Recently in Cognitive Science Category

There's no denying that I've been stressed out more and more recently. For example, at a close friend's engagement party last week, I felt my face pulse, and felt short of breath. Although it wasn't a panic attack, there was no denying that my body was in control of that situation.

But where do all of these worries, anxieties, doubts, fears, and nausea truly come from? Like any emotion, these worrisome fears come from the body. The body, not the brain.

What one must understand is that our brains are not separate from our bodies, and our bodies are not separate from the environment is travels through. Consider this: why is it we must eat food? It's not because we are simply satisfying the mental urge to eat; it's because the nutrients of that food must be metabolized by the myriad of amazing cellular processes in every living organism. And it is this machine which will ensure that the molecules and atoms from the environment make their way into your being.

What does this have to do with worrying? Well, what one must understand is that it is simply a mental construct resulting from the amazing cognitive processes in you, as the chemical processes in your neurological system form an amazing set of emergent gates which you know as your consciousness. Our conscious being is not something we fully understand (yet), but it is much more mechanical and predictable than one would imagine.

Worry comes from an uneasiness between environmental models in the brain, and the perceived world outside. Worry, like any emotion, is exacerbated by our body's state. If we are low on blood sugar, or tired, or have cramps, our brain will make different sorts of decision-processes.

So, don't worry. When analyzing any given situation, do not think about the bad or worst outcomes, and do not think about what your "gut" is telling you. Instead, take a few breaths, step back, and give your problem a good rational look. Ask yourself:

•  What is the problem, exactly?
• Is it within my power to solve this problem?
• How much time will it take to solve this problem?

Whatever you do, don't become caught in the sea of despair: no matter how bad a situation seems to you, it is always slightly better off, objectively.

So, it's been about two weeks since I updated the site-software, so I'm going to take a moment to thoroughly elaborate on why I did.

The Original Site

The old site had many issues that start to gather up more and more until I Finlay became too lazy, busy, and tired to do all the tasks that it took to make a single post.

Previously, in order to make a post, I had to:

• Write up the post
• Reformat it to HTML
• Ensure that all of the css, javascript, and links were connected correctly
• Repeat the whole process in a template.
• Make a new spot in the forums
• Link the index and other pages back to the new post

So I then thought to myself, "hey Siraf, why don't you write your own scripting program to do this?" And spent the next three months without updating the site and realizing that this is a far more daunting task than I originally intended. When asking for advice, I found that most people recommended I simply use a pre-built Content Management System (CMS).

Choices

But which one to use? After a bit of research, I narrowed it down to three choices:

• Movable Type
• Wordpress
• Drupal

Drupal was too complicated to install with my web host, and was impossible without the adjustment of a couple shell scripts, so it was counted out.

Wordpress is an open-source blogging tool and although Wordpress was recommended by my host, I found it to be a bit too intensive in SQL queries and scaling. It would have been a bit slower.

Movable type's use of perl in their cgi ensured that I could have a faster site and still maintain the core features of a CMS-based site.

In Sum

The issues I ran into Movable type installation were mostly a result of the plesk-based system and a lack of understanding of where the root of the site was located. This was quickly resolved with some google searching. I'm planning on writing up a bit more on how I managed this in a later post.

Until then, cheers!

Well, before I begin this post, let me first fill everyone in on my new academic pursuits. Namely, Cognitive Science at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. For those not in the know, (like everyone I met from Syria, and numerous others here in Utah) Cognitive Science is the study of the mind that combines the main streams of linguistics, philosophy, computational science, and psychology. One of the main pursuits is building a computational model of the mind: AI (artificial intelligence). Along with this, I'm hoping to add the little biology experience I have in order to progress this field.

With all this in mind, I've been thinking a lot about our definitions of artificial intelligence lately. You see, one of the greatest problems of artificial intelligence is that we probably won't know we have it when we do. The problem of cognitive definition isn't new either; one of the greatest issues in ethics is abortion, and this stems mostly from when a fetus becomes a "child." I'm not going to make a political statement on this issue, but only use it as an example.

The reason this is such an issue stems from our current computing capabilities. That is to say, we may have stumbled upon a road to artificial intelligence; an indefinite singularity -- and not even know it! I was speaking to some Google employees, and a discussion came up on whether or not datamining  is one of the "senses" of the artificial intelligence. They told me (and I'm not going to name names here) that there is a running rumour that the google servers may reach its own singularity in the next 15 years.

Just stuff I've been thinking about. Let me know what you think in the comments.