Brains working towards machine consciousness

This Is Me is an Eduserv funded project to design learning materials to help with education about forming, maintaining and securing your personal identity on the web, otherwise known as their Digital Identity (DI). The initial stages involve collecting people's stories about DI, whether cautionary, advisory, entertaining or just plain educational.

In typical Ben style, he argues why you should vote. I feel compelled by the logic. I should find time to read more of Ben's stuff too - though last time I was reading it I did wonder quite why he was using my brain rather than his own. To be fair, I suspect it may be as well as his own as I think he is somewhat more brainy than me.

Just a note to say I have finally got round to finding the settings which allow people to leave their name etc. should they so choose. I would like it if you do let me know who you are, but I have refrained from making it compulsory.

The internet provides many resources and many distractions. Of the resources, some are higher quality than others. A learner, seeking understanding, is in a similar position to a ship's captain - aiming to reach a certain goal, but without necessarily having accurate charts to plot the route, weather forecasts to predict disturbances to their route, and possibly without much idea of how the rudder works, or from where they are starting.

I have to apologise to those who have commented on this blog - until now I had thought that the server was emailing me when I got comments (it used to), but that appears not to be the case at the moment. I will try and address this, so your comments get published with the minimum of delay.

Oh, and if you would like to leave your name in the post, that would be grand :-)

I have held off posting about this, as I wanted to make sure I wasn't being too 'hot headed', but the more I see, the more I am sure there is something wrong.

Been getting:

Request took too long.

Your request took too long to complete. This is typically just a temporary error due to high network traffic or heavy usage of Blogger.

Please hit the back button on your browser and try again. If the problem persists, please contact the Blogger Help Group. We apologise for the inconvenience.

quite a bit when trying to read blogs on Blogspot.com recently. Wonder just how much traffic it takes to cause an error like this on the service?

Some thoughts on the differences between artificial and natural, a debating point, if you will, rather than a firm stand point.

The artificial is, I would argue, the product of the mind. It is that which is created as a result of ingenuity, the clever or artful produce of rational agency. It can also been seen as not genuine, based on the reproduction of something which occurs naturally but without the innocence of that state, fooling the senses into a believing that it is something which it is not, a falsehood, a manipulation of the observer’s senses.

Whilst I found much of Catherine Fitzpatrick's style of communication and apparent unwillingness to listen to reasoned argument a trial in the first couple of weeks of the Connectivism and Connect Knowledge course run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, I have to say a few of her recent posts on the topic of the forums and blogs and whether there is a problem with dominant voices to be 'on the mark'.

First, my model of mind and (therefore) of learning - we are pattern matching creatures by dint of the way out brains work, and look for the similarities and differences between things. We also create models in our minds of what we perceive, which are, by definition, abstractions and simplifications of the 'objective reality'. Our perceptions are, I believe, affected by the internal models.