Tag: Consciousness
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Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life
The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package. Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship. Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without…
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Consciousness May Require a New Kind of Computation – Neuroscience News
So, if we want something like synthetic consciousness, the problem may not be, “What algorithm should we run?” The problem may be, “What kind of physical system must exist for that algorithm to be inseparable from its own dynamics?” What are the necessary features—hybrid event–field interactions, multi-scale coupling without clean interfaces, energetic constraints that shape inference…
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The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore – The Atlantic
For one thing, the organization of living matter defies physicists’ usual expectations about the universe. Your body is made of matter, just like everything else. But the atoms you’re built from today won’t be the atoms you’re built from in a year. That means you and every other living thing aren’t an inert object, like…
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How harmful is the decline in long-form reading? – Marginal REVOLUTION
A second and more pessimistic diagnosis is that print and reading culture has been hanging by a thread, and current and pending technological advances are about to give that thread its final cut. The intellectual and cultural apocalypse is near. Even if your family thinks of itself as well-educated, your kids will grow up unable…
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Kubrick on Lessons from Chess
think before grabbing, — Read on x.com/FischerKing64/status/1998785412559720910
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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…