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[Road Walker] Organoids Are Not Brains. How Are They Making Brain Waves? By Carl Zimmer Publ...

Road Walker — 9/3/2019 3:41:20 PM

Organoids Are Not Brains. How Are They Making Brain Waves?
By Carl Zimmer

Published Aug. 29, 2019

Clusters of living brain cells are teaching scientists about diseases like autism. With a new finding, some experts wonder if these organoids may become too much like the real thing.

Alysson Muotri, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego. His lab grows and studies so-called organoids to understand how the human brain functions.

SAN DIEGO — Two hundred and fifty miles over Alysson Muotri’s head, a thousand tiny spheres of brain cells were sailing through space.

The clusters, called brain organoids, had been grown a few weeks earlier in the biologist’s lab here at the University of California, San Diego. He and his colleagues altered human skin cells into stem cells, then coaxed them to develop as brain cells do in an embryo.

The organoids grew into balls about the size of a pinhead, each containing hundreds of thousands of cells in a variety of types, each type producing the same chemicals and electrical signals as those cells do in our own brains. In July, NASA packed the organoids aboard a rocket and sent them to the International Space Station to see how they develop in zero gravity.

Now the organoids were stowed inside a metal box, fed by bags of nutritious broth. “I think they are replicating like crazy at this stage, and so we’re going to have bigger organoids,” Dr. Muotri said in a recent interview in his office overlooking the Pacific.

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What, exactly, are they growing into? That’s a question that has scientists and philosophers alike scratching their heads.

On Thursday, Dr. Muotri and his colleagues reported that they have recorded simple brain waves in these organoids. In mature human brains, such waves are produced by widespread networks of neurons firing in synchrony. Particular wave patterns are linked to particular forms of brain activity, like retrieving memories and dreaming.

As the organoids mature, the researchers also found, the waves change in ways that resemble the changes in the developing brains of premature babies.

“It’s pretty amazing,” said Giorgia Quadrato, a neurobiologist at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the new study. “No one really knew if that was possible.”

But Dr. Quadrato stressed it was important not to read too much into the parallels. What she, Dr. Muotri and other brain organoid experts build are clusters of replicating brain cells, not actual brains.

“People will say, ‘Ah, these are like the brains of preterm infants,’” she said. “No, they are not.”

It’s been only six years since scientists created the first brain organoid from human skin cells. Now they’re being grown in laboratories around the world, offering scientists a new window onto the earliest stages of human brain development.

Here at U.C.S.D., researchers are using them to recreate, in miniature, inherited brain disorders and brain infections. They are also trying to grow bigger, more complex brain organoids. In one recent experiment, scientists linked a brain organoid and a spider-shaped robot, so that the two could exchange signals.

With Thursday’s report, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the question of what brain organoids might become is gaining more urgency.

“There are some of my colleagues who say, ‘No, these things will never be conscious,’” said Dr. Muotri. “Now I’m not so sure.”

Even if scientists someday produce only minimally self-aware organoids, that could represent a serious ethical concern, said Christof Koch, the chief scientist and president of the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle.

“The closer we come to his goal, the more likely we will get a brain that is capable of sentience and of feeling pain, agony and distress,” Dr. Koch said.

A tray of brain organoids cultured with a Neanderthal gene in Dr. Muotri’s lab. The neurons formed fewer connections, the researchers found.David Poller/ZUMA Wire, via Alamy Live News

‘Failing miserably’Few things in biology are harder to study than the development of the human brain. Scientists have largely contented themselves with indirect clues from studies of animals, like mice and monkeys.

But the human brain is so distinctive that it’s hard to make the evolutionary leap from other species. As a result, researchers have a disappointing track record for treating brain-based disorders such as autism or schizophrenia.

“We are failing miserably,” Dr. Muotri said. “We can cure animals of some diseases, but it’s not translatable.”

In 2006 Shinya Yamanaka, a biologist at Kyoto University in Japan, opened a new way to study human brains. He found a cocktail of four proteins that can turn ordinary skin cells into stem cells, which then have the potential to turn into neurons, muscles or blood cells.

Building on that advance, other researchers learned to get stem cells to grow like miniature organs in a dish. And in 2013, a team of researchers in Austria succeeded in producing small, short-lived brain organoids for the first time.

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Until then, Dr. Muotri had studied neurons derived from people with autism. He quickly taught himself how to turn stem cells into brain organoids instead.

“The most incredible thing is that they build themselves,” he said. Primed with just the right conditions, the organoids take over their own development.

Today, Cleber Trujillo, a project scientist, oversees the growth of thousands of organoids in a tissue culture room in Dr. Muotri’s lab. “This is where we spend half our day,” he said, gesturing to the banks of refrigerators, incubators and microscopes.

Brain organoids demand so much labor because growing them is more like making a soufflé than running a chemistry experiment. Scientists have to continually replace the broth in which the cells grow and keep a careful eye on the cells themselves.

“We need to guide them,” said Dr. Trujillo. “Otherwise, they become other stuff.”

If all goes according to plan, the cells turn into brain organoids. They become blobs, inside of which tunnels form. So-called progenitor cells surround the tunnels and sprout cables. Other cells crawl down the cables and form successive rings.

They match the cells in our cortex in many respects. Their surface even folds in on itself.

Dr. Trujillo pulled out a translucent muffin tray and raised it above his head. The lights overhead illuminated hundreds of tiny pale spheres. At two months, the cells inside each organoid held it together with a network of sticky branches.

“They like to stay in touch with each other,” Dr. Trujillo said fondly.

A multi-electrode dish array in Dr. Muotri’s lab. The instrument detected brain waves in growing organoids.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

A robot in Dr. Muotri’s lab that communicated with a brain organoid via a computer.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

Dr. Muotri and his colleagues use brain organoids to run experiments on a host of diseases.

They have infected organoids with Zika virus, for instance, to better understand how it causes severe brain damage in babies. Last year, the researchers discovered that a drug called sofosbuvir, already approved for hepatitis, shields brain organoids from infection.

Dr. David Baud, a Zika expert at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who was not involved in the study, called it a promising discovery — one that would be hard to make studying mice or individual neurons. “Organoids offer the best alternative,” he said.

Fabio Papes, a neuroscientist at University of Campinas in Brazil, feels the same way about organoids when it comes to studying hereditary brain disorders. Dr. Papes is collaborating with Dr. Muotri to study a disease called Pitt-Hopkins syndrome.

It’s a rare condition that leaves children unable to speak and suffering regular seizures. To understand how certain mutations cause the disease, Dr. Papes is growing organoids from skin cells donated from patients.

“For this particular disease, mice are no good,” he said. “And you obviously cannot open the child’s head to know what’s going on. We can go this way, or not go at all.”

A critical massIn 2016 Priscilla Negraes, then a project scientist in Dr. Muotri’s lab, began eavesdropping on organoids. She figured out how to stick them to the bottom of a well that was lined with 64 electrodes. When a neuron in the organoids fired, one of the electrodes would light up.

The organoids turned out to be surprisingly noisy — and with each passing week, they got noisier. Then she noticed that patterns were emerging.

Most of the neurons would suddenly start firing in a synchronized burst — a pattern that looked remarkably like brain waves.

Dr. Negraes and her colleagues began working with brain wave experts, and they found some similarities between the organoids and the brains of premature infants. The babies and the organoids both produced bursts of synchronized activity, followed by quiet lulls.

As the organoids grew, the researchers found, the lulls got shorter. That, too, is a feature of premature baby brains as they mature.

What makes the similarity so remarkable is that organoids and baby brains are so different, said Richard Gao, a graduate student at U.C.S.D. and a co-author of the new study.

“I don’t think you need all the billions of neurons in the brain to produce these patterns,” Mr. Gao said. “Once you pass a critical mass, it’s able to do that.”

Fernanda Cugola, a postdoctoral researcher, was a part of a team examining the effects of the Zika virus on brain organoids.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times

To learn more from brain organoids, researchers want to make them bigger, more complex, and more durable. Immune cells, surprisingly, may make that possible.

Immune cells called microglia don’t just fight pathogens. In the developing brain, they sculpt neuron branches, helping them to mature. Researchers in Dr. Muotri’s lab have coaxed microglia to crawl inside brain organoids. Now the scientists are tracking the organoids’ activity as they develop.

“I’m thinking, with microglia it might be better,” said Gabriela Goldberg, a graduate student on the project.

Real brains need connections to the outside world to mature properly. In 2017, Dr. Quadrato and her colleagues grew a brain organoid that included cells from the retina, making it sensitive to light.

Dr. Muotri and his colleagues are testing out different ways to stimulate brain organoids in order to make them develop more complex neural networks. In one experiment, they’ve linked organoids to a small spider-shaped robot. A computer translates an organoid’s electrical activity into instructions for moving the robot’s legs.

As the robot moves, it uses sensors to detect when it gets close to a wall. The computer relays those signals back to the organoid in the form of electrical pulses.

Dr. Muotri can’t say yet whether these experiments will affect how brain organoids develop. The efforts may fail — or they may produce increasingly sophisticated brain mimics that we don’t fully understand.

He urges his fellow scientists to think carefully about what they may inadvertently create.

“What if you add neurons that sense pain?” asked Dr. Muotri. “Or what if we start recording memories in these organoids?”

But Jeantine Lunshof, a bioethicist at Harvard University, believes it’s too early to make judgments about what we should and shouldn’t do with brain organoids.

“In order to say what you should do with it, you first have to say, ‘What is it?’” she said. “We’re making things that were not known 10 years ago. They were not in the catalog of philosophers.”

At this stage of research, Dr. Lunshof said, the most important thing is to avoid mistaking today’s brain organoids for true human brains — let alone people. “They’re in a completely different category,” she argued.

For now, these debates matter to a few scientists: the master chefs who can reliably make enough brain organoids to run experiments. But Dr. Muotri and Dr. Trujillo hope to automate the process, so that other scientists can make lots of cheap, high-quality brain organoids.

“That’s our concept — plug and play,” said Dr. Muotri. “We want to make farms of these organoids.”

The organoids sent to space may help make that concept a reality. The box in which they were housed is a rough prototype of a device that someday might produce organoids without human intervention.

The astronauts aboard the space station simply installed the box, turned on the power, and let it run on its own.

On a recent morning, Dr. Muotri wanted to check on his space organoids. Cameras inside the box snap pictures every half-hour, but all the pictures Dr. Muotri had seen were obscured by unexpected air bubbles.

Now, to his delight, the bubbles were gone from the latest image. On his computer monitor, he saw a half-dozen gray spheres floating on a beige background.

“They’re rounded, and they more or less have the same size,” he said. “You don’t see them fusing or clustering together. So this is all good news.”

If all this work does eventually lead to mass-produced brain organoids, Dr. Muotri won’t mind if his artisanal organoid-growing skills become obsolete.

“I think we can use our brains for something more noble,” he said.

Correction: Aug. 29, 2019Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the journal in which the brain wave study appeared. It was Cell Stem Cell, not Cell.

Carl Zimmer writes the “Matter” column. He is the author of thirteen books, including “She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.” @carlzimmer • Facebook

[Sun Tzu] DARPA's plan for mind-enhanced humans When these technologies become generally ...

Sun Tzu — 10/21/2018 8:05:45 PM

DARPA's plan for mind-enhanced humans

When these technologies become generally available, the internet and cell phone revolution will seem so very archaic!

theatlantic.com

[GPS Info] [youtube video] September 6, 2017 The best-selling author and UCSF endocrinologi...

GPS Info — 10/14/2018 4:19:06 PM

September 6, 2017
The best-selling author and UCSF endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig explores how industry has contributed to a culture of addiction, depression and chronic disease. Always provocative, Lustig reveals the science that drives these states of mind and offers solutions we can use.

[GPS Info] [youtube video] June 12, 2018 Part of the Science and Society Initiative: A join...

GPS Info — 10/8/2018 8:58:55 PM

June 12, 2018
Part of the Science and Society Initiative: A joint project with the Laboratory for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology at Stanford University Medical School.

[koan] I saw that. Very cool,but not surprising. Why wouldn't a male copulate with a fe...

koan — 8/25/2018 11:32:10 AM

I saw that. Very cool,but not surprising. Why wouldn't a male copulate with a female of another tribe, which is probably how they saw them? I always thought that and always thought the idea so many scientists had that we did not mate with Neandertal was intellectually deficient. I never understood how scientists could think that.

I have ROKU now and when I go to youtube and ask for a subject their algorithms keep feeding me lectures or documentaries, etc on the subject. I recently moved to be near my daughters in Oregon and they turned me on to it.

This is the future for learning and one reason the kids are so smart. I have been binging in one subject after another I have had questions about, quantum physics and gravity, cosmology and string theory, human evolution and our dozen known ancestors,

I learned more in a month than in years of college and was able to answer so many lifelong questions.

I watch mostly foreign cinema on Netflix and am heartened by how most of the foreign cinema shows are very progressive, around the world and reflected a new enlightened human species led by females. I am sure this is the result of young informed writers networking knowledge round the world and then attacking primitive venal norms and mores like racism, misogyny and caste systems in their scripts.

And South Korea is a leader in this new revolution. Although it has been a male dominated society, the young females are having none of it and even refusing to marry and have children. It has among the lowest birth rate in the world and the kids are looking to extinct that old male dominated culture.

Two of my favorite South Korean cinema are Mr Sunshine about SK around 1900 and Descendants of the Sun which shows an ideal modern society , and is a great interesting drama.

Cheers

[Road Walker] A Blended Family: Her Mother Was Neanderthal, Her Father Something Else Entirely...

Road Walker — 8/25/2018 10:37:53 AM

A Blended Family: Her Mother Was Neanderthal, Her Father Something Else Entirely

Genetic analysis of bones discovered in a Siberian cave hint that the prehistoric world may have been filled with “hybrid” humans.

A Blended Family: Her Mother Was Neanderthal, Her Father Something Else Entirely - The New York Times apple.news

[koan] Hi Roadwalker, I saw a Ted talk yesterday by James Flynn that mirrored a concept...

koan — 8/15/2018 11:49:10 AM

Hi Roadwalker, I saw a Ted talk yesterday by James Flynn that mirrored a concept I deduced 50 years ago and have tried to explain to people with varying success over the years. The link is below.

The thesis is this: over the last couple of hundred years we have gone from almost categorical concrete thinking to increasing abstract thinking and this has made us much smarter. flynn says: "We don't just get a few more questions right each new generation we get many more questions right. We have "new habits of mind".

James Flynn makes the point, that our minds have altered dramatically , from people who only confronted a concrete world to a very complex world today. If you score the IQ of people when the Stanford Benit was first published in 1916 , against today's standards they would score around 70, boarder line mental retardation. If you score todays people against those people we would score around 130, boarder line genius.

ted.com

[Road Walker] Maria Konnikova Shows Her CardsThe well-regarded science writer took up poker wh...

Road Walker — 8/14/2018 11:11:55 AM

Maria Konnikova Shows Her CardsThe well-regarded science writer took up poker while researching a book. Now she’s on the professional circuit.
Aug. 10, 2018
A conversation with...

"Luck is just … randomness," said Maria Konnikova. "That’s what I wanted to write about. Poker was a way into it."Joshua Bright for The New York Times

As a science writer at The New Yorker, Maria Konnikova, 34, focuses on the brain, and the weird and interesting ways people use their brains.

Dr. Konnikova is an experimental psychologist trained at Columbia University. But her latest experiment is on herself. For a book she’s researching on luck and decision-making, Dr. Konnikova began studying poker.

Within a year, she had moved from poker novice to poker professional, winning more than $200,000 in tournament jackpots. This summer Poker Stars, an online gaming site, began sponsoring Dr. Konnikova in professional tournaments.

We spoke recently for two hours at the offices of The Times. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

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You’ve taken a year’s sabbatical from The New Yorker to play on the professional poker circuit. Why?I’d been thinking, for a while, about what my next book was going to be. I was interested in the theme of skill versus chance and was looking for a way to get into it. A friend suggested I read John von Neumann’s “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,” the foundational text of game theory.

Von Neumann, as you know, was one of the geniuses of the 20th century — the hydrogen bomb, computing, economics. And he’d been a poker player. It turned out that all of game theory came out of poker!

When he was trying to understand how strategic decision-making worked, he concluded that poker was the perfect analog, because it was a blend of skill and chance and because, over the long run, skill can win. I decided that poker was the way to go.

I knew I’d need to spend a few months living in that world. I thought, “I’m going to have to dedicate myself to this like a career, because otherwise it’s just going to be ‘a writer dabbles in the world of poker.’”

Did you have a background in the game?No, no. When I started this, I didn’t know how many cards were in a deck. I hate casinos. I have zero interest in gambling.

Then I met Erik Seidel, one of the best poker players in the world. He agreed to become my coach, though he told me, “You’re a hard worker, and you have a good background for this, but who knows if you’re going to be any good?”

It’s been an unexpected journey. I don’t think anyone could have predicted that I would have gone in less than a year from not knowing how many cards were in a deck to winning a major poker title.

What did that involve? I’ve been studying, playing, living, breathing poker for eight to nine hours a day. Every day! When I’m between events and in New York, I’m reading, watching videos or live-streaming very good players.

There might be a specific concept I want to work on, and I’ll watch some videos of people doing this and take notes. Sometimes I’ll go to New Jersey and hop onto the poker website at an internet cafe. Online poker is illegal in New York, but not in Jersey.

When Erik Seidel said you had the right background, what did he mean?I think he was talking about my background in experimental psychology. I did a doctorate on overconfidence and risky decision-making with Walter Mischel, who invented the “marshmallow test.”

I wanted to see if people with high levels of self-control made better decisions in risky conditions, like in the stock market. Usually, people with high self-control do so much better at everything than people with low self-control.

But it ends up that in unpredictable environments like the stock market, successful high self-control people — when in an environment where control is taken away from them — take longer to figure things out. They are too confident and won’t take negative feedback from the environment.

Whereas people with lower self-control and who aren’t as successful — they’re like, “Uh oh, a bad thing is happening. I guess I should actually figure that out.”

Are the other poker pros nice to you? For the most part. I’ve been very lucky because my coach introduced me to high-level players. They are not only brilliant but nice, and they’ve taken me under their wing.

So yeah, there are people who aren’t nice to me. I mean, I’ve been called everything at the poker table. I’ve been propositioned at the poker table — like, actually propositioned!

Was it an attempt to throw you off your game or to get you to his room? Probably both. I called the “floor,” which is management, and had him moved to another table.

If poker is an analog to real life, does it help or hurt to be a woman? Obviously, the first thing people notice about me is my gender. And people stereotype.

When you see someone looking a certain way, you assume they play a certain way. So once I figure out how they view women, I can figure out how to play against them. They’re not seeing me as a poker player, they’re seeing me as a female poker player.

There are people who’d rather die than be bluffed by a woman. They’ll never fold to me because that’s an affront to their masculinity.

I never bluff them. I know that no matter how strong my hand, they are still going to call me because they just can’t fold to a girl.

Other people think women are incapable of bluffing. They think if I’m betting really aggressively, it means I have an incredibly strong hand. I bluff those people all the time.

There are people who think that women shouldn’t be at a poker table, and they try to bully me. So, what do I do? I let them. And I wait to be in a good position so that I can take their chips. Just like life, right?

Your last book, “The Confidence Game,” was about con artists. Is there a thematic connection to the topics you write about?The motive for this book was about getting back to what I’d studied in grad school: the illusion of control. How much of our lives do we actually control — and can we tell the difference?

People often ascribe everything good to skill. And then when bad things happen, they say, “Oh, it’s bad luck.” Or they say, “You make your luck.”

That’s just empirically impossible. And it drives me crazy because luck, by definition, is something you can’t make. Luck is just … randomness. So that’s what I wanted to write about. Poker was a way into it.

Now, it is true that I’ve long been preoccupied with the darker side of humanity. I’m interested in deviations because they make you notice the normal. In psychology, you learn a lot about the brain by looking at the deviant cases.

When you ask if my books have a progression, I’d say the world of con artists has a lot of overlap with poker because of belief, deception, figuring out what people are representing.

Do you have any insights on why grifting schemes appear to be proliferating? Fraud really thrives in moments of great social change and transition. We’re in the midst of a technological revolution. That gives con artists huge opportunities. People lose their frame of reference for what can and can’t be real.

Are there more con artists now? It’s more that technology made conning easier.

Before, if you wanted to con someone, you had to do expend a lot of energy doing research. Was a person a good target? Today, we’re all on Twitter and Facebook, putting out all this information about ourselves.

With cellphones and emails, it’s much easier to inundate a large number of people and to catch one person at a vulnerable moment. In the past, the grifter would have a lot of misses. Now, they don’t care if they’ll have a thousand misses. All they need is one hit.

You’ve earned so far over $200,000 at the table. Few writers make that sort of money. Will you be quitting your day job?For the next year, yes. But I’m never going to stop being a writer. Why can’t I do both? I love poker. Why would I stop?

[Road Walker] ted.com

Road Walker — 6/17/2018 10:56:24 AM

[Sun Tzu] I should have been clear - I meant physical scientific cosmology such as that pr...

Sun Tzu — 3/29/2018 8:55:52 PM

I should have been clear - I meant physical scientific cosmology such as that practiced by Stephen Hawking. I was not talking about religious cosmology or philosophical ones. In fact, a comparison of these will make my point.

[Sun Tzu] What you are saying is that S uses H to produce something that could be wrong. ...

Sun Tzu — 3/29/2018 8:26:57 PM

What you are saying is that S uses H to produce something that could be wrong. R also uses H to produce something that could be wrong. Therefore S = R, which is a falacy.

>> factual of the difference, when you go to the universal level, is likely not that different

Nope. Science and Religion/philosophy are not physical objects that you can measure how similar they are. They are processes for achieving something and are defined by their end product. Not only their end product is very different, the way they go about producing that end product is also very different. Cosmology is not the same thing as philosophy or religion. Go ahead and do a real comparison.

[Road Walker] They don't care that they were wrong before. But the same is not true for religi...

Road Walker — 3/29/2018 7:35:53 PM

They don't care that they were wrong before. But the same is not true for religion. Nobody wants to hear that their god is dead or never existed.

This is a huge difference and it changes the way these two operate. Science welcomes the change and actively provides means and methods for it. But religion hates apostasy and works hard to make it impossible. Which is why if it cannot be proven one way or another, it is not science.

Well, you do have a point. Religion is probably more sticky. But science is also sticky.

But I’m saying the factual of the difference, when you go to the universal level, is likely not that different. Religion and science are probably both wildly wrong (most religions, obviously). Buddhism is maybe closer to the truth than others I think, but what do I know?

Just don’t “worship” science it’s just as falable, in the end, as anything human. It makes for a wonderful working hypothesis, makes living a little easier. And religion makes for a wonderful working social hypothesis for many (not me).

We’re human. It’s likely whatever we believe is wrong some way or another.

[Sun Tzu] >> As I said, there is not much difference between science and religion at the u...

Sun Tzu — 3/29/2018 6:43:22 PM

>> As I said, there is not much difference between science and religion at the universal level.

Yes, you keep saying that and refusing to see the difference. I will agree with you when you show me a religion or even a religious belief that can be disproven.

>> Really, all I’m saying, is that “science” at base is speculation.

No. Science is a lot more than speculation. Science is the application of scientific method to the speculations. The big difference between science and religion is that scientists want to know whereas religion wants to believe. These are not the same things. Hypothetically, if you somehow *prove* that evil spirits rather than bacteria make people sick, scientists will welcome the new discovery. They don't care that they were wrong before. But the same is not true for religion. Nobody wants to hear that their god is dead or never existed.

This is a huge difference and it changes the way these two operate. Science welcomes the change and actively provides means and methods for it. But religion hates apostasy and works hard to make it impossible. Which is why if it cannot be proven one way or another, it is not science.

[Road Walker] Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed t...

Road Walker — 3/29/2018 4:46:53 PM

Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers like Thales, Parmenides, Plato, Averroes, Spinoza, Leibniz and William James. Panpsychism can also be seen in ancient philosophies such as Stoicism, Taoism, Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism. During the 19th century, panpsychism was the default theory in philosophy of mind, but it saw a decline during the middle years of the 20th century with the rise of logical positivism. [1] [2] The recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness has revived interest in panpsychism. [1]

As I said, there is not much difference between science and religion at the universal level.

Who knows, an entire universe could be contained in a single earth atom. Our entire universe could be containing in a single atom, somewhere. We don’t know. Infinity is quirky, likely 3 dimensional (or more dimensional that out physics doesn’t understand).

Really, all I’m saying, is that “science” at base is speculation. Pretty good on earth bound physics, mostly, but also primarily subject to disproof. When looking at infite things, like the human brain, it’s all a guess.

[TimF] The more you know the more you know about the gaps in your knowledge... A lot m...

TimF — 3/29/2018 3:42:34 PM

The more you know the more you know about the gaps in your knowledge...

A lot more is understood than in the past, but that understanding itself isn't perfect and is subject to potential revision.

That having been said Panpsychism, strikes me more as religion or philosophy than science. Its not just that its speculative, its that I don't see any evidence for it at all.

[Road Walker] Exactly what I’ve been saying. Except that much stuff is eventually proved wrong...

Road Walker — 3/29/2018 3:37:20 PM

Exactly what I’ve been saying. Except that much stuff is eventually proved wrong, despite our observation. We’re hopelessly provincial in the vastness of the universe. We can’t even explore our tiny solar system. We have no idea why this green planet, teaming with billions of organisms on so many levels, exists. One square inch of Earth soil contains far more organic life than we’ve found in the entire, infinite universe.

Our “science” has no clue... so speculation is about the only thing this feeble species can do. We can’t “prove” anything.

[TimF] Astronomy is more observational science than experiment. Still you an observe s...

TimF — 3/29/2018 3:04:43 PM

Astronomy is more observational science than experiment. Still you an observe something over and over, make predictions and theories, and than see if they pan out in future observations.

[Road Walker] Astronomers think coronas have one of two likely configurations. The "lamppost" ...

Road Walker — 3/29/2018 2:52:31 PM

Astronomers think coronas have one of two likely configurations. The "lamppost" model says they are compact sources of light, similar to light bulbs, that sit above and below the black hole, along its rotation axis. The other model proposes that the coronas are spread out more diffusely, either as a larger cloud around the black hole, or as a "sandwich" that envelops the surrounding disk of material like slices of bread. In fact, it's possible that coronas switch between both the lamppost and sandwich configurations.

So... it’s not science because it’s can’t be tested and proved?

[TimF] Speaking of black holes, did you see that “stuff” was observed coming OUT of a b...

TimF — 3/29/2018 2:45:54 PM

Speaking of black holes, did you see that “stuff” was observed coming OUT of a black hole, recently?

Do you mean this en.wikipedia.org

Probably not that's nothing new.

A quick search suggests you probably mean this jpl.nasa.gov

Its not really from the black hole (if by that you mean coming out through the event horizon), its from the material swirling around the black hole.

From that link -

Supermassive black holes don't give off any light themselves, but they are often encircled by disks of hot, glowing material. The gravity of a black hole pulls swirling gas into it, heating this material and causing it to shine with different types of light. Another source of radiation near a black hole is the corona. Coronas are made up of highly energetic particles that generate X-ray light, but details about their appearance, and how they form, are unclear.

Astronomers think coronas have one of two likely configurations. The "lamppost" model says they are compact sources of light, similar to light bulbs, that sit above and below the black hole, along its rotation axis. The other model proposes that the coronas are spread out more diffusely, either as a larger cloud around the black hole, or as a "sandwich" that envelops the surrounding disk of material like slices of bread. In fact, it's possible that coronas switch between both the lamppost and sandwich configurations.

The new data support the "lamppost" model -- and demonstrate, in the finest detail yet, how the light-bulb-like coronas move. The observations began when Swift, which monitors the sky for cosmic outbursts of X-rays and gamma rays, caught a large flare coming from the supermassive black hole called Markarian 335, or Mrk 335, located 324 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Pegasus. This supermassive black hole, which sits at the center of a galaxy, was once one of the brightest X-ray sources in the sky.

"Something very strange happened in 2007, when Mrk 335 faded by a factor of 30. What we have found is that it continues to erupt in flares but has not reached the brightness levels and stability seen before," said Luigi Gallo, the principal investigator for the project at Saint Mary's University. Another co-author, Dirk Grupe of Morehead State University in Kentucky, has been using Swift to regularly monitor the black hole since 2007.

In September 2014, Swift caught Mrk 335 in a huge flare. Once Gallo found out, he sent a request to the NuSTAR team to quickly follow up on the object as part of a "target of opportunity" program, where the observatory's previously planned observing schedule is interrupted for important events. Eight days later, NuSTAR set its X-ray eyes on the target, witnessing the final half of the flare event.

After careful scrutiny of the data, the astronomers realized they were seeing the ejection, and eventual collapse, of the black hole's corona.

"The corona gathered inward at first and then launched upwards like a jet," said Wilkins. "We still don't know how jets in black holes form, but it's an exciting possibility that this black hole's corona was beginning to form the base of a jet before it collapsed."

How could the researchers tell the corona moved? The corona gives off X-ray light that has a slightly different spectrum -- X-ray "colors" -- than the light coming from the disk around the black hole. By analyzing a spectrum of X-ray light from Mrk 335 across a range of wavelengths observed by both Swift and NuSTAR, the researchers could tell that the corona X-ray light had brightened -- and that this brightening was due to the motion of the corona.

Coronas can move very fast. The corona associated with Mrk 335, according to the scientists, was traveling at about 20 percent the speed of light. When this happens, and the corona launches in our direction, its light is brightened in an effect called relativistic Doppler boosting.

Putting this all together, the results show that the X-ray flare from this black hole was caused by the ejected corona.

"The nature of the energetic source of X-rays we call the corona is mysterious, but now with the ability to see dramatic changes like this we are getting clues about its size and structure," said Fiona Harrison, the principal investigator of NuSTAR at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who was not affiliated with the study.

Many other black hole brainteasers remain. For example, astronomers want to understand what causes the ejection of the corona in the first place.

[Road Walker] So an untestable hypothesis is not science. I suspect we’re going down a semant...

Road Walker — 3/29/2018 2:02:41 PM

So an untestable hypothesis is not science.

I suspect we’re going down a semantic black hole here. (Speaking of black holes, did you see that “stuff” was observed coming OUT of a black hole, recently? There goes that proven theory).

All of science, to me, is speculation and working hypothesis just waiting to be disproved. Gravity? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps there is a different explanation.

My feeling, yes feeling, is that we don’t really know anything about how the physics of the universe really work. We’re hopelessly isolated from the mechanics, and don’t even understand the language it speaks, probably can’t see the spectrum it put out, likely can’t hear the decibel range, can’t touch or smell it. We’re local, mobile sensors on own little speck of a planet in infinity.

[Sun Tzu] I don't know of any scientific theory that cannot be (dis)proved and is not mo...

Sun Tzu — 3/29/2018 1:25:57 PM

I don't know of any scientific theory that cannot be (dis)proved *and* is not mocked by other scientists. The nearest thing I can think of is String Theory. Despite its mathematical and theoretical physics foundation, because it cannot be disproven, many physicists don't consider its proponents as real scientists. Here's one book that set out tackle this deficiency of theirs: Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law

"Not Even Wrong" shows the dominant scientific attitude. Real, scientists prefer a wrong theory over one that cannot be proven/disproven one way or another. Science could be defined as the application of scientific method. See

Scientific method - Wikipedia
The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry is commonly based on empirical or measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.

So an untestable hypothesis is not science. It could pass as religion, philosophy, or just plain amusing naval gazing, but not as science.

[Road Walker] When you get to the question of consciousness science and religion are not so fa...

Road Walker — 3/29/2018 6:06:55 AM

When you get to the question of consciousness science and religion are not so far apart. And science is full of theory that can’t be proved or disproved. And many more that have been proved, then disproved.

[Sun Tzu] In this context, "couldn't" and "can't" are apples and oranges. While we couldn...

Sun Tzu — 3/27/2018 2:24:41 PM

In this context, "couldn't" and "can't" are apples and oranges.

While we couldn't test Einstein's theory of relativity, it was clearly a testable theory. All you had to do was to go very fast and have sensitive enough measurement equipment. As technology progressed, this became feasible and we have tested the theory many times and proved it.

On the other hand, your spoon is conscious or the whole universe is conscious are not things that you can test. Or at least I cannot think of a test for them. But if the authors can come up with it, then that would go a long way towards making their hypothesis respectable.

What rubbed me the wrong way in that article was the claim that many respectable scientists are giving weight to such thought - that is hogwash. No respectable scientist will give credence to a theory that could never be proven one way or another. That is the realm of religion, not science.

ST

[koan] I try enjoying myself. I play poker several days a week and enjoy that. And swi...

koan — 3/27/2018 11:37:33 AM

I try enjoying myself. I play poker several days a week and enjoy that.

And swim and watch good movies.

And I still post on SI to get my intellectual fix.

[Road Walker] I’m trying to hibernate from “thinking too much”. The Trump effect. Life is bett...

Road Walker — 3/27/2018 11:33:48 AM

I’m trying to hibernate from “thinking too much”. The Trump effect. Life is better if you don’t think.

[Road Walker] I love the idea of a conscious universe, but how would we test if the universe i...

Road Walker — 3/27/2018 11:28:46 AM

I love the idea of a conscious universe, but how would we test if the universe is conscious?

We can’t test for it, as we couldn’t for Einstein’s special theory of relativity. That doesn’t mean the idea isn’t very important. You need the theory first, to develope the tests. And they can take generations.

That said, I think we’re probably wrong about most everything. We seem to disprove far more than we “prove”.

So yes, speculation is our game, we love and play it very well with great joy.

[koan] So nice to hear from you again. Yes I am struggling with it too. I have been ...

koan — 3/27/2018 11:20:00 AM

So nice to hear from you again.

Yes I am struggling with it too.

I have been watching a lot of cinema from around the world on Netflix. Sort of like taking an anthropology course :)>.

A positive note in today's scary world is how it seems all the countries are engaged in replacing primitive norms and mores regarding misogyny, racism and caste systems with modern humanitarian ideas.

Sort of what the west went through in the 60's. The 60's part II. The establishment of modern humanitarian existential societies.

A film on Netflix is Ladies first which tells the story of an Indian female bow athlete and how India is still so misogynistic; but the modern writers and cinema directors are making these subject the thesis of many of their movies.

[Road Walker] I read most of it, then became distracted. Old age strikes again.

Road Walker — 3/27/2018 11:12:44 AM

[Sun Tzu] For any theory to be scientifically viable, it has to be testable and refutable....

Sun Tzu — 3/25/2018 1:09:30 PM

For any theory to be scientifically viable, it has to be testable and refutable. The "weird" stuff in quantum mechanics actually predict behavior and scientist state how we could test for those behaviors. Sometimes it takes a long time to develop the technology that can test the scientific, as was the case for gravitational waves. But that does not change the fact that the theory was testable.

I love the idea of a conscious universe, but how would we test if the universe is conscious?

And while I am conscious, I have no reason to believe that the individual cells in my body are conscious, let alone the rocks and spoons. How does the author suggest we test if a spoon is conscious?

I am not hostile to these concepts, but a theory that is not testable is like a competitive sport that has no score. You can't really call it a "game;" it's more like a group activity say ... discussing modern art, than basketball.

[Road Walker] The idea that everything from spoons to stones are conscious is gaining academic...

Road Walker — 3/25/2018 12:47:16 PM

The idea that everything from spoons to stones are conscious is gaining academic credibility

Written by Olivia Goldhill

ROCK CONSCIOUSNESSIs everything conscious? (NASA)

Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.

This sounds like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, the “panpsychist” view is increasingly being taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger Penrose.

“Why should we think common sense is a good guide to what the universe is like?” says Philip Goff, a philosophy professor at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. “Einstein tells us weird things about the nature of time that counters common sense; quantum mechanics runs counter to common sense. Our intuitive reaction isn’t necessarily a good guide to the nature of reality.”

David Chalmers, a philosophy of mind professor at New York University, laid out the “ hard problem of consciousness” in 1995, demonstrating that there was still no answer to the question of what causes consciousness. Traditionally, two dominant perspectives, materialism and dualism, have provided a framework for solving this problem. Both lead to seemingly intractable complications.

“Physics is just structure. It can explain biology, but there’s a gap: Consciousness.” The materialist viewpoint states that consciousness is derived entirely from physical matter. It’s unclear, though, exactly how this could work. “It’s very hard to get consciousness out of non-consciousness,” says Chalmers. “Physics is just structure. It can explain biology, but there’s a gap: Consciousness.” Dualism holds that consciousness is separate and distinct from physical matter—but that then raises the question of how consciousness interacts and has an effect on the physical world.

Panpsychism offers an attractive alternative solution: Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter; every single particle in existence has an “unimaginably simple” form of consciousness, says Goff. These particles then come together to form more complex forms of consciousness, such as humans’ subjective experiences. This isn’t meant to imply that particles have a coherent worldview or actively think, merely that there’s some inherent subjective experience of consciousness in even the tiniest particle.

Panpsychism doesn’t necessarily imply that every inanimate object is conscious. “Panpsychists usually don’t take tables and other artifacts to be conscious as a whole,” writes Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosophy researcher at New York University’s Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, in an email. “Rather, the table could be understood as a collection of particles that each have their own very simple form of consciousness.”

But, then again, panpsychism could very well imply that conscious tables exist: One interpretation of the theory holds that “any system is conscious,” says Chalmers. “Rocks will be conscious, spoons will be conscious, the Earth will be conscious. Any kind of aggregation gives you consciousness.”

Interest in panpsychism has grown in part thanks to the increased academic focus on consciousness itself following on from Chalmers’ “hard problem” paper. Philosophers at NYU, home to one of the leading philosophy-of-mind departments, have made panpsychism a feature of serious study. There have been several credible academic books on the subject in recent years, and popular articles taking panpsychism seriously.

One of the most popular and credible contemporary neuroscience theories on consciousness, Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory, further lends credence to panpsychism. Tononi argues that something will have a form of “consciousness” if the information contained within the structure is sufficiently “integrated,” or unified, and so the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Because it applies to all structures—not just the human brain—Integrated Information Theory shares the panpsychist view that physical matter has innate conscious experience.

Goff, who has written an academic book on consciousness and is working on another that approaches the subject from a more popular-science perspective, notes that there were credible theories on the subject dating back to the 1920s. Thinkers including philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Arthur Eddington made a serious case for panpsychism, but the field lost momentum after World War II, when philosophy became largely focused on analytic philosophical questions of language and logic. Interest picked up again in the 2000s, thanks both to recognition of the “hard problem” and to increased adoption of the structural-realist approach in physics, explains Chalmers. This approach views physics as describing structure, and not the underlying nonstructural elements.

“Physical science tells us a lot less about the nature of matter than we tend to assume,” says Goff. “Eddington”—the English scientist who experimentally confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity in the early 20th century—“argued there’s a gap in our picture of the universe. We know what matter does but not what it is. We can put consciousness into this gap.”

“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” In Eddington’s view, Goff writes in an email, it’s “”silly” to suppose that that underlying nature has nothing to do with consciousness and then to wonder where consciousness comes from.” Stephen Hawking has previously asked: “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Goff adds: “The Russell-Eddington proposal is that it is consciousness that breathes fire into the equations.”

The biggest problem caused by panpsychism is known as the “combination problem”: Precisely how do small particles of consciousness collectively form more complex consciousness? Consciousness may exist in all particles, but that doesn’t answer the question of how these tiny fragments of physical consciousness come together to create the more complex experience of human consciousness.

Any theory that attempts to answer that question, would effectively determine which complex systems—from inanimate objects to plants to ants—count as conscious.

An alternative panpsychist perspective holds that, rather than individual particles holding consciousness and coming together, the universe as a whole is conscious. This, says Goff, isn’t the same as believing the universe is a unified divine being; it’s more like seeing it as a “cosmic mess.” Nevertheless, it does reflect a perspective that the world is a top-down creation, where every individual thing is derived from the universe, rather than a bottom-up version where objects are built from the smallest particles. Goff believes quantum entanglement—the finding that certain particles behave as a single unified system even when they’re separated by such immense distances there can’t be a causal signal between them—suggests the universe functions as a fundamental whole rather than a collection of discrete parts.

Such theories sound incredible, and perhaps they are. But then again, so is every other possible theory that explains consciousness. “The more I think about [any theory], the less plausible it becomes,” says Chalmers. “One starts as a materialist, then turns into a dualist, then a panpsychist, then an idealist,” he adds, echoing his paper on the subject. Idealism holds that physical matter does not exist at all and conscious experience is the only thing there is. From that perspective, panpsychism is quite moderate.

Chalmers quotes his colleague, the philosopher John Perry, who says: “If you think about consciousness long enough, you either become a panpsychist or you go into administra

[Road Walker] Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious? By JOANNA...

Road Walker — 2/6/2018 4:32:33 PM

Sedate a Plant, and It Seems to Lose Consciousness. Is It Conscious?
By JOANNA KLEIN FEB. 2, 2018

In an experiment, scientists sedated plants like the Venus fly trap. When the drugs wore off, the plants came back to life, almost as if they were regaining consciousness. Ken Yokawa, et al. Plants don’t get enough credit.

They move. You know this. Your houseplant salutes the sun each morning. At night, it returns to center.

You probably don’t think much of it. This is simply what plants do: Get light. Photosynthesize. Make food. Live.

But what about all the signs of plant intelligence that have been observed?

Under poor soil conditions, the pea seems to be able to assess risk. The sensitive plant can make memories and learn to stop recoiling if you mess with it enough. The Venus fly trap appears to count when insects trigger its trap. And plants can communicate with one another and with caterpillars.

Now, a study published recently in Annals of Botany has shown that plants can be frozen in place with a range of anesthetics, including the types that are used when you undergo surgery.

Insights gleaned from the study may help doctors better understand the variety of anesthetics used in surgeries. But the research also highlights that plants are complex organisms, perhaps less different from animals than is often assumed.

“Plants are not just robotic, stimulus-response devices,” said Frantisek Baluska, a plant cell biologist at the University of Bonn in Germany and co-author of the study. “They’re living organisms which have their own problems, maybe something like with humans feeling pain or joy. In order to navigate this complex life, they must have some compass.”

Plants sometimes use that compass to deal with stress, competition or development. They take in information from their environment and produce their own anesthetics like menthol, ethanol and cocaine, similar to how humans release chemicals that dull pain during trauma. These may act within the plant itself or float off in the air to affect neighboring plants.

Our anesthetics work on plants too, the study confirmed, although what exactly they’re working on is unclear.

The researchers trapped pea plants in glass chambers with ether, soaked roots of the sensitive plant and seedlings of garden cress in lidocaine and even measured the electrical activity of a Venus fly trap’s cells. An hour or so later the plants became unresponsive. The seedlings stayed dormant. And the Venus fly trap didn’t react to a stimulus similar to a bug crawling across its maw. Its cells stopped firing.

When the dope wore off, the plants returned to life, as if something had hit pause — almost like they were regaining consciousness, something we typically don’t think they possess. It’s all so animal-like.

“How organisms are perceiving the environment or responding or adapting are based on some very similar principles,” Dr. Baluska said.

Researchers already knew that anesthetics with different chemical structures or elements all seem to halt pain, consciousness or activity in plants and animals — even bacteria. But how they render us unconscious or how so many different kinds physically act on the human nervous system still elude us after more than a century of use. Some bind to receptors to turn off activity. But this can’t explain them all.

Under anesthetics, the physical properties of cell membranes change, becoming more flexible. Apply pressure to the cells, this effect is reversed and the anesthetic wears off. This suggests that something simple, like what is physically happening to a cell’s membrane, may be the common denominator explaining anesthetics’ effects across the plant and animal kingdoms, Dr. Baluska and colleagues suggest.

In some plant root cells under anesthesia, Dr. Baluska and his colleagues found that membranes were having trouble doing what they normally do, recycling bits of cellular material by transporting it in and out of cells.

Dr. Baluska can’t say what was altering membrane function in the plants, but membranes are important for transferring messages via electricity from one cell to another, messages that would lead to action or movement.

The electrical activity that moves across neurons is thought by some scientists to contribute to human consciousness. If electrical activity is being disrupted by anesthetic in plants, too, causing them to “lose consciousness,” does that mean, in some way, that they are conscious?

“No one can answer this because you cannot ask them,” said Dr. Baluska.

Even so, perhaps we’re more alike, us and plants, than we think.

[The Ox] Brain 'pacemaker' for Alzheimer's bbc.com

The Ox — 1/30/2018 3:06:27 PM

[koan] Yes, we are standing on a cliff called "our ability to destroy ourselves or make...

koan — 12/28/2017 11:30:32 AM

Yes, we are standing on a cliff called "our ability to destroy ourselves or make for a better world", and education is the key.

I also think it is the way the universe works and the human journey has been made by countless sentient beings over time. It is our manifest destiny.

[Nathan Avery] I also had a read of the book by Yuval Noah Harari. It is absolutely an epic! Th...

Nathan Avery — 12/28/2017 1:03:13 AM

I also had a read of the book by Yuval Noah Harari. It is absolutely an epic! The ending will make you feel like we are standing at the edge of a cliff after a long and arduous journey.

IMO, A must read!

[koan] Species:I haven't read it yet, but am starting to read Human Deux, I am on the ...

koan — 11/20/2017 11:52:35 AM

Species:I haven't read it yet, but am starting to read Human Deux,

I am on the road moving to Las Vegas to play poker.

Lot's of time to read now.

Let me know what you think of Species.

Have you read the Axe Makers Gift yet? That is still the book I recommend most to provide people with a comprehensive picture of the evolution of the human species.

[koan] They are just talking about basic stuff e.g. the word is round, the earth moves ...

koan — 11/20/2017 11:45:09 AM

They are just talking about basic stuff e.g. the word is round, the earth moves around the sun, one should not own slaves :.>).

Otherwise I agree with you.

<<Knowlege Directed perception.

I’m starting to think that isn’t possible. We’re sensors, Nature is way too complex for our very complex brains. We’re just wandering around.

[Road Walker] Gottfried, it makes you LOOK. And think. Can’t stand doing my photo hikes with o...

Road Walker — 11/18/2017 5:21:59 PM

Gottfried, it makes you LOOK. And think. Can’t stand doing my photo hikes with other people. They don’t pay attention to what’s around them; they “talk”. About themselves, mostly. I go brain dead, can’t see any light, color, great shapes. I never take a picture.

[Road Walker] Knowlege Directed perception. I’m starting to think that isn’t possible. We’re ...

Road Walker — 11/18/2017 5:16:39 PM

Knowlege Directed perception.

I’m starting to think that isn’t possible. We’re sensors, Nature is way too complex for our very complex brains. We’re just wandering around.

[Road Walker] Started reading Sapiens. Good, but got bogged down in other things.

Road Walker — 11/18/2017 5:09:58 PM

[Gottfried] it forces mindfulness. Good observation. I've not seen photography mentioned in ...

Gottfried — 10/30/2017 3:19:22 AM

it forces mindfulness. Good observation. I've not seen photography mentioned in mindfulness literature

[koan] I agree, another way of viewing that is as perspective and context. But in the ...

koan — 10/18/2017 7:15:48 PM

I agree, another way of viewing that is as perspective and context.

But in the end, it is too see, that is directly connected to knowing, but more profound.

Knowlege Directed perception.

<<

Thank you Shane. Yes I shoot in RAW (not jpeg) so some processing is required. I don't do photoshop, just some altering of the basics in Lightroom. I enjoy the shooting part a lot more than the post production part, I never spend more than a couple of minutes on a single photo.

The best part of photography for me is that it forces you to pay intimate attention to your surroundings. To look at connections of things, at light, at texture. The camera is a means to a very different experiential end.

[koan] Reading Homo Deus and the long home (sci fi). Home deus is the future he sees f...

koan — 10/18/2017 7:09:31 PM

Reading Homo Deus and the long home (sci fi).

Home deus is the future he sees for our integrating with AI, merging he calls it, marriage I call it.

[Road Walker] Sorry, don't buy into this at all... --- In ‘Enormous Success,’ Scientists Tie ...

Road Walker — 5/24/2017 1:50:19 PM

Sorry, don't buy into this at all...

---
In ‘Enormous Success,’ Scientists Tie 52 Genes to Human Intelligence
Carl Zimmer

MAY 22, 2017

Blood samples from some participants in a new study of genes linked to intelligence were held at the U.K. Biobank, above. Wellcome Trust In a significant advance in the study of mental ability, a team of European and American scientists announced on Monday that they had identified 52 genes linked to intelligence in nearly 80,000 people.

These genes do not determine intelligence, however. Their combined influence is minuscule, the researchers said, suggesting that thousands more are likely to be involved and still await discovery. Just as important, intelligence is profoundly shaped by the environment.

Still, the findings could make it possible to begin new experiments into the biological basis of reasoning and problem-solving, experts said. They could even help researchers determine which interventions would be most effective for children struggling to learn.

“This represents an enormous success,” said Paige Harden, a psychologist at the University of Texas, who was not involved in the study.

For over a century, psychologists have studied intelligence by asking people questions. Their exams have evolved into batteries of tests, each probing a different mental ability, such as verbal reasoning or memorization.

In a typical test, the tasks might include imagining an object rotating, picking out a shape to complete a figure, and then pressing a button as fast as possible whenever a particular type of word appears.

Each test-taker may get varying scores for different abilities. But over all, these scores tend to hang together — people who score low on one measure tend to score low on the others, and vice versa. Psychologists sometimes refer to this similarity as general intelligence.

Danielle Posthuma, a geneticist at Vrije University Amsterdam. Yvonne Compier It’s still not clear what in the brain accounts for intelligence. Neuroscientists have compared the brains of people with high and low test scores for clues, and they’ve found a few.

Brain size explains a small part of the variation, for example, although there are plenty of people with small brains who score higher than others with bigger brains.

Other studies hint that intelligence has something to do with how efficiently a brain can send signals from one region to another.

Danielle Posthuma, a geneticist at Vrije University Amsterdam and senior author of the new paper, first became interested in the study of intelligence in the 1990s. “I’ve always been intrigued by how it works,” she said. “Is it a matter of connections in the brain, or neurotransmitters that aren’t sufficient?”

Dr. Posthuma wanted to find the genes that influence intelligence. She started by studying identical twins who share the same DNA. Identical twins tended to have more similar intelligence test scores than fraternal twins, she and her colleagues found.

Hundreds of other studies have come to the same conclusion, showing a clear genetic influence on intelligence. But that doesn’t mean that intelligence is determined by genes alone.

Our environment exerts its own effects, only some of which scientists understand well. Lead in drinking water, for instance, can drag down test scores. In places where food doesn’t contain iodine, giving supplements to children can raise scores.

Advances in DNA sequencing technology raised the possibility that researchers could find individual genes underlying differences in intelligence test scores. Some candidates were identified in small populations, but their effects did not reappear in studies on larger groups.

So scientists turned to what’s now called the genome-wide association study: They sequence bits of genetic material scattered across the DNA of many unrelated people, then look to see whether people who share a particular condition — say, a high intelligence test score — also share the same genetic marker.

In 2014, Dr. Posthuma was part of a large-scale study of over 150,000 people that revealed 108 genes linked to schizophrenia. But she and her colleagues had less luck with intelligence, which has proved a hard nut to crack for a few reasons.

Standard intelligence tests can take a long time to complete, making it hard to gather results on huge numbers of people. Scientists can try combining smaller studies, but they often have to merge different tests together, potentially masking the effects of genes.

As a result, the first generation of genome-wide association studies on intelligence failed to find any genes. Later studies managed to turn up promising results, but when researchers turned to other groups of people, the effect of the genes again disappeared.

But in the past couple of years, larger studies relying on new statistical methods finally have produced compelling evidence that particular genes really are involved in shaping human intelligence.

“There’s a huge amount of real innovation going on,” said Stuart J. Ritchie, a geneticist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the new study.

Dr. Posthuma and other experts decided to merge data from 13 earlier studies, forming a vast database of genetic markers and intelligence test scores. After so many years of frustration, Dr. Posthuma was pessimistic it would work.

“I thought, ‘Of course we’re not going to find anything,’” she said.

She was wrong. To her surprise, 52 genes emerged with firm links to intelligence. A dozen had turned up in earlier studies, but 40 were entirely new.

But all of these genes together account for just a small percentage of the variation in intelligence test scores, the researchers found; each variant raises or lowers I.Q. by only a small fraction of a point.

“It means there’s a long way to go, and there are going to be a lot of other genes that are going to be important,” Dr. Posthuma said.

Christopher F. Chabris, a co-author of the new study at Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pa., was optimistic that many of those missing genes would come to light, thanks to even larger studies involving hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people.

“It’s just like astronomy getting better with bigger telescopes,” he said.

In the new study, Dr. Posthuma and her colleagues limited their research to people of European descent because that raised the odds of finding common genetic variants linked to intelligence.

But other gene studies have shown that variants in one population can fail to predict what people are like in other populations. Different variants turn out to be important in different groups, and this may well be the case with intelligence.

“If you try to predict height using the genes we’ve identified in Europeans in Africans, you’d predict all Africans are five inches shorter than Europeans, which isn’t true,” Dr. Posthuma said.

Studies like the one published today don’t mean that intelligence is fixed by our genes, experts noted. “If we understand the biology of something, that doesn’t mean we’re putting it down to determinism,” Dr. Ritchie said.

As an analogy, he noted that nearsightedness is strongly influenced by genes. But we can change the environment — in the form of eyeglasses — to improve people’s eyesight.

Dr. Harden predicted that an emerging understanding of the genetics of intelligence would make it possible to find better ways to help children develop intellectually. Knowing people’s genetic variations would help scientists measure how effective different strategies are.

Still, Dr. Harden said, we don’t have to wait for such studies to change people’s environments for the better. “We know that lead harms children’s intellectual abilities,” she said. “There’s low-hanging policy fruit here.”

For her part, Dr. Posthuma wants to make sense of the 52 genes she and her colleagues discovered. There are intriguing overlaps between their influence on intelligence and on other traits.

The genetic variants that raise intelligence also tend to pop up more frequently in people who have never smoked. Some of them also are found more often in people who take up smoking but quit successfully.

As for what the genes actually do, Dr. Posthuma can’t say. Four of them are known to control the development of cells, for example, and three do an assortment of things inside neurons.

To understand what makes these genes special, scientists may need to run experiments on brain cells. One possibility would be to take cells from people with variants that predict high and low intelligence.

She and her colleagues might coax them to develop into neurons, which could then grow into “mini-brains” — clusters of neurons that exchange signals in the laboratory. Researchers could then see if their genetic differences made them behave differently.

“We can’t do it overnight,” Dr. Posthuma said, “but it’s something I hope to be able to do in the future.”

[Road Walker] We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment By MARTIN E. P. SELIGMAN and JOHN TIERNEY...

Road Walker — 5/21/2017 6:08:13 AM

We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment
By MARTIN E. P. SELIGMAN and JOHN TIERNEYMAY 19, 2017

nytimes.com

Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch We are misnamed. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise man,” but that’s more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart from other animals? Various answers have been proposed — language, tools, cooperation, culture, tasting bad to predators — but none is unique to humans.

What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation. Other animals have springtime rituals for educating the young, but only we subject them to “commencement” speeches grandly informing them that today is the first day of the rest of their lives.

A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.

Behaviorists thought of animal learning as the ingraining of habit by repetition. Psychoanalysts believed that treating patients was a matter of unearthing and confronting the past. Even when cognitive psychology emerged, it focused on the past and present — on memory and perception.

But it is increasingly clear that the mind is mainly drawn to the future, not driven by the past. Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities. Our brain sees the world not by processing every pixel in a scene but by focusing on the unexpected.

Our emotions are less reactions to the present than guides to future behavior. Therapists are exploring new ways to treat depression now that they see it as primarily not because of past traumas and present stresses but because of skewed visions of what lies ahead.

Prospection enables us to become wise not just from our own experiences but also by learning from others. We are social animals like no others, living and working in very large groups of strangers, because we have jointly constructed the future. Human culture — our language, our division of labor, our knowledge, our laws and technology — is possible only because we can anticipate what fellow humans will do in the distant future. We make sacrifices today to earn rewards tomorrow, whether in this life or in the afterlife promised by so many religions.

Some of our unconscious powers of prospection are shared by animals, but hardly any other creatures are capable of thinking more than a few minutes ahead. Squirrels bury nuts by instinct, not because they know winter is coming. Ants cooperate to build dwellings because they’re genetically programmed to do so, not because they’ve agreed on a blueprint. Chimpanzees have sometimes been known to exercise short-term foresight, like the surly male at a Swedish zoo who was observed stockpiling rocks to throw at gawking humans, but they are nothing like Homo prospectus.

If you’re a chimp, you spend much of the day searching for your next meal. If you’re a human, you can usually rely on the foresight of your supermarket’s manager, or you can make a restaurant reservation for Saturday evening thanks to a remarkably complicated feat of collaborative prospection. You and the restaurateur both imagine a future time — “Saturday” exists only as a collective fantasy — and anticipate each other’s actions. You trust the restaurateur to acquire food and cook it for you. She trusts you to show up and give her money, which she will accept only because she expects her landlord to accept it in exchange for occupying his building.

The central role of prospection has emerged in recent studies of both conscious and unconscious mental processes, like one in Chicago that pinged nearly 500 adults during the day to record their immediate thoughts and moods. If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past, and even those few thoughts about a past event typically involved consideration of its future implications.

When making plans, they reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress than at other times, presumably because planning turns a chaotic mass of concerns into an organized sequence. Although they sometimes feared what might go wrong, on average there were twice as many thoughts of what they hoped would happen.

While most people tend to be optimistic, those suffering from depression and anxiety have a bleak view of the future — and that in fact seems to be the chief cause of their problems, not their past traumas nor their view of the present. While traumas do have a lasting impact, most people actually emerge stronger afterward. Others continue struggling because they over-predict failure and rejection. Studies have shown depressed people are distinguished from the norm by their tendency to imagine fewer positive scenarios while overestimating future risks.

They withdraw socially and become paralyzed by exaggerated self-doubt. A bright and accomplished student imagines: If I flunk the next test, then I’ll let everyone down and show what a failure I really am. Researchers have begun successfully testing therapies designed to break this pattern by training sufferers to envision positive outcomes (imagine passing the test) and to see future risks more realistically (think of the possibilities remaining even if you flunk the test).

Most prospection occurs at the unconscious level as the brain sifts information to generate predictions. Our systems of vision and hearing, like those of animals, would be overwhelmed if we had to process every pixel in a scene or every sound around us. Perception is manageable because the brain generates its own scene, so that the world remains stable even though your eyes move three times a second. This frees the perceptual system to heed features it didn’t predict, which is why you’re not aware of a ticking clock unless it stops. It’s also why you don’t laugh when you tickle yourself: You already know what’s coming next.

Behaviorists used to explain learning as the ingraining of habits by repetition and reinforcement, but their theory couldn’t explain why animals were more interested in unfamiliar experiences than familiar ones. It turned out that even the behaviorists’ rats, far from being creatures of habit, paid special attention to unexpected novelties because that was how they learned to avoid punishment and win rewards.

The brain’s long-term memory has often been compared to an archive, but that’s not its primary purpose. Instead of faithfully recording the past, it keeps rewriting history. Recalling an event in a new context can lead to new information being inserted in the memory. Coaching of eyewitnesses can cause people to reconstruct their memory so that no trace of the original is left.

The fluidity of memory may seem like a defect, especially to a jury, but it serves a larger purpose. It’s a feature, not a bug, because the point of memory is to improve our ability to face the present and the future. To exploit the past, we metabolize it by extracting and recombining relevant information to fit novel situations.

This link between memory and prospection has emerged in research showing that people with damage to the brain’s medial temporal lobe lose memories of past experiences as well as the ability to construct rich and detailed simulations of the future. Similarly, studies of children’s development show that they’re not able to imagine future scenes until they’ve gained the ability to recall personal experiences, typically somewhere between the ages of 3 and 5.

Perhaps the most remarkable evidence comes from recent brain imaging research. When recalling a past event, the hippocampus must combine three distinct pieces of information — what happened, when it happened and where it happened — that are each stored in a different part of the brain. Researchers have found that the same circuitry is activated when people imagine a novel scene. Once again, the hippocampus combines three kinds of records (what, when and where), but this time it scrambles the information to create something new.

Even when you’re relaxing, your brain is continually recombining information to imagine the future, a process that researchers were surprised to discover when they scanned the brains of people doing specific tasks like mental arithmetic. Whenever there was a break in the task, there were sudden shifts to activity in the brain’s “default” circuit, which is used to imagine the future or retouch the past.

This discovery explains what happens when your mind wanders during a task: It’s simulating future possibilities. That’s how you can respond so quickly to unexpected developments. What may feel like a primitive intuition, a gut feeling, is made possible by those previous simulations.

Suppose you get an email invitation to a party from a colleague at work. You’re momentarily stumped. You vaguely recall turning down a previous invitation, which makes you feel obliged to accept this one, but then you imagine having a bad time because you don’t like him when he’s drinking. But then you consider you’ve never invited him to your place, and you uneasily imagine that turning this down would make him resentful, leading to problems at work.

Methodically weighing these factors would take a lot of time and energy, but you’re able to make a quick decision by using the same trick as the Google search engine when it replies to your query in less than a second. Google can instantly provide a million answers because it doesn’t start from scratch. It’s continually predicting what you might ask.

Your brain engages in the same sort of prospection to provide its own instant answers, which come in the form of emotions. The main purpose of emotions is to guide future behavior and moral judgments, according to researchers in a new field called prospective psychology. Emotions enable you to empathize with others by predicting their reactions. Once you imagine how both you and your colleague will feel if you turn down his invitation, you intuitively know you’d better reply, “Sure, thanks.”

If Homo prospectus takes the really long view, does he become morbid? That was a longstanding assumption in psychologists’ “terror management theory,” which held that humans avoid thinking about the future because they fear death. The theory was explored in hundreds of experiments assigning people to think about their own deaths. One common response was to become more assertive about one’s cultural values, like becoming more patriotic.

But there’s precious little evidence that people actually spend much time outside the lab thinking about their deaths or managing their terror of mortality. It’s certainly not what psychologists found in the study tracking Chicagoans’ daily thoughts. Less than 1 percent of their thoughts involved death, and even those were typically about other people’s deaths.

Homo prospectus is too pragmatic to obsess on death for the same reason that he doesn’t dwell on the past: There’s nothing he can do about it. He became Homo sapiens by learning to see and shape his future, and he is wise enough to keep looking straight ahead.

[The Ox] Message 31102520

The Ox — 5/11/2017 10:22:05 AM

[James Seagrove] Conrad Hilton arrested trying to breaking into ex-girlfriend's house, police say...

James Seagrove — 5/6/2017 6:17:29 PM

Conrad Hilton arrested trying to breaking into ex-girlfriend's house, police say

[koan] People who know me well, know my favorite mentor was a man who lived 2500 yea...

koan — 5/5/2017 1:05:29 PM

People who know me well, know my favorite mentor was a man who lived 2500 years ago, Plato. This is ironic for me, because I mostly study contemporary thinkers as I find the edge of knowledge the most interesting place to be. What drew me to Plato when I was young and has allowed him to remain my constant companion, was the fact he discovered the two most important things in life, IMO: 1) Kindness as a way of life; and 2) the fact we are all born into an illusion and a major goal in life should be to try and find a way out of it and move into the world of reality to the degree possible. Note: see animated shorts of Plato's:" Allegory Of The Cave" on youtube".

1) Kindness as a way of life: Being kind should be every persons most important behavior. It is something we should all try to do all the time. As I taught my children: "kindness is a compass one should always keep close as it shows the way out of the darkest places. Plato said: "be kind to everyone".

2) And my second reason is that Plato, IMO, was the world's first existentialist. Imagine, he figured that concept out 2500 years ago as shown by his historic story: "The allegory of the Cave". Plato figured out 2500 years ago that we are all born into a world of illusion and the goal in life is to find ones way out of that illusion and into a more sophisticated reality Plato figured out 2500 years ago what 99% of the world still doesn't understand today.

[Road Walker] Our Delight in Destruction Costica Bradatan MARCH 27, 2017 [graphic] Christop...

Road Walker — 3/27/2017 6:01:39 AM

Our Delight in Destruction
Costica Bradatan

MARCH 27, 2017

Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos “I, for example,” says the nameless narrator in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground (1864),” “would not be the least bit surprised if suddenly, out of the blue, amid the universal future reasonableness, some gentleman of ignoble or, better, of retrograde and jeering physiognomy, should emerge, set his arms akimbo, and say to us all: ‘Well, gentlemen, why don’t we reduce all this reasonableness to dust with one good kick, for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to the devil and living once more according to our own stupid will!’ That would still be nothing, but what is offensive is that he’d be sure to find followers: that’s how man is arranged.”

The musings of Dostoevsky’s hero certainly seem pertinent now — not just because of Donald Trump’s rise to the White House but also in light of the populist sentiment and politics emerging in other parts of the world. But for all their mocking, jovial tone, the underground man’s observations have more serious and far-reaching implications. For, after all, what he tells us here is the story of a disastrous historical blindness.

For quite a while now we in the West have been operating under certain cultural assumptions about what it means to be human: that human beings are driven by a rational “pursuit of happiness,” that they choose — again, rationally — what is best for them and what contributes to their well-being, both individual and collective. Thanks in part to this Enlightenment heritage, we’ve come to assume that history is a progression toward more inclusion, mutual understanding and respect, tolerance and acceptance and that bigotry, xenophobia, intolerance and racism are doomed to disappear as a matter of “historical necessity.” For history, Hegel has taught us (and we’ve rarely challenged this teacher), is nothing but the gradual unfolding of rationality in the world.

These assumptions are reflected in the way mainstream philosophy has come to construct the human subject. What defines us is primarily our capacity for rational thinking; we always use our reason to make decisions, to relate to the others and the world around us, to conduct our lives. Granted, we still have our emotions, we are capable of feelings and passions, but somehow, in our pursuit of the philosophical project, these aspects of our makeup are given a back seat. They are not really what we are; we are fundamentally “rational agents.”

This presumption has its benefits. For the economic and social behavior of such agents can be predicted — indeed, it can be shaped, stimulated, even engineered. Not only is it possible to know that rational agents will buy a product, but thanks to certain marketing devices they will be compelled to do so. If modern capitalism is to be considered successful, it’s because, at its core, it relies heavily on a hyper-rationalistic understanding of the human subject.

And yet what if this is all wrong and we’ve been caught in a blind spot? What if reason is not the driving force of human history and, just as often, we act irrationally, out of resentment, anger, spite, frustration, envy, even out of self-destructive impulse? What if there is even such a thing as the pursuit of unhappiness? Or, in the underground man’s own words, “What if it so happens that on occasion man’s profit not only may but precisely must consist in sometimes wishing what is bad for himself”? What if we in fact take delight in destruction? “I’m certain that man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos,” proclaims Dostoevsky’s hero in one of his more philosophical moments.

In reality, the hyper-rationalism we inhabit and embrace relies on an extreme simplification of what we really are. It is more a caricature than an actual description. And philosophy should have known better: From Diogenes of Sinope and Augustine to Pascal, from Dostoevsky, Schopenhauer and Leopardi to Nietzsche, Mishima and Cioran, there has been a long tradition of philosophizing on the human abyss. If man is a complex animal, mankind is an even more complicated beast, with many layers and regions, one more irrational than the next.

The human is a knot of contradictions and opposing drives: reason and unreason; wisdom and recklessness; faithlessness and mysticism; logic and imagination. We feed on exact science as much as we do on myths, on fictions and fabulations. We can die for others or let them perish in the cold; we can create extraordinary things only to enjoy their utter destruction; human society can be paradise and hell at one and the same time.

In the past century, philosophy has mostly abandoned the effort to account for this complexity, and so has the data-driven age that has blossomed in its wake. We’ve become masters of conformity, empirical evidence and science. We read the books of Pascal, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and the other thinkers of the abyss, if we ever do, in the way we look at ancient coins: as curiosa, interesting remnants from times past, not as something that can feed us today. They have no value when it comes to helping us make better sense of ourselves.

It’s as though we have become more Cartesian than Descartes; we refuse to have anything to do with that which is not exceedingly clear and distinct; if something defies the usual explanations and seems mysterious, then it “smacks of religion.” If a problem unsettles us, but it’s not solvable in strictly linguistic, logical or empirical terms, we deem it a “false problem” and move on. Today, it is considered unrigorous and unprofitable to talk of matters of the human heart — that obscure little thing that, more than logic or arguments, make people act and live and die.

The main reason we don’t engage with the abyss, however, is not necessarily mental laziness. Most of the time, it is sheer fear. For, as Nietzsche warned, if you look intently into an abyss, the abyss will start looking back. Dostoevsky — socialist, political prisoner, addicted gambler, epileptic, reactionary thinker and visionary artist — did plenty abyss-gazing and his testimony is overwhelming. It is clear “to the point of obviousness,” he confesses in “A Writer’s Diary,” that “evil lies deeper in human beings than our socialist-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it has always been; that abnormality and sin arise from that soul itself; and, finally, that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges.”

When the hyper-rationalist model fails, it fails spectacularly. In the American election, reason gave way to fear, resentment, hate and spite. For the most part, “rational agency” was nowhere to be found. What seemed to drive the support for Trump was darker and more complicated — the heart. And what makes this event particularly significant is not necessarily its political aspect (though that’s serious enough), but the fact that we find ourselves so poorly equipped to comprehend it. Thanks to the clumsy way in which we’ve been imagining ourselves, we are unprepared to digest it. Rarely has a failure of imagination been more humiliating.

Dealing with the human abyss used to be the province of religion, but ever since God died we haven’t really been able to find a good replacement. (Not that there are any serious candidates.) Yet if we are to remain human ignoring the problem, looking elsewhere, is not an option. The humanities can reinvent themselves only to the extent that they will be able to chart, as adequately as humanly possible, the full depth of the human abyss. Unless we will find a way to account for the whole human subject, without self-flattery and self-delusion, we will move in circles, unable to overcome the blinding hyper-rationalism under which we currently slave.

[koan] I never thought AI could be stopped. In fact I have always thought it is our ma...

koan — 3/7/2017 9:18:25 PM

I never thought AI could be stopped. In fact I have always thought it is our manifest destiny. It is the way the universe works as I posted many times. We go from inorganic systems, to organic systems and then to systems of consciousness.

I think this system has been played out in the universe many many times and now it's our turn. The trick is getting through the singularity safely. Because you have to go from a biological system based on evolution which is everything killing everything to a system where kindness has to be the thesis.

One of the things that people need to get in their mind is that our brain was not created by a God. Our brain evolved from some little animals that used to jump around in the trees and that's how it's hardwired to function.

We have the ability to override that brain and develop a new existential brain that is capable of dealing with the modern world that we have inadvertently created, in my opinion, but very few people take that journey.

That is actually a journey that should be taught in the schools with the realization that it is one we must take in order to survive. We cannot survive if we continue to use our animal brain to address modern-day problems. It is not designed correctly to do that.

[Road Walker] Thank you Shane. Yes I shoot in RAW (not jpeg) so some processing is required. I...

Road Walker — 3/6/2017 6:01:10 AM