Tag: Consciousness
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These College Students Ditched Their Phones for a Week. Could You? – The New York Times
By midweek, students said they felt more immersed in the world around them. They met up to hand-write letters to family members and discuss “Self-Reliance,” the poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson. (“Oh what is Heaven but the fellowship / Of minds that each can stand against the world / By its own meek and incorruptible…
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AGI is here (and I feel fine)
The key word in Artificial General Intelligence is General. That’s the word that makes this AI unlike every other AI: because every other AI was trained for a particular purpose. Consider landmark models across the decades: the Mark I Perceptron, LeNet, AlexNet, AlphaGo, AlphaFold … these systems were all different, but all alike in this way. Language models were trained…
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The Score by C Thi Nguyen review – a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life
For Nguyen, wonder, absorption and play are central to human flourishing. Metrics are a kind of invasive species threatening to replace our weird, delicate joys with the dumbed-down epistemic fundamentalism of league tables and graphs. — Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/06/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen-review-a-brilliant-warning-about-the-gamification-of-everyday-life
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Stories Beyond Demographics – seeing stories in ourselves
The archetypal model, however, shifts our way of thinking. Instead of needing to adapt the story of Little Red-Cap (Red Riding Hood) to my own social and cultural norms so that I can see myself in the story, I am tasked with seeing the story play out in myself. How am I Riding Hood? How…
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The Goon Squad, by Daniel Kolitz
From these companies’ perspective, the ideal consumer would do literally nothing but goon, lose at gambling, and maybe watch other people play video games. You can try to fight this. You can read a book, pet a dog, buy a stupid box to lock away your phone. You can make a joke about the box,…
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The hard part: A quote from Jason Gorman
The hard part of computer programming isn’t expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking — with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions — into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a…
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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…