Dancing with the Universe

A fundamentally new way of thinking about consciousness that is spreading like wildfire through the theoretical physics community

This might extend beyond humans and computers into a means of describing nontangible phenomena. It's completely consistent, for example, with my experience of sentience arising from certain arrangements of life energy, and it might fit very well into the worldview of practicing pagans. So long as there is the ability to store information -- and as we know from quantum computing and fiber-optics, energy can store a great deal of information using different states -- and integration as a coherent whole, consciousness can result. That would include life-energy nodes, group consciousness, the theory of Schumann resonance and racial consciousness, the coherent cosmos, and a bunch of other very "woo" concepts.

The theory isn't sufficiently complete yet (as the article notes), but the fact that it's not being laughed completely out of academia is something. Even string theory finally came into the halls as a kind of alternate way of looking at things, and in some cases it's found to describe the universe better than classical theories. Maybe this will be similar.

I have been made aware of the phenomenon known as the "salmon bot".

It connects two random people on AIM by sending both of them the same random message (it just happened to me on Yahoo IM, so it's there too). The other user's visible handle belongs to the bot, and is made up of "[adjective]salmon". I got to talk to "shimmeringsalmon", for example. There are other fish bots with similar characteristics, such as Trout-bots and Coho-bots -- shimmeringsalmon told me my handle was "WhitelistedCoho".

So if you get a random IM from someone with a fish name, and they think you started the conversation, it's a fish bot at work. The Wikipedia entry linked to above has an opt-out command if it bugs you, how to poke the bot if you want, and more information on who is behind them.

I'm finding I don't mind so much now that I know what's going on. I'll try to explain it to the next person I get connected to, so that at least they understand (and can opt-out themselves).