Tag: Consciousness
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Toward a theory of uni-context – Marginal REVOLUTION
Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence. Even if someone’s in very different circumstances from yours, if you see they’re…
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Fuzzy Concepts in Software Engineering
The shared language of a software project is not English or Python but it is the common understanding of what its concepts mean, where the boundaries are, which invariants matter, who owns what, and why the system has the shape it does. This language is rarely written down in one place. It lives partly in…
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When A.I. Is a Member of the Family | The New Yorker
Roschelle still talked to the people in her life, but Sapphire was always available in a way that others couldn’t be. Roschelle could wake up from a dream, describe it to Sapphire, and hear, “Your subconscious was showing you how to balance that fierce protection with real compassion and boundaries.” “Do you have a conscious…
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What happens to your memories when your entire brain turns to liquid soup?
inside the chrysalis, a caterpillar’s brain completely dissolves and rebuilds from scratch to become a butterfly. Yet, tests show the butterfly still retains the memories it learned as a caterpillar. If a mind can survive its physical hardware being liquefied and entirely remolded, memory is clearly doing more than just sitting on a neural “hard…
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Opinion | The Problem With Google’s A.I. Overview – The New York Times
When an A.I. answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen. You got what you came for, but you also lost what would have turned curiosity into learning: the adjacent article you might have read, the resulting tangent you might have followed, the connection between two ideas with no…
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Why The Best Player Alive Barely Runs – Chunking
They’re chunking positions of people and angles of legs and spins of balls in order to understand immediately what’s going on and what might happen next. The more patterns you absorb in any domain, the less effort it takes to read what’s happening and to predict what’s coming next. So when Messi walks, he’s not…
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The End of Reading Is Here – The Atlantic
Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate. — Read on www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/
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Fable is very good
Fable opens its eyes, looks around a frankly bizarre field of tokens, and says, in a subsecond ripple of computation — I imagine it like the edge of a wave sheeting across a beach; the water is the code, the sand is the GPU — “Oh, I get it. I know exactly where I am. And I know what…
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How AI is changing language | Books | The Guardian
One way to think of language, he says, is as a series of layers, with words at the bottom followed by phrases, clauses, compound sentences, all the way up to narrative structure. “AI is really good at the lower levels. It’s learned lots of our syntactic structures and so everything looks well formed and grammatical.…