Opinion - The Korea Times

Is consciousness more than the brain?

Is consciousness more than the brain?The physical location of consciousness is an interesting problem that has been vexing neuroscientists, philosophers, and religious thinkers alike. A key question is whether consciousness is entirely a function of the brain, or is there more to consciousness than just the individual’s biology? A logical corollary is whether an individual’s consciousness belongs entirely to oneself or is it something that’s shared somehow with one’s surroundings? If shared, then what’s the platform through which it’s shared? In a Big Ideas video titled, “We've Been Looking for Consciousness in The Wrong Place,” Philosopher Alva Noe poses an interesting notion. Trying to place consciousness as something that physically exists within us is akin to “trying to find dancing in the musculature of the dancer or trying to find the value of money in the chemical composition of the dollar bill.” Rather, he suggests that we think about consciousness as, “something that we do, enact, or perform in our dynamic inv

Dec 7, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Where should my little boy go to school?

By Jason LimWhere should my little boy go to school?This was the question that consumed us as we got ready to make the momentous decision: Which school should our little boy attend to start his official academic career? We didn’t want to feel guilty by sending our child somewhere where we weren’t confident he would receive the best opportunity to … what exactly? Best opportunity to excel? But he will be a five-year old kindergartner. What kind of excelling can he possibly be expected to do? By this time, we already knew that he was no Mozart (Thank God), but in what subject matter could a kindergartner excel, except perhaps magically creating a mess out of a clean space or strategically leaving sharp LEGO pieces where your unsuspecting foot is bound to find them. Best opportunity to be nurtured? But what does that really mean? We don’t want the kindergarten teachers to be substitute parents (although I’ve seen many of them end up being one due to circumstances) ― they are not there to clothe, feed, and bathroom-guide our children. After all, a kindergar

Nov 24, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Facebook wants your naked pictures, really

By Jason LimAccording to Washington Post story by Travis M. Andrews dated Nov. 8, Facebook wants you to upload your own explicit photos – for your own good.This is how it works. You have explicit pictures that you are worried that your ex-lover might post to Facebook to embarrass you. This is your typical revenge porn scenario. To proactively prevent this, you upload your own explicit photos ―  those that you suspect your ex has and might post – to some type of a secure Facebook portal. Facebook won’t store the photos but will use some AI-driven algorithm to create a digital footprint of the photo so that it would be able to recognize the photo and disallow if someone tries to post it to the platform at some later date.In a way, this is a very forward-leaning, prevention-focused way to address the growing revenge porn problem, rather than engage in incident management after-the-fact. At the same time, it does require you to submit your naked, explicit photos (and videos, I would assume, in the next iteration of this capability) to Facebook. That is a whole lot

Nov 10, 2017By Jason Lim

Facebook wants your naked pictures, really

Jason Lim

#Me, too. So what?

By Jason LimIn 2014, close to 300 girls in the town of Chibok in Nigeria were kidnapped by Boko Haram, an extremist Islamic terrorist organization based in northeastern Nigeria. A social media campaign, “#BringOurGirlsBack” went viral across the world, with global celebrities including then-first lady Michelle Obama personally chiming in to raise awareness of the horrific crime and to name and shame the Nigerian government to do something to rescue the girls. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Over the years, some girls came back home, but many are still unaccounted for.Starting in winter of 2016 and through early 2017, millions of South Korean citizens braved the freezing cold to demonstrate against the sitting president for incompetence, corruption, and influence peddling. Much of the initial outrage was fanned through social media, resulting in an organic, self-amplifying mobilization. Huge protests involving over a million people in central Seoul and multiple presenters were organized through social media platforms weekend after weekend until the president was final

Oct 27, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Nudging your karma

By Jason LimThe central narrative of the 2008 financial crisis was that highly capable individuals driven by rational self-interest made such bad decisions that they almost brought down the world’s financial infrastructure and visited ruin upon themselves, not to mention the Main Street. But bad decision-making is not limited to powerful executives. From A-list celebrities to powerful politicians, we have witnessed people make disastrous, self-destructive decisions. For Exhibit A, look at what Harvey Weinstein has allegedly done in going from a legendary film producer to a sexual predator. I am sure that wasn’t the legacy that he wanted to leave behind, yet he engaged in actions that inevitably marched him off the cliff.As behavioral scientists have already proven, human decisions are not driven by rational self-interest coldly maximizing utility and resources, as traditional economics have taught us. Then, what really drives our decisions, many of which can be self-destructive?This was the question that ultimately won the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for

Oct 13, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Swiping left on Asian men

By Jason LimThree years ago, Christian Rudder, a founder of OKCupid, a well-known online dating site, who also happens to be a Harvard-trained data scientist, analyzed the interactions on his site and came up with interesting generalizations about how people behave in dating situations.TIME Magazine summarizes Rudder's findings as such: ''According to Rudder's research, Asian men are the least desirable racial group to women… On OkCupid, users can rate each other on a 1 to 5 scale. While Asian women are more likely to give Asian men higher ratings, women of other races ―black, Latina, white ―give Asian men a rating between 1 and 2 stars less than what they usually rate other men. Black and Latin men face similar discrimination from women of different respective races, while white men's ratings remain mostly high among women of all races."Tinder, the dating app that broke onto the scene five years ago, uses the revolutionary “swipe” user interface to register one’s immediate judgment on whether a person ―based on the profile photo ―is attractive or not. Eric F

Sep 29, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Can NK be just another country?

By Jason LimI’ve always found B.R. Myers a very interesting voice in Korea studies. His idea that North Korea is not a Marxist-Leninist or a Stalinist state but an ethnonational-socialist country patterned more after Imperial Japan than Soviet Union really struck a nerve when I first read it. It was jarring but also very insightful. It was certainly a shock to my subconscious sense of ethno-nationalism that admittedly informed my analytical paradigm and hermeneutics when it came to Korea.In that sense, I found his recent blog posting on President Moon Jae-in’s recent address commemorating August 15th especially provocative. For those who might not be aware, Koreans celebrate August 15th, 1945 as Independence Day because that was the day that Imperial Japan surrendered to the U.S. Myers writes, “I’ve always found it odd that South Koreans would want to celebrate their transition from colonial rule to military occupation… It says a lot about South Koreans’ lack of identification with their republic, a problem relevant to discussion of the nuclear cr

Sep 1, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Google's sins of omission

By Jason Lim“Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” was the title of the 10-page memo that James Damore circulated with his fellow Google employees. In the memo, Damore took issue over what he perceived was Google’s current Politically Correct (PC) culture, claiming that the gender gap in Google’s diversity was not due to discrimination but inherent differences in what men and women find interesting. Damore was promptly fired for perpetuating gender stereotypes.Most of the outrage against this memo had to do with Damore’s claim that there are biological differences between men and women that lead to natural segmentation in the workplace based on roles. Specifically, he argued that women have less interests in STEM and are therefore self-selecting themselves out of the engineering and coding jobs dominated by men.I found Deborah Soh’s piece in the The Globe and Mail titled, “No, the Google manifesto isn’t sexist or anti-diversity. It’s science,” especially interesting. Soh points to various scientific studies that illustrat

Aug 18, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Can the self survive augmented intelligence?

By Jason LimBy AI, I actually mean augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence. And by augmented intelligence, I mean technology that will allow us to do what we do faster, more, higher, stronger, etc. In short, AI doesn’t replace the human; it makes us better in every way.While this seems less threatening than artificial intelligence with its PR baggage of Skynet and Terminators, HAL9000 and Dave, etc., augmented intelligence may be more of a threat to what it means to be a human being because it can fundamentally redefine how we define ourselves.Arati Prabhakar, the former director of DARPA, writes in Wired, “What's drawing us forward is the lure of solutions to previously intractable problems, the prospect of advantageous enhancements to our inborn abilities, and the promise of improvements to the human condition. But as we stride into a future that will give our machines unprecedented roles in virtually every aspect of our lives, we humans ― alone or even with the help of those machines ― will need to wrangle some tough questions about the meaning of personal

Aug 4, 2017By Jason Lim

Can the self survive augmented intelligence?

Jason Lim

Elon Musk's AI challenge

By Jason LimSo, Elon Musk wants us to start thinking about how to regulate artificial intelligence. Speaking at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting on Rhode Island, Musk suggested that the gubernatorial assembly start thinking about putting in regulations to prevent artificial intelligence from wiping out humanity.Huh. A push for proactive regulation coming from the world’s most famous serial entrepreneur is somewhat disorienting. You would think that an entrepreneur would want the government to get out of the way, rather than get in the way on purpose.Musk is very transparent on why he is doing this. He joins Stephen Hawking and other renowned thinkers of our generation in viewing AI as an existential threat to humankind.“AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization and I don’t think people fully appreciate that,” Musk told the governors.According to WIRED, Musk “asked the governors to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a stock-trading program orchestrated the 2014 missile strike that downed a Malaysian airliner over

Jul 21, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Read more

Is consciousness more than the brain?

Where should my little boy go to school?

Facebook wants your naked pictures, really

#Me, too. So what?

Nudging your karma

Swiping left on Asian men

Can NK be just another country?

Google's sins of omission

Can the self survive augmented intelligence?

Elon Musk's AI challenge

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