An insightfull documentary on the lifecycle of buildings

This six part documentary (by Stewart Brand) into the lifecycle of buildings presents the way buildings get reconstructed from time to time in order to accomodate the way people use and feel about their own space.

The most interresting conclusion this documentary tries to transmit is that :the building’s life starts (not ends) after the construction phase is finished. This brings into focus important concerns (that usually tend to be overlooked) like :

• maintenance
• flexibility of modification
• the main vectors of change

2 documentaries made by Richard Dawkins and Jeremy Taylor

The Blind Watchmaker : A plausible response to the classical teleological argument made by the ID supporters. The classical teleological argument runs like this :

“How could nature alone develop very specialised and complicated devices, without the intervention of an inteligent designer?”

Richard Dawkins has a book with the same title.

Nice guys finish first :  A good explanation/defense of the selfish gene explanation paradigm in evolutionary biology. The main aim of this is to show that (aparent) cooperative behaviour – which we usually call altruistic – can be reduced to gene level individualism. The gene survival paradigm (in evolutionary biology) denies the truth of the group survival paradigm.

See Richard Dawkins – “The Selfish Gene” for a more detailed picture of this.

A mini series on the life and works of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre

This is a mini series on the life and works of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre made by the BBC.
Each episode has 50 minutes and offers a very rough sketch of their subject matter.

I don’t think these would be a good place to learn about these philosophers, but I really enjoyed watching them because they offer a good feeling (mostly because of the pictures/interviews and movies presented) of the kind of life those philosophers had.

Walter Freeman’s Merleau-Pontian Neurodynamics

See Hubert’s Dreyfus conference at : Internet Archive – Movies

Our experience of the everyday world is given as already organized in terms of significance and relevance. Yet, all that the organism can receive is meaningless physical energy. How can such senseless physical stimulation be experienced directly as significant and acted upon? To suggest an answer to this basic question I will draw on Walter Freeman’s model of rabbit learning and of acting which resembles Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception and action.
To bring out the structural similarities and differences, I will consider two examples, one of convergence (Freeman’s account of learning new attractors and Merleau-Ponty’s description of what he calls the intentional arc), and one of possible divergence concerning the role of expectation in the perception/action loop. The question then will be: How does Freeman’s account of pre-reference relate to Merleau-Ponty’s account of maximum grip?

Building Gods and related devices

A very bold/speculative perspective regarding the present and future of Artificial Intelligence.

The key figures of this documentary are :

• Anne Foerst – the theological advisor for the Cog and Kismet Projects at M.I.T. A.I. Laboratory
• Hugo de Garis – famous A.I. scientist – the creator of the A.I. sub-domain of “Brain Building”
• Nick Bostrom – founder/director “Future of Humanity Institute” at Oxford University
• Kevin Warwick – cybernetician/cyborg – Reading University – England

And here is an interview with Ray Kurzweil, famous cybernetician/inventor, author of the book “The Age of Spiritual Machines“. In this book (summarised in the interview) he talks in a litle more detail about the hopes of the present brain builders and Strong A.I. enthusiasts.