bpung

I'm skeptical of any argument that attempts to explain consciousness, because there is no clear definition of what people mean when they use the word consciousness.

I'm currently taking a class taught by Marvin Minksy at MIT known as Society of Mind (named after his book), in which he addresses consciousness as a suitcase word which people use to represent a million different things that we don't have words to properly explain. This makes sense to me.

I highly doubt there is or will ever be a single theory that correctly explains consciousness, but rather there will be lots of different reasons for why we experience different feelings and awareness's which sum to what we consider consciousness.

I worked as a developer on Chickenfoot for about 6 months going into my sophomore year at MIT. It does share a lot of similarities with GreaseMonkey, but I've found it to be a much more powerful tool for writing quick scripts to perform simple interactions with web sites. This is largely assisted by its API of commonly used operations (some of which I wrote).

The ability to quickly package your Chickenfoot scripts into Firefox extensions also holds a lot of value.

With quite a few Augmented Reality iPhone apps currently in development, along with creative new approaches such as this use of HTML 5 video, I see Augmented Reality as a frontier with a great deal of space for startups to flourish.