Archive for April, 2006

Last night was the Club Crawl here in Tucson. They shut down downtown and for $10 you could bounce around to all the clubs and hear all kinds of different music (as long as it was rock music). They even had stages setup in the streets. We ended up staying until 2am when everything closed down. Great fun.

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The Consciousness convention was absolutely awesome. I wish I could have gone to the whole thing. (Maybe next year). I went to a 4 hour lecture on intracellular and quantum aspects of consciousness. They used lots of big words that I didn’t understand, but for the most part I did understand what they were talking about and I learned a ton about the very fundamental construction of what our consciousness is.

Steward Hameroff was the presenter that I went to see and he didn’t disappoint. His co-presenter Nancy Woolf took on the intercellular part of the lecture which I was slightly less interested in. Dr Hameroff is a anaesthesiologist and I believe a professor at the U of A. He talked about consciousness and losing it thru anaesthetic gasses. He provided a very interesting argument against classical neural networks alone being the building blocks of consciousness. (This should be very interesting to any computer/scifi geek). It takes a certain amount of time for our brain to react. By the time the neural network of our brain has processed a thought, that thought is in the past. So basically, there is no “now” in a neural network. To “be here now” your brain really needs to transcend time, enter quantum mechanics.

To quicky summarize the lecture:
Microtubules in nerve cells contain quantum particles in superpositioned states. Consciousness occurs when the state collapses into a single value. This happens in a cyclical cycle that can actually be measured by sensors placed on the head. The cycle is the gama frequency and is typically around 20 to 30Hz. Very interestingly, during meditation, Tibetan monks have the highest gama frequency ever measured (around 100Hz). Also interesting, if consciousness comes from quantum particles in our brains, these particles could be quantomly entangled with particles in other people’s brains. This would create a collective consciousness.

If you find any of this interesting, I’d urge you to check out the conference next year. See: http://consciousness.arizona.edu

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It’s been a busy last few weeks. For those keeping track, here’s a summary of the latest happenings around the Nolletti house.

The House
The house sale is a done deal. Hope the new owners are enjoying it. I’m definitely enjoying not having a house to have to keep up. We’d like to buy a place around here, but housing prices have gotten insane. I really wanted a downtown loft, and there are lots of new ones going it. But they are all around $250/sqft! So unless they are selling just a closet, we’re going to have to do some lookin.

Transportation
One of my goals in moving was to live lighter. To help facilitate that Stef and I are getting scooters. We’re going to keep her car, but I think I’m going to sell mine. I picked up her scooter at a dealer last night, but am having trouble finding the one I want.

Summer Fun
Plans are coming together for this summer. We have 4 friends coming to visit with us next month, and we have airline tickets and admission tickets for Cochlea, Gaian Mind, and also a weekend back home to go to a cousin’s wedding.

DJ
After a short bit of playing with our friend, Jeremy’s new CDJ’s, Stef and I decided that we had to get some too! I just ordered a gently used pair that I hope to be getting next week. Who know’s, we might become superstar DJ’s. (Yeah right). We also picked up a 3 channel mixer for them so we can mix in the notebook computer. Stef has been having fun playing with a program called Tracktor.

Work
Work has been keeping me really busy. I love it though (most of the time). I suppose I should be getting back to it now.

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