Presenting the work of Mayer Spivack
Syncretic Associative Cognition Papers
by Mayer Spivack15 Feb 2011 at 11:15 am
This is a collection of articles my father wrote about his theory of syncretic associative cognition. It gives some good insight into his unique style and his thoughts about mind and intelligence.
Mayer Spivack's Life and Accomplishments
by Mayer Spivack13 Feb 2011 at 6:58 pm
Editor's note: In order to illustrate and celebrate the accomplishments and thinking of my late father, Mayer Spivack, I've attached his CV here as a PDF. His work touched many fields, and many people. It's rare for anyone to dive as deep as he did in even one field; but he did it in many. His CV is an example of that special breed of interdisciplinary intellectuals and artists who make Boston so
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Mayer Spivack, 1936 - 2011
by Mayer Spivack14 Feb 2011 at 11:45 pm
(Note from Nova Spivack, son of Mayer Spivack)
The author of this blog, Mayer Spivack, passed away on February 12, 2011, after a year and a half battle with cancer. Throughout it all he maintained his curiosity, humor, compassion, and dedication to innovation - in fact, these facets of his personality only got stronger as he got closer to his transition. I encourage you to explore the directory o
Snake Stories
by Mayer Spivack13 Feb 2011 at 12:08 pm
Nan–Nan! Please listen! You’re just my older sister, You’re not my mother. You could not have prevented any of it so try not to blame yourself. It all just happened, things happen. Sometimes they are just a chain of unconnected events. Think about all the good—no, the great—stuff you have done, the stuff you have done for us, for me, try to think about that for a minute. For example
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Cancer Reveals The Sublime Within The Ordinary
by Mayer Spivack15 Jan 2011 at 6:39 pm
Cancer is a time machine. The ‘C-Word’, once attached, clings like a burr, leaving sharp bits of itself everywhere. I cannot get rid of it. I heard the word pronounced by a creature whose eyes, dark with seriousness, were telling me the truth.
Waking up in the morning, or less fortunately in the middle of the night, I am innocent, having only to pee. Unaware, forgetting, that the definition o
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Will The Keyboard Ever Disappear?
by Mayer Spivack13 Feb 2011 at 12:13 pm
We now accept that voice activated computers have come of age. There are many applications of voice input that are used by people wishing to avoid using their keyboards. We read about direct brain control of the computer interface and have seen convincing demos of this in action as a prosthetic assist and as research effort. Soon that too will seem commonplace.
The profusion of technologies that
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A Quantum-Entangled One-Time-Pad For Continuous Transmission.
by Mayer Spivack13 Feb 2011 at 12:13 pm
Masahiro Hotta at Tohoku University in Japan has proposed an energy and information teleportation system, (Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1002.0200 Energy-Entanglement Relation for Quantum Energy Teleportation). His proposal, as I understand it, would be limited to a single instantiation event taking place in a single simultaneous pair of measurements, one in a laboratory, the other somewhere within th
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iPad Launch Viewers Overload Information Channels
by Mayer Spivack27 Jan 2010 at 3:34 pm
Today the Apple Tablet media crunch by Steve Jobs has created an enormous demand for information. We have become a swarm of distributed agent systems programmed to follow Jobs. “Distributed agent systems r(u)n by themselves…You set them up and let them go.” (M Crichton, Prey, p.500). We techies recursively crowded internet sites, and caused channel overloads? 
(see this blog:
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Read Steven Weber's Discussion Of Why Art Is Vital
by Mayer Spivack9 Jun 2009 at 10:11 am
I recommend reading Steven Weber's article on the importance of art in education and the mind. find it onThe Huffington Post at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-weber/its-arts-time_b_212732.html
I read new posts on the Huffington Post several times each day. The journalistic freedom and effort there, the truths revealed and doors knocked off their hinges have become an essential isotope of ... read more
Way Out On A Limbic About Quantum Entanglement for Associative Recall and Thi...
by Mayer Spivack16 Jan 2010 at 4:16 pm
(Please follow me at @MayerSpivack on Twitter for further articles and discussion)
Perhaps I am overreacting to a query at the end of an article discussing the implications of Quantum entanglement in organic environments—Technology Review by K. Birgitta Whaley et al. at the Berkeley Center for Quantum Information and Computation as published in Quantum Phy
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Could Information-Projectiles be our Legacy?
by Mayer Spivack31 May 2009 at 5:55 pm
The internet, and within it the blogosphere, are not legacy media. The internet races always into the future trailing it’s comet’s tail, a short electric past, while blogs and websites tumble into their own archives and disappear forever. Websites and weblogs if not kept up (and paid up), lapse, leaving only limited traces to be traced in future decades. What wisdoms, without durable
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I Reject Intuition and Insight
by Mayer Spivack30 May 2009 at 9:20 pm
I think of the word intuition and the word insight as far too-comfortable and simplistic euphemisms for complex associative / syncretic /concilliative processes that operate in the brain all the time, and that we are too lazy to examine. We use the words intuition and insight to cover up the fact that we do not know how creativity operates, or what it really is. I don’t trust many of the words i
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Visual thought and the ‘blind’ artist
by Mayer Spivack28 May 2009 at 8:42 pm
Please watch the video about the work of the artist Esref Armagan at the end of this posting. 
It presents a credible record of the process of a Turkish artist, Esref Armagan, born blind, who nonetheless draws and paints. Despite the ‘common sense’ impression one might have that this is a trick, his is not a ‘supernatural’ ability or parlor trick in which he attempts to convinc
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Was It Torture?
by Mayer Spivack6 Jun 2009 at 7:15 pm
Was It Torture that the Bush administration lawyers allowed, within ‘limits’? My first question is how could they have known if it was or was not torture? Had they tried the various techniques on themselves or on each other in a specially equipped legal dungeon with a dispassionate group, twelve of their peers, observing, taking snapshots, and helping to form a decision? It is common to expe
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Art and Real Value *
by Mayer Spivack15 Apr 2009 at 5:22 pm
Artists have practice in survival on minimal rations and
little income. Many make little or no income from art, but with pluck and luck
can make a side-job support their own work efforts. Peanut-butter and impasto paint
are both common artist’s materials. Peanuts in—paints out.
Some people must be paid to do a stitch of work, while artists gladly pay for the privilege of working. That is the
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Economic Recession and The Psychological Ecosystem Around Individual Depressi...
by Mayer Spivack8 Apr 2009 at 3:02 pm
Economic recession and depression are part of the larger psychological ecosystem that interacts with individual human depression. If we were too busy to notice these relationships before the current economic ‘downturn’, we cannot fail to be aware of it now if we read the headlines.
We all live together in a largely unnoticed greater context of nested interacting ecosystems. This is a way of d
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Those Who Work With Money Are Tempted To Play With Money
by Mayer Spivack21 Mar 2009 at 12:44 pm
When you work with other people’s money you may be tempted to play with money. Some bankers now seem to fear that no one will trust them or pay them again—ever, so they are trying to quickly grab as  much cash as they can on the way out of the tower, a case of institutional ‘take the money and run’.
In a few months time, everything they value or measure value by, has been devalu
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(no title)
by Mayer Spivack27 Feb 2009 at 6:32 pm
Everyone who loves music should follow this link to a performance from Venezuela during the recent TED conference. I think that this is an unbreathable performance. Now that I have inhaled, I cannot remember such energy in a conductor or orchestra integrated so well since Sergei Koussevitzky conducted The Boston Symphony Orchestra, way back. That is the highest praise, well deserved. Hope, aliv
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Artificial Intelligence and The Railroad Track Illusion.
by Mayer Spivack8 Aug 2008 at 4:02 pm
by Mayer Spivack
8/6/2008
The Singularity—The Siren.
If any definition of ‘The Singularity’ is: That future moment when artificial intelligence function levels in machines are equal to or greater than human intelligence, then how do we get there from here? By the wayside, how intelligent are we? What do we include and exclude from our definitions of intelligence, including our own?
T
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I am starting to post in Twine.com
by Mayer Spivack6 Jul 2008 at 12:50 pm
I am starting to post in Twine.com. Twine is a new service for sharing and discussing information around mutual interests. It's like blogging but more interactive, and there is more community. Also, Twine uses the Semantic Web to automatically organize information and help you discover content around your interests. Twine is the product of my son's company, but that's not why I'm using it -- it's
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I Am Now Publishing Lumia Photography in this Weblog
by Mayer Spivack29 Jun 2008 at 1:06 pm
I have begun to publish a series of my Lumia and other photographs as an addition within this weblog. This begins a longer term effort to present a range of photographic art. I will upload images as I convert them to digital format from my own 35 mm archives, and from my still, yet quite active, handheld cameras. The original Lumia images are high-density film transparencies. As photographs are c
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A Response to Adam Nagourney, 5/19/2008 New York Times Article Entitled "A La...
by Mayer Spivack20 May 2008 at 12:34 pm
The NYT has proven itself again and again during this Democratic race to be as conservative as anyone in the industry. The media ’s “molly coddling” of Senator Obama has been as rampant as the sexism towards Senator Clinton. To imply that Senator Obama is somehow a weak and helpless victim of a strong woman candidate, is ridiculous and astounding in this century. It is interesting that the f
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Electoral Psychodynamics and Senator Obama
by Mayer Spivack25 Feb 2008 at 5:19 pm
Many Americans, and especially the press and media, fear, talk about, and impugn strong confident women who enter the generally hardball realm (or kick-boxing ring) of political power. While we are all free to talk in any way we wish to, expressing ourselves in either healthy or unhealthy ways, the media and the press have a greater impact on government then the rest of us when they pronounce or b
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Intelligence and Adaptability in Systems
by Mayer Spivack22 Feb 2008 at 10:35 am
My son Nova Spivack ( http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2008/02/a-classificatio.html?cid=103805366#comments ) has brought up the subject of developing a universal classification of intelligence. It is a worthwhile effort, and one that may require a century of reflection and research. It is worth more and serious work. Others have and will attempt it as well, and agreement will be
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One Person, One Ballot, One Envelope
by Mayer Spivack6 Feb 2008 at 7:02 pm
National Public Radio, that great national radio university, announced that voters in some states were unable to vote because some polling places ran short of ballots and envelopes. Voters waited outside polling places in freezing weather for their moment in the voting booth. Many waited patently while many were too cold and could wait no more. But worse still, many were stopped at the door after
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