THE CODEX FUNERAL

Even though an argument was stated about books being dead, there was never an argument discusing how books were de-valued or talked down apon. I believe that the statement "books are dead" means that books are no longer used because of the new technology, but not because we dont read books or want them. I completely agree with the statement that books are dead, but only due to the newest technology. We have IPADs where all you do is download a book and your able to read the book right on the screen. Instead of lugging around a huge book, or even a small book with tiny writing. Now you can have 100s of books right on a good sized IPAD, and you can zoom in to the words if necessary. It is so convienient and can be taken anywhere, starbucks to enjoy a cup of coffe while reading, you can even read a chapter from one book and then open another tab to the next book and read a chapter from that one. I know it sounds rediculous, but having books on your IPAD is more hands on. Your able to pinch zoom and change pages by flicking your finger quickly across the screen. The only down side is that your IPAD must be charged, if your battery dies then so do all you 100 books. But with the book physically in your hand you never have that problem.

Is Consciousness physical ?

Consciousness is commonly referred to a mental one which doesn’t have scientific or physical explanations. Most people think of their consciousness as haveing or not having self- awareness. It can be an example of going to sleep, when you are in the state of sleep your unconscious. It seems like people are more interested in the state of consciousness these days, yet it cant be explained scientificaly or phisicaly so we are limited to knowledge regaurding consciousness. Neurology has been a great helper for understanding consciousness physically. Neurology is a scientific field dealing with the central nervous system in human body. Neurophylosophers firmly believe that the structure and function of brain are the keys of consciousness.Neurology has given people a different way to view consciousness from folk psychology. It’s like how physics, biology and chemistry change the way people view the world.

Patricia Churchland and Neurophilosophy

Neurophilosophy stands between philosophy and neuroscience. Neurophilosophy has philosophy and neuroscience intertwined into it. Patricia Churchland is a Canadian-American philosopher. The term “Neurophilosophy”was first introduced by the publication of Patricia Churchland’s Neurophilosohy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. She wanted to make progress of philosophy of the mind. Her husband was really involved with her work also. After her continued education on neuroscience, she convinced herself more about that the neuroscientific techniques and empirical research were important to philosophy. Churchland was an eliminated materialist who believed a physical state of the brain was more necessary than some subjective biasing concepts of mental states. After all, the reason why Churchland championed neurophilosophy was that she believed that there should be a scientific base for philosophy. 

Alan Turing and AI

Alan Turing, an English mathematician, he was a leader in Artificial Intelligence.Alan was said to be good at code-breaking and computer science, so he was often considered as the father of computer science. When he became famous for something called the turning test he became involved with artificial intelligence.This test was introduced by Turing in the 1950s.It was based on a question that asked if machine could think as human does and if machine could imitate human intelligence. He used a human judge needed to distinguish the works done by human and machine separately. If the judge couldn’t tell which one was done by the machine, then the machine passed the test and was said to be intelligent because it meant the work done by the machine had closely resembled the one done by the human. Since then it has been used for the past 50 years.

Cellular Automata

The British scientist Stephen Wolfram is one of the scientists who are deep into the cellular automata. A cellular automata is an innovative modeling studied in mathematics, physics, complexity science, theoretical biology. Basically, in a grid which can be in any finite number of dimensions, cells’ states are affected by neighbor cells’ states according to some fixed rules. For example, the rule might be that the cell is "On" in the next generation if exactly two of the cells in the neighborhood are "On" in the current generation; otherwise the cell is "Off" in the next generation. Typically, the rule for updating the state of cells is the same for each cell and does not change over time, and is applied to the whole grid simultaneously, though exceptions are known (Wikipedia).

Wolfram considers the cellular automata a new kind of science as he states.Wolfram has been studying cellular automata for more than ten years and trying to incorporate rules of cellular automata into the nature. He believes it is a new kind of science because it is challenging the foundations of all modern science.

Mummy and the Wolfman

Mummy was originally to avoid death by preserving the physical body, to mummify your body is to allow your body to still be here on this earth as if you never left it. And the Wolfman suffer from their identities of half-human and hald-beast and lusts for blood in every full moon. To them, living is suffering, and death is what they ultimately want. So if you have a mummy on one hand that is trying to stay alive and the Wolfman on the other hand that perfers death, then you can see that they are coming from two different directions. The preferences of Death over Life describes the difference between the mummy and wolfman.

In Eastern religions, reincarnation is the central belief. It seems to follow the Mummy. In Western religions, death is a continuing life in the Heaven or in the Hell which seems to follow the beliefs of the Wolfman. The wolfman will allow and accept death like the Western religions and the Eastern religions believe in reincarnation as to perserve your body and reminds me of the mummy.

Littlewoods Law of miracles

John Littlewood was a great mathematician.He believed miracles happened once per a million, and his carrer path as a mathematician led him to believe this. He based this calculation on assuming that the typical person is awake and alert about eight hours a day and that events occur at the rate of about one per second. He calculated his own law of miracles due to the fact that he was a mathematician. And since he was a mathematician it was seemed to be a believeable law. Even though most people usually think that miracles are works of God because they happen so rarely that god has something to do with performing the miracles. But when people use calculations to describe how things occur and when miracles occur then it seems like Johns law of miracles is believably true. Like how there were 911 days between September 11^th attacks and the Madrid bombing in Spain.  Ofcourse people connected these two events and considered this significant enough to believe the Littlewoods law of miracles.