Blast Off Into Space

Floating in Near Space, the spacecraft appeared in the foreground in this view photographed when looking back at planet Earth. The fight and mission is a Big Brain Machine space exploration initiative funded by the Big Brain program and the Humanoido Lab Foundation and investors. The spacecraft is leased from Mainland China and successfully launches one American into space and makes a safe retrieval during the mission.

BIG BRAIN MACHINE'S SPACE PROGRAM
BLAST OFF INTO SPACE
Saturday January 4th, 2014

With the first Manned Mission in January of 2014, the Big Brain's robust space program launched a morning craft into Near Space. The launch and flight were successful and the entire mission went relatively smooth without a hitch.

The swinging camera in space sadly recorded vast death dominions of poisonous upper atmosphere clouds and a blanket of gray matter atmospheric pollution, with life threatening smog, extending as far as the space eye could see over the Asian continent, attributed to fierce industrial manufacturing, the release of deadly chemicals, burning of garbage and horrific release of dangerous gas and particulate matter.

Enhanced photo - Earth pollution gradient level studies

Studies included a photographic mission, atmospheric phenomena, the transit of Earth horizon atmospheric gradients, content and water vapor relative to altitude, early low level cloud formation, and numerous other studies.

The Earth cartography mission was abandoned due to ground level pollution and smog being at an all time high level. This changed the mission to one of a deadly smog and pollution study.

Large machine aerospace hydrodynamic pump

The spacecraft reached about 7 miles altitude with a downrange speed of 486 mph. Temps reached -46 deg. F. in space when the downrange distance of 185 miles was exceeded.

A RESTRICTED AREA  Area 27 is like a vacated ghost town with no residents or apparent occupancy. It has this large unknown structure for dealing with spacecraft launching. No information is available regarding its purpose. Other than a launch deliver hatch housing, most objects are simply unidentifiable. Photo was shot through several reflective windows causing some reflections of various posted signs.

One known glitch is the lack of space craft air regulation and most of the flight was excessive in heat causing the astronaut undue discomfort. This is a common anomaly in Chinese origin or modified craft. This is also due to pressure of the spacecraft and the lack of thermally environmentally controlled individual space suits to keep the missions on a minimal budget. At this time, budget missions do not include space walks.

The higher the altitude, rising above pollution, the darker space became. At this altitude, the Earth itself is still too bright with a lot of reflected sunlight causing the inability to see objects in the galaxy or solar system. This is because the flights are suborbital in daylight for various reasons. No stars or planets were seen.

As usual in these space missions, some equipment is photographed for the mission. This is presumably the pump for highly refined and maximum rocket fuel delivery to fill the tanks on the craft.

Area 27 is off limits and has presumably a very large tracking station on top of the spacecraft center regional housing structure as seen through this reflective window shot. Though we cannot be sure of its purpose, it could also serve as a massive device to vent strange materials or toxic production gases.

The roof is geometrically sinusoidal in shape and houses the giant duct appearing device within the low negative slope of the roof. Several man sized objects are visible however it's strange that no people are in this vicinity.

Are We Just a Brain in a Jar?

ARE WE JUST
A BRAIN IN A JAR?
After all these philosophical ponderings about the validity of the existence of a brain in a jar, science answers philosophy by bringing contemplation in to scientific fact. Transferring a human brain into a brain in a jar is now possible, at least in demonstrative parts of simplistic nature. Careful what you ask for, or in this case, think about, because it just might come true...

The “Brain in a Vat” thought experiment is an update to René Descartes’ evil demon problem. Hilary Putnam is credited with this update. The example supposes that a mad scientist has removed your brain, and placed it into a vat of liquid to keep it alive and active. The scientist has also connected your brain to a powerful computer, which sends neurological signals to the brain in the way the brain normally receives them. Thus, the computer is able to send your brain data to fool you into believing that you are still walking around in your body.

The brain-in-a-vat thought experiment is generally used to ask the question: how do you know that you are not a brain in a vat? The question mirrors an early one from Descartes, which asks how you are to know that there is not an evil demon feeding false information to your senses. The essential conclusion is that, from the perspective of the brain itself, it is impossible to tell whether it is a brain in a vat or a brain in a skull.
http://www.philosophy-index.com/putnam/brain-vat/

In philosophy, the brain in a vat is an element used in a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of our ideas of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, and meaning. It is based on an idea, common to many science fiction stories, that a mad scientist, machine, or other entity might remove a person's brain from the body, suspend it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer which would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those the brain normally receives. According to such stories, the computer would then be simulating reality (including appropriate responses to the brain's own output) and the person with the "disembodied" brain would continue to have perfectly normal conscious experiences without these being related to objects or events in the real world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat

The brain in a vat arguement
The Brain in a Vat thought-experiment is most commonly used to illustrate global or Cartesian skepticism. You are told to imagine the possibility that at this very moment you are actually a brain hooked up to a sophisticated computer program that can perfectly simulate experiences of the outside world. Here is the skeptical argument. If you cannot now be sure that you are not a brain in a vat, then you cannot rule out the possibility that all of your beliefs about the external world are false. Or, to put it in terms of knowledge claims, we can construct the following skeptical argument. Let “P” stand for any belief or claim about the external world, say, that snow is white.
If I know that P, then I know that I am not a brain in a vat
I do not know that I am not a brain in a vat
Thus, I do not know that P.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/

Skepticism and Content Externalism
The Cartesian skeptic puts forward various logically possible skeptical hypotheses for our consideration, such as that you are now merely dreaming that you are reading an encyclopedia entry. The more radical Evil Genius hypothesis is this: you inhabit a world consisting of just you and a God-like Evil Genius bent on deceiving you. In the Evil Genius world, nothing physical exists, and all of your experiences are directly caused by the Evil Genius. So your experiences, which represent there to be an external world of physical objects (including your body), give rise to systematically mistaken beliefs about your world (such as that you are now sitting at a computer). (For an overview of the problem of external world skepticism, see Greco 2007.) Some philosophers would deny that the Evil Genius hypothesis is genuinely logically possible. Materialists who hold that the mind is a complex physical system deny that it is possible for there to be an Evil Genius world, since, on their view, your mind could not possibly exist in a matterless world. Accordingly, a modern skeptic will have us consider an updated skeptical hypothesis that is consistent with materialism. Consider the hypothesis that you are a disembodied brain floating in a vat of nutrient fluids. This brain is connected to a supercomputer whose program produces electrical impulses that stimulate the brain in just the way that normal brains are stimulated as a result of perceiving external objects in the normal way. (The movie ‘The Matrix’ depicts embodied brains which are so stimulated, while their bodies float in a vats.) If you are a brain in a vat, then you have experiences that are qualitatively indistinguishable from those of a normal perceiver. If you come to believe, on the basis of your computer-induced experiences, that you are looking at at tree, then you are sadly mistaken.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-content-externalism/

Brain in a Vat by John Pollock (PDF) - Philosophical Doubts
http://www.unc.edu/~megw/Pollock.pdf 

Hawking is a Brain in a Vat
The generally accepted form of wishing someone a happy birthday is to sing to the lucky person. Or perhaps buy him or her a gift. A less accepted form is to compare the birthday person to Darth Vader and suggest he or she is merely a "brain in a vat." Still, Helene Mialet, a UC Berkeley anthropologist of science, chose the path slightly less trodden. Writing in Wired, she offered that perhaps Hawking should be referred to as Obi-Wan refers to Darth Vader: "More machine than man." She went on to suggest that the eminent physicist's beautiful mind is made beautiful only with large amounts of external assistance: He is delegated across numerous other bodies: technicians, students, assistants, and of course, machines. Hawking's "genius," far from being the product of his mind alone, is in fact profoundly located, material, and collective in nature.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57563650-71/scientist-hawking-is-brain-in-a-vat/

Putnam on Brain in a Vat
Putnam’s argument is based on a couple of claims about words, pictures or mental images, and even thoughts or intentions link to things. Negatively, resemblance is not sufficient (nor is it necessary) for reference / aboutness / intentionality. Positively, one needs to do some further work and Putnam suggests standing in the right sort of causal relation. Using this background, the argument runs as follows:

Words/thoughts can only refer to things that stand in the right sort of causal relation to them. So ‘vats’ stand either for real vats or vats-in-the-image (ie computer generated). If we are not brains in a vat, then the “we are brains in a vat” refers to real vats and is false. If we are brains in a vat then “we are brains in a vat” refers to vats-in-the-image and is false. So “we are brains in a vat” is never true, is always false.
Putnam himself summarises his argument thus:

It follows that if their ‘possible world’ is really the actual one, and we are really the brains in a vat, then what we now mean by ‘we are brains in a vat’ is that we are brains in a vat in the image or something of that kind (if we mean anything at all). But part of the hypothesis that we are brains in a vat is that we aren’t brains in a vat in the image (i.e. what we are ‘hallucinating’ isn’t that we are brains in a vat). So, if we are brains in a vat, then the sentence ‘We are brains in a vat’ says something false (if it says anything). In short, if we are brains in a vat, then ‘We are brains in a vat’ is false. So it is (necessarily) false. [Putnam 1981]https://sites.google.com/site/drtimthornton/courses/epistemology/putnam-and-the-brain-in-a-vat/reflections-on-putnam-and-the-brain-in-a-vat

Brain Cortex First Futures Conference Part 37

BRAIN CORTEX FIRST FUTURES CONFERENCE PART 37
SUBJECT: HUMAN TO MACHINE BRAIN TRANSFER CONFERENCE
The first Humanoido Labs Brain Conference was held this week in the Asian Arena. The conference included a spectacular number of subjects regarding not only futures investment and investors, construction and potentials of the cortex, but also its ongoing maturation, design and abundance of rapidly developing applications.

Discussions were in regard to futures, investment, human mind to machine mind brain transfer, how to proceed for the most effective designs, how to make easy simplified brain transfers, how to create larger jar brains with more layering capacity, designing a more effective and more complete Katra, Katra mapping, mind reduction, mind compression, how to transfer more of the human mind, mind content transfers, techniques of mind-to-mind transfer, how to make machine brains live longer and become immortal, the care and feeding of electric brains, the design of effective energy supplies to increase longevity, automating sources of electric brain energy, improving electric brain designs, communicating with the cortex...

Also covered were topics of a far reaching nature, i.e. sending out electric cortex in the universe, cloning, etransfers, multiplicity existences, consciousness, and the soul. Talks progressed about expanding the electric cortex after a human mind transfer and its ramifications such as expanding and increasing memory, intelligence, capacity, function. 

Index to the Brain Cortex
http://humanoidolabs.blogspot.tw/2013/11/brain-cortex-index-part-16.html

USA Presidential Brain Initiative

USA PRESIDENTIAL BRAIN INITIATIVE
Now the President of the USA, Obama,  is getting into the act of brains by his own initiative.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/share/brain-initiative

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/04/02/brain-initiative-challenges-researchers-unlock-mysteries-human-mind

Today at the White House, President Obama unveiled the “BRAIN” Initiative—a bold new research effort to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury.

The BRAIN Initiative — short for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies — builds on the President’s State of the Union call for historic investments in research and development to fuel the innovation, job creation, and economic growth that together create a thriving middle class.

The Initiative promises to accelerate the invention of new technologies that will help researchers produce real-time pictures of complex neural circuits and visualize the rapid-fire interactions of cells that occur at the speed of thought. Such cutting-edge capabilities, applied to both simple and complex systems, will open new doors to understanding how brain function is linked to human behavior and learning, and the mechanisms of brain disease.

For more information, follow the links.