Learning the Dhamma

"Don't set up any desires, because the setting up of desire is a deficiency, a hunger. And hunger, no matter when or what the sort, is pain: Hunger for sleep is pain, hunger for food is pain, hunger for water is pain. When was it ever a good thing?"

In my breaks at work, I relax by reading online texts on mindfulness and meditation. I can highly recommend this kind of reading. One very good resource for these texts is AccessToInsight.com. The above quote is from the collection of Thirteen Talks on the Practice of Meditation.

Photo courtesy: RechargeYourMind.com

Currently reading

• Mr Pye by Mervyn Peake
• Dreaming - a very short introduction
• The Brain - a very short introduction
• QED by Richard Feynman
• Collected short stories by Roald Dahl
• Den femte revolution by Lone Frank
• The man who mistook his wife for a hat by Oliver Sacks
• Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
  
• Emotions - a very short introduction

Since I started writing this post I finished reading Mr. Pye, but I left it here, just to make the list look longer...

What do robots dream of?

Reading a Perspective article in Science, or actually reading a Letter responding to the article, brought to my attention once again the research on robot cognition and self-awareness. How can robots be programmed to learn independently? And can they be modeled by our knowledge of human learning?
The article 'Resilient Machines Through Continuous Self-Modeling' describes how a robot can model its own gait, and if it is injured by i.e. removing part of a limb, it can think up new ways of walking by a dream-like process. In the 'dream' it revisits its past experiences and recombines the knowledge to try out new solutions to the problem.

Reading:
'Resilient Machines Through Continuous Self-Modeling', Science Nov 2006
What do robots dream of?, Perspective article in Science Nov 2006
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick