Internet had to already have noticed this and chances are that someone took the average of everyone's mood and concluded that to be the mood of the Internet.
That someone, or couple of someone's, website is here: http://www.wefeelfine.org

Allegedly we, as a society of the mind of the Internet have become happier since around February 2005.

Now I've done some research to try to figure out what the exact date was that started this turn around from 'miserable ape in the supermarket' to 'slightly less miserable ape that finally realised it would like some cereal too' and I think it was February 15th, 2005, the day the Internet was introduced to YouTube.

Now the question is, how does YouTube assist consciousness and emotion?

Space Vampires Teaser

What do you think when you're thinking?

How exactly do you think?
It's a strange question, and I'm not sure I even have an answer for it myself.
I wouldn't be able to tell you which thought came first, but I could tell you that they didn't occur in chronological order.

This tells me that they are connected another way, linked by a common thread my mind uncovered that makes it easier or quicker for these thoughts to communicate.
The thoughts however aren't as distinct as the words I'm using now.

Another thing I can tell you is that I mostly think in pictures, except for when I read. It isn't that I'm not imagining the landscapes and characters being described in the pages of the book, I am, but all that comes after a voice in my head reads it back to me.

What I'm saying is that I don't strictly see pictures, like I do when I'm simply thinking.
Oddly, this voice in my head doesn't assist me when I read signs, cereal boxes, or movie posters.
I've thought about this, and it could be because those things are very similar to pictures.

A box of Froot Loops is practically a symbol, therefore I believe my brain processes it as one and no longer employs the "voice function" it uses for reading books or magazines.

So what the hell is the point of this rant?
Well, I'd like to know what happens when two people collect the same data and arrive at different conclusions. I'd like to figure out what questions need to be asked in order to determine what's going on behind the curtain of their consciousness.

What goes on in your mind when you read? Do you hear a voice, see pictures, both, neither?

What about music? Does your mind drift into images, do you pick apart the sounds, or are you overcome with emotion to the point where your mental critics shut down?

How long does it take you to count to a minute in your head? Do you use a voice, do you imagine a clock, or do you use your sense of touch and keep count with your heartbeat?