It is strange that "Forty Years of String Theory: Reflecting on the Foundations" doesn't have any of the bigger names from string theory (particularly, no Ed Witten?), but has pretty much the full list of controversial (some people would say outright currently crackpotish[1]) names like 't Hooft, Verlinde, Smolin and lately also Susskind. I am not picking sides, but this raises all sorts of red flags about it. I bet Motl will be all over this.

I'll have a look at Susskind's paper, particularly if he is railing against reductionism.

[1] 't Hooft's and Susskind's contributions to modern theoretical physics can't be understated, but their general reputation suffered in recent years.

Does somebody happen to have an overview of the current consensus on Dual N-Back? My understanding is that the impact on IQ is not solidly established. What about working memory? Is there solid evidence for transfer? Is it wort a) learning more about it b) actually spend time on training if you have a cognitively demanding job (analysis/programming)? Thank you!

I've been long thinking about strengthening Anki with gamification. Have a score display, encouraging messages, bonuses and achievements for answer speed, correct-answer chains etc.

I'll try your ideas!

I actually never heard about non-von Neumann architectures. Anybody has some tip on a good source on this? Especially how this relates to biological brain architectures? Thank you!

Other Media Thread

Graham Priest interview with Julia Galef and Massimo Pigliucci on paraconsitency and dialetheism:

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.de/2012/11/rationally-speaking-podcast-graham.html

Just for fun a recent paper:

Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation

Silas R. Beane, Zohreh Davoudi, Martin J. Savage (Submitted on 4 Oct 2012) Observable consequences of the hypothesis that the observed universe is a numerical simulation performed on a cubic space-time lattice or grid are explored. The simulation scenario is first motivated by extrapolating current trends in computational resource requirements for lattice QCD into the future. Using the historical development of lattice gauge theory technology as a guide, we assume that our universe is an early numerical simulation with unimproved Wilson fermion discretization and investigate potentially-observable consequences. Among the observables that are considered are the muon g-2 and the current differences between determinations of alpha, but the most stringent bound on the inverse lattice spacing of the universe, b^(-1) >~ 10^(11) GeV, is derived from the high-energy cut off of the cosmic ray spectrum. The numerical simulation scenario could reveal itself in the distributions of the highest energy cosmic rays exhibiting a degree of rotational symmetry breaking that reflects the structure of the underlying lattice.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847

CogPrime

An indepth description of CogPrime's architecture by Ben Goertzel:

http://wiki.opencog.org/w/CogPrime_Overview CogPrime: An Integrative Architecture for Embodied Artificial General Intelligence

Added my vote for October 27/28.

Although, if I'm the only non-native German speaker then I'll bow out. I can speak German, but not to the standard required for these kinds of conversations. And I'm uncomfortable with others speaking English only on my account.

Is there somewhere a glossary for all the questions? That would be very helpful (beyond this survey).

Also - there was already a similar thread:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/56q/how_would_you_respond_to_the_philpapers_what_are/

The comments have some answers (though not in a convenient machine readable form).