Microcosm, a literary term used to describe how a large world/society can be illustrated in the form of a small world. (opposed to macrocosm)
Category: Cyborg Anthropology
Mentat – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mentat – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Mentat discipline is developed as a replacement for computerized calculation, humans trained to mimic computers: human minds developed to staggering heights of cognitive and analytical ability.
Unlike computers, however, Mentats are not simply calculators. Instead, the exceptional cognitive abilities of memory and perception are the foundations for supra-logical hypothesizing.
Mentats are able to sift large volumes of data and devise concise analyses in a process that goes far beyond logical deduction: Mentats cultivate “the naïve mind”, the mind without preconception or prejudice, so as to extract essential patterns or logic from data and deliver useful conclusions with varying degrees of certainty.
Mind uploading – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Whole brain emulation or mind uploading (sometimes called mind transfer) is the hypothetical process of transferring or copying a conscious mind from a brain to a non-biological substrate by scanning and mapping a biological brain in detail and copying its state into a computer system or another computational device.
Whole brain emulation or mind uploading (sometimes called mind transfer) is the hypothetical process of transferring or copying a conscious mind from a brain to a non-biological substrate by scanning and mapping a biological brain in detail and copying its state into a computer system or another computational device.
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Human computer – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term “computer”, in use from the mid 17th century, meant “one who computes”: a person performing mathematical calculations, before electronic computers became commercially available.
The term “computer”, in use from the mid 17th century, meant “one who computes”: a person performing mathematical calculations, before electronic computers became commercially available.
Biorobotics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Biorobotics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Biorobotics is a term that loosely covers the fields of cybernetics, bionics and even genetic engineering as a collective study.
Biorobotics is often used to refer to a real subfield of robotics: studying how to make robots that emulate or simulate living biological organisms mechanically or even chemically. The term is also used in a reverse definition: making biological organisms as manipulatable and functional as robots, or making biological organisms as components of robots.
In the latter sense biorobotics can be referred to as a theoretical discipline of comprehensive genetic engineering in which organisms are created and designed by artificial means. The creation of life from non-living matter for example, would be biorobotics. The field is in its infancy and is sometimes known as synthetic biology or bionanotechnology.
In fiction, the robots featured in Rossum’s Universal Robots, the play that originally coined the term, are presented as artificial biological entities closer to biorobotics than the mechanical objects that the term came to refer to. The replicants in the film Blade Runner would be considered biorobotic in nature: (synthetic) organisms of living tissue and cells yet created artificially. Instead of microchips, their brain is based on ganglions/artificial neurons.
Ship of Theseus – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
via Ship of Theseus – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’ paradox, or various variants, notably grandfather’s axe and (in the UK) Trigger’s Broom (based upon the BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses) is a paradox that raises the question of whether an object which has had all its component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object.
The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late 1st century. Plutarch asked whether a ship which was restored by replacing all its wooden parts remained the same ship.
The paradox had been discussed by more ancient philosophers such as Heraclitus, Socrates, and Plato prior to Plutarch’s writings; and more recently by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. This problem is “a model for the philosophers”; some say “it remained the same, some saying it did not remain the same”
Geist – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Geist – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Geist (German pronunciation: [ˈɡaɪst]) is a German word.
Depending on context it can be translated as the English words mind, spirit, or ghost, covering the semantic field of these three English nouns. Some English translators resort to using “spirit/mind” or “spirit (mind)” to help convey the meaning of the term.
Edmund Spenser‘s usage of the English-language word ‘ghost’, in his 1590 The Faerie Queene, demonstrates the former, broader meaning of the English-language term. In this context, the term describes the sleeping mind of a living person, rather than a ghost, or spirit of the dead.
The word Geist is etymologically identical to the English ghost (from a Common Germanic *gaistaz) but has retained its full range of meanings, while some applications of the English word ghost had become obsolete by the 17th century, replaced with the Latinate spirit.[3] For this reason, English-language translators of the term Geist from the German language face some difficulty in rendering the term, and often disagree as to the best translation in a given context.