Hi. Just stumbled across this site today and found it very interesting.

I had a thought to share but ask you to forgive me if it is a bit unclear as I have some medical problems that has been screwing with my ability to concentrate with the end result that something that is clear in my head often comes out less coherent.

I was thinking that as humans aside from the usual ways we experience things or gain knowledge -by being taught, through our senses including minute physical and chemical cues and so on that we may be able to 'network' into other 'spheres of knowledge'

I'm not sure if you identify it as God, electromagnetic energy, universal consciousness and so on but I think a case could be made that some people, sometimes, may tap into a bigger consciousness. For example some people demonstrate the ability to 'read minds' or perhaps even something like 'mob mentality' where large groups of people seem to tap into a group mentality of sorts -not sure how clear I am being but I have felt hunches and had other experiences which I feel are beyond the usual physical senses or pheromones or some 'super observation' of minute clues. Perhaps we are like computers with some number of open ports with ability to tap into some sort of bio-electro-magentic network?

I mention this because if any of this makes sense then maybe an AI could be enahnced by creating some sort of pools of knowledge which could be tapped into depending on the sensitivity of that virtual entity -know this is coming out muddled but if you created say a "shared group consciousness" database and different individuals in the virtual world add knowledge of some sort to this -without a consciousness awareness- and other members of the group depending on their sensitivity may be able to intuit or have better guesses.

In the same way perhaps animals or the environment may contribute to an "environmental consciousness" which say an individual who is more actively aware of his environment -one who lives in the forest for example- might tap into on some sort of intuitive level.

Hopefully this doesn't sound completely muddled or inane...

Not muddled at all Burt. You want inane, one of the more deranged projects I worked on was trying to get two Timex Sinclair computers to telepathically communicate. No, really. It never was fully tested, but the idea was to use all that quantum teleportation/Bell's inequality stuff and get instantaneous data transfer between them. But in reality, I think much of the coordinated behavior we see in populations can be explained in many other ways, more along the lines of your 'super observation' of minute clues. Plus don't forget we are all designed basically the same; so seeing synchronous behavior is not that surprising. Using the same methods in the VIM is part of the plan, each functioning in basically the same way, but in different environments. And so yeah, I'd say there is a collective consciousness, but it can be simply from the normal interaction of all the components. It's just scaling, like all the cells in the body working collectively together to make the animal.

Sounds like that was an interesting experiment. :) As for the 'super observation' mode and the fact that we are all wired basically the same I agree. I hadn't thought about it to much but recently read some material in the errr....Reader's Digest :) and on the net and it talked about some of that and I can see how that would work. I guess I'll hold out that there is still a small (probably much smaller than I originally thought if you eliminate the super observation and our functional similarities) area of what may fall into ESP-like areas but not sure how statistically significant these would be in determining actions for an AI. By ESP-like I am not refering only to the card guessing kind since I don't know much about what has or hasn't been proved but more of the my family lives 3000 miles away and I feel something serious is wrong and call and find that I was right type of thing. Of course there may be something else there like an invisible electromagnetic telephone line of sorts as there are still enough mysteries like cats walking several hundred miles to a families new home after being left behind that aren't easily explained by say a sense of smell, hmmmm maybe its time to see if there are still some Carlos Castaneda books out there. ;)

Hi Michael,

Just a bit more inchoate chatter from me, feel free to respond or ignore as time or inclination dictate -just helpful to me to spin out some of these rambling thoughts rather than have them continue to bounce around the insides of my cranium; again please forgive any slight 'offness' or lack of clarity...

I was sitting out here watching the trees grow and found myself wondering a few things...

Does our brain store information/memory/responses as something like fractals -in other words breaking it down to a fractal or small repeatable pattern, or maybe even say a 'fractal primitive' for lack of a better word as a sort of a small chain of related objects that could be repeated in a fractal fashion. For example is there a root 'fear fractal' which is the same for a little anxiety and full-blown-being-chased-by-a-predator type fear, only differing in degree or the number of iterations or layers applied? If something like this is true do we then constuct little 'fractal primitives' or 'precompiled responses' (I guess like a conditioned response) to deal with information and situations we encounter more frequently (maybe stereotyping fits in here as well)?

Two other musings...

-When we talked about this 'super observation mode' do you think it is possible that some mental illnesses may be a dysfunction of this process with continous analysis and observation of too may details, sort of using up too much CPU time?

-I read that between the ages of 12-17 tennagers undergo a sort of pruning of the branches of the brain, removing less used pathways and allowing further development of specific pathways. In this case of ADD for example where you follow too many pathways is it possible that when this pruning takes place, using whatever parameters the brain uses, that not enough 'depth of pruning' is possible because the many branches are given equal weight, resulting in too many branches being kept active, resulting in this lack of development of depth in specific areas or perhaps the brains inability to allocate sufficient gray matter (memory resources etc) to each branch?

Mostly these questions relate to observances of specific challenges I am facing and my trying to make sense of them; this may or may not be just a bunch of babel.

Hi Burt,

The only reason I don't answer posts is time...it is just getting less and less these days. Some quick comments; if you have ADD, it must be either mild or you are dealing with it very well, because your posts do not lack clarity in any way, quite the opposite in fact. While I am a neuroscientist, I don't personally know much about ADD; but from what I do know about information processing in the brain, you ideas are sound; focused thinking, being able to forget, pruning of synapses, all these things are very much part of the function, and when they go wrong the dysfunction, of the mammalian brain. A quick suggestion for your search...don't rely on or trust the web or magazines for information on subjects like this. You can find a whole lot of very convincing sites that say they have all the answers and they could be completely inaccurate (this site included!). Pick up a basic text book on neuroscience and start reading - and I say neuroscience and not psychology, your focus seems to be on the mechanism of all this. When you want to get into more detail about a disorder, go to PubMed, a government run search engine for current research, it's at . You might not get access to the full articles, but the abstract can tell you a lot, and you can always go to the library and get access to the journal there. Best of luck.