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About Joe Roushar

Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor.

About Joe Roushar

Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor.

About Joe Roushar

Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor.

About Joe Roushar

Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor.

About Joe Roushar

Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor.

About Joe Roushar

Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor.

About Joe Roushar

Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor.

About Joe Roushar

Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor.

About Joe Roushar

Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor.

About Joe Roushar

Former spy, current enterprise systems architect and entrpreneur, camper, canoeist, musician, grandparent, inventor.

12 Feb Conscious Phenomena

Conscious or Psychic

Conscious Phenomena For the past few posts, I have been exploring consciousness. Extra-sensory perception is a part, or an extension of consciousness. Are you sometimes psychic?  Some people have truly remarkable extra-sensory capabilities while others do not. I read a short story by Ursula K. Le  Guin, though I can’t for the life of me remember the […]

11 Feb Introspection as Empirical Science

Eye Storm

Heightened awareness – inner vision – focus. I have looked to psychology, neuroscience and philosophy for clues about how to get computers to pay attention to all the right cues so they can engage in meaningful dialog with me. Much of what I encounter in the literature mixes experimental results with empirical observations. And many paths lead […]

11 Feb Conscious Sensibility

Spiderweb 1

Watergate Revisited More than one President of the United States has been asked this question: “What happened, and how soon did you know about it?” Many cognitive psychologists perform experiments in which they ask subjects (people) the same question, seeking to mark the boundaries between conscious and unconscious phenomena. I recently spoke of mindfulness. Wakefulness may be a […]

08 Feb Seeing Within: Proprioception for Robots

Nervous System

I saw a couple movies awhile back, “The Terminator” and “Terminator 2” in which artificial intelligence in computers became hazardous to the survival of humanity. One of the premises, as I recall, was that the critical event that lead to the disastrous attempt of man-made machines to destroy humanity, was when they became “self-aware”. This […]

07 Feb Mindfulness

Attention Switch

Imagine being able to flip a switch and get quantitative and qualitative improvements to your intelligence. Mindfulness, in the form of directing your attention or focus can induce changes in the structure and function of the brain. When I was in school, I learned that taking notes helped me not only focus better on what I […]

06 Feb Nature vs Nurture in Intelligence

Nature vs Nurture in Intelligence

The three deep roots of intelligence are biological (built into the flesh), cognitive (based on our unique mental responses to stimuli), and psychosocial (learned through culture-laden experiences). Language springs from the same roots, and becomes inseparably intertwined with intelligence. I came across this article in The Creativity Post that corroborated ideas I have been working on for […]

05 Feb Rings of Power: Workflow and Business Rules

One Ring plus tools

Gandalf the Wizard explained the writing on the “One Ring”: “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them“ Such a ring would be a nice thing to have, as long as it didn’t make you into a fascist – the […]

04 Feb Body Language in Understanding

Body Language Examples

How much can you hear without a word being spoken? How often does something about a person’s face, posture or hand gestures completely contradict the “normal interpretation” of the words they speak, creating a sense of sarcasm or other indirect message? To what extent are the academy awards influenced by an actor’s ability to use […]

03 Feb Mapping a Thought

Human Mind

What is truly going on in a network of billions of cells with trillions of connections? Can we even begin to figure it out – is mapping a thought possible? When I was in the midst of my studies in which I initially wrote this, MRIs and CAT scans were the best of our ability […]

31 Jan Feature Selectivity in Vision

Color, Feature and Line Selectivity

This post is another in the series on specialization, in which the author stresses the need for very heterogeneous models for imitating brain capabilities with computers. An important discovery of neurophysiological and cybernetic research is that many neurons, particularly those in areas of the brain that specialize in processing perceptual data, are feature selective. Vision processing is […]