Tag: Consciousness
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Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025)
In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete. And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a…
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Write to escape your default setting – kupajo
Writing expands your working memory, lets you be more brilliant on paper than you can be in person. While some of this brilliance comes from enabling us to connect larger and larger ideas, much of it comes from stopping, uh… non-brilliance. Writing reveals what you don’t know, what you can’t see when an idea is…
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Meet the Aphantasics, Those Who Can’t See Mental Images
because the words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly into their minds. Aphantasics might skip over descriptive passages in books — since description aroused no images in their minds, they found it dull — or, because of such passages, avoid fiction altogether. When…
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The space of intelligences is large
LLMs are shaped a lot less by biological evolution and a lot more by commercial evolution. It’s a lot less survival of tribe in the jungle and a lot more solve the problem / get the upvote. LLMs are humanity’s “first contact” with non-animal intelligence. Except it’s muddled and confusing because they are still rooted…
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Confidently Wrong – Marginal REVOLUTION
The authors then correlate respondents’ scores on the objective (uncontroversial) knowledge with their opposition to the scientific consensus on topics like vaccination, nuclear power, and homeopathy. The result is striking: people who are most opposed to the consensus (7, the far right of the horizontal axis in the figure below) score lower on objective knowledge…
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The Genetic Evolution of the Human Race and Its Consequences for the Industrial Revolution
We do not claim that the Black Death instantly made Europeans smarter. Instead, we suggest that the post-plague economy may have amplified long-running selection on traits linked to educational attainment: learning ability, self-control, and long-term planning. In that sense, the Black Death looks less like a one-off catastrophe and more like a hinge in the…
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Edward O. Wilson: The Real Problem of Humanity
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall. — Read on www.harvardmagazine.com/2009/09/james-watson-edward-o-wilson-intellectual-entente
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En abandonnant l’écriture à l’IA, nous risquons de nous empêcher de réfléchir
si écrire, c’est penser, un texte écrit avec l’assistance de ChatGPT ne matérialise-t-il pas les pensées du générateur de texte, plutôt que les nôtres ? Du contenu soi-disant neuf Et à quoi pense donc ChatGPT ? Heureusement, à rien : on l’a dit, le programme se contente de régurgiter les textes figurant dans son corpus d’entraînement, en en…
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Game design is simple, actually – Raph Koster
Some of this is down to personality types, some of it is down to social dynamics, how they were raised, what their local culture is like, what trauma they have had, and countless other psychological things. That’s why one fancy term for this is psychographics. The big thing is, it’s not enough that the problems…
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Aiming for Fullness: The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind.
The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a…