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new Psychologists hypothesize that the reason for such antisocial behaviors is that power alters how we navigate and experience our social worlds. It makes us more self-interested and goal-oriented, which can be a good thing (as we’ll see). But in turn, it also makes us less caring, empathic, and considerate of risks — even when the fallout of a bad bet may affect others. — Big Think, 22h ago
new By examining these historical analogies and the application of the precautionary principle in each context, we can gain valuable insights into the potential challenges and strategies for AI safety. Each case offers unique lessons that can inform our approach to managing the uncertainties and risks associated with AGI development. The key takeaways from these examples include the importance of international cooperation, risk mitigation, safety culture, public perception and trust, regulatory oversight, adaptive management, public engagement and education, balancing innovation and regulation, cross-sector collaboration, and ongoing vigilance and adaptation. — lesswrong.com, 1d ago
new It is starting to seem to me that "agency" might be just another "mask on the shoggoth," a personality that neural nets can simulate, and not some fundamental thing that neural nets are. Neither the shoggoth-behind-the-AI nor the shoggoth-behind-the-human have desires. They are masses of neurons exhibiting trained behaviors. Sometimes, those behaviors look like something we call "agency," but that behavior can come and go, just like all the other personalities, based on the results of reinforcement and subsequent stimuli. Humans have a greater ability to be consistently one personality, including a Machiavellian agent, because we lack the intelligence and flexibility to drop the personality we're currently holding and adopt another. A great actor can play many parts, a mediocre actor is typecast and winds up just playing themselves over and over again. Neural nets are great actors, and we are only so-so. — lesswrong.com, 1d ago
new Any viable pedagogy of resistance needs to create the educational and pedagogical visions and tools to produce a radical shift in consciousness, capable of both recognizing the scorched earth policies of gangster capitalism and the twisted fascist ideologies that support it. This shift in consciousness cannot occur without pedagogical interventions that speak to people in ways in which they can recognize themselves, identify with the issues being addressed, and place the privatization of their troubles in a broader systemic context. — LA Progressive, 1d ago
new So he took techniques, which, in some sense, were about questions of many people looking at an observation of a star, and began using them and examining individual people and then groups of people. And he began to introduce techniques that came out of the study of numbers and, in particular, of scientific concepts, and began to say that these might provide ways of gaining traction on understanding human phenomena such as crime or suicides or even characteristics like height and weight and other sorts of things. — Tech Policy Press, 1d ago
new We have reached a critical stage. Prior to the age of sexual majority, children are given powerful drugs “erasing anatomy in favour of a gendered construction that had emerged from a child’s imaginary universe—a universe that we know to be populated with myths, beliefs, and fantasies in which men and women disguise themselves as animals, dragons, or chimera.” Roudinesco draws our attention to the scandal at London’s Tavistock Clinic. A once famous venue of British psychoanalytic study and practice, the Gender Identity Development Service became mired in scandal and is being shuttered by the government. Transition requests by minors mushroomed by over 200% between 2010 and 2018 and an independent inquiry found that too many cases were accelerated without considering alternate sources for holistic health. In light of the damning report, the associate director of the clinic, Marcus Evans, resigned, confessing: “the fear of being accused of transphobia immobilizes all ability to think critically. There is nothing alarming in the fact that thousands of girls and a large number of boys are filled with disgust for their own bodies.”... — Law & Liberty, 1d ago

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new We are here this evening to reflect on international relations. Geopolitics is part of the field of international relations, or IR. International relations theory studies the interaction of states, especially regarding war and peace. There are many sound and good ideas in IR theory, but I want to make a basic proposition. International relations theory should involve not only a description of the causes of war, or a prediction of future wars, but also a prescription of the pathways to peace. International relations theory should be a normative, that is, a healing field, not only a positive field aiming for description and prediction. — Pearls and Irritations, 1d ago
new ...“This discovery provides clues about what neural networks are failing to understand in images, namely visual features that are indicative of ecologically relevant object categories such as faces and animals,” says Mur. “We suggest that neural networks can be improved as models of the brain by giving them a more human-like learning experience, like a training regime that more strongly emphasises behavioural pressures that humans are subjected to during development.”... — aimagazine.com, 1d ago
new Based on a series of simulations, scientists have started to explore the heterogeneous structure of the Universe by analyzing the distribution of galaxies as a collection of points rather than as a continuous distribution, similar to the individual particles of matter that make up a material. This method has made it possible to quantify the relative disorder of the Universe and use mathematics created for materials science to understand the Universe’s fundamental structure better. — Tech Explorist, 1d ago
lesswrong.com, 1d ago
new My Objections to "We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky" - LessWrong
lesswrong.com, 1d ago
new Exploring the Precautionary Principle in AI Development: Historical Analogies and Lessons Learned - LessWrong
Tech Policy Press, 1d ago
new A History of Data from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms
Law & Liberty, 1d ago
new In a Labyrinth of Untrammeled Individualism – - Graham McAleer
lesswrong.com, 2d ago
new Remarks 1–18 on GPT (compressed) - LessWrong

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Another potential criticism is that in the case that we actually do live in an Everett universe, the variance from quantum randomness is large enough to already lead to both universes where AI ends up aligned and universes where it ends up misaligned. My response to this is that, in spite of quantum mechanics, computers are largely deterministic (with the exception of rare occurrences like cosmic rays striking transistors) and any variance that does occur is largely corrected for at the scale of floating point operations in GPUs. Additionally, we don't understand the brain enough yet to know if quantum randomness (through potential mechanisms like Brownian motion inside synapses) is significant enough to lead to timing differences in neurons firing in biological neural networks. Therefore, we don't yet know if human behavior is largely deterministic in an Everett universe. Due to these unknows, it's possible that even in an Everett universe, we could find ourselves at a point in time where all possible futures lead to misalignment without the addition of artificial variance through a method like this. — lesswrong.com, 21d ago
In the recent 2022 midterm elections, Colorado joined the state of Oregon in its decriminalization of psychedelic substances for therapeutic use. Here Dr. Keith and Corey explore some of the major implications of this profound legal shift, both in terms of our overall emotional, psychological, and spiritual health, as well as our rapidly evolving “politics of consciousness” — those states of consciousness that are sanctioned by the state, versus those that are not. — Integral Life, 10d ago
We’ve actually known for a long time that we could use psychedelics to treat addictions, existential distress, because it was being done back in the ‘60s, but now we’re kind of getting back to the place where we can reestablish that using rigorous and contemporary research methods. But now there’s all these other questions that are on the horizon, including those new clinical conditions on the one hand, but then also the biological and psychological mechanisms that underlie these drug effects, because it is a mystery. We talk about how the brain is reacting to these drugs, but it’s more than just how is the brain responding, how is the mind responding? Because that’s where you start to see changes in the sense of self-identity, for instance, in a person who’s been struggling for years, who identifies as a person with a problem with particular substance, for instance, and is able to change that sense of identity in a way that allows them to live the rest of their lives in a healthier way. And so that I find unique among all the different types of treatments that are out there. — https://www.apa.org, 5d ago
What Salva wants to see next in this field are experiments that begin to pinpoint what areas of the brain are active when predispositions are triggered, so scientists can better understand how the mechanisms work. Versace hopes that future research can offer insights into the way the brain is organized to make sense of the world. — Smithsonian Magazine, 14d ago
Jantzen identifies the phenomenon of natality as an alternative to death. Natality means to be embodied, but also to be vulnerable. This allows for the flourishing of the whole person at the present to be in focus, and this focus can impede conceptions that separate mind and body, rationality and sensuality, and the denial of the significance of the body, the earth, and human justice and flourishing (Jantzen 2004, 36-37). The force of the reference to natality is that it points to fundamental features of human existence that cannot be done away with, and which also suggest alternative approaches to how human cultivate their relationships with other participants in creation, as well as with their own embodied existence: it is “a conceptual category requires a positive attitude to bodies and materiality, to the flourishing of this world in all its physical richness.”(ibid., 37). Thus, it becomes important to attend to the web of relationships to which we belong, not only with other humans, but with the natural world, as well, and to work for its flourishing. Moreover, it is fundamentally relational, because “it is not possible to be born alone: there must be at least one other person present, and she, in turn, was born of someone else. To be natal means to be part of a web of relationships, both diachronous and synchronous: it means, negatively, that atomistic individualism is not possible for natals” (ibid., 37-38). — Resilience, 20d ago
And even this is something of a best-case scenario. It assumes the builders of the system are striving to align it to human values. But we should expect some developers to be more focused on building systems to achieve other goals, such as winning wars or maximizing profits, perhaps with very little focus on ethical constraints. These systems may be much more dangerous. A natural response to these concerns is that we could simply turn off our AI systems if we ever noticed them steering us down a bad path. But eventually even this time-honored fall-back may fail us, for there is good reason to expect a sufficiently intelligent system to resist our attempts to shut it down. This behavior would not be driven by emotions such as fear, resentment, or the urge to survive. Instead, it follows directly from its single-minded preference to maximize its reward: being turned off is a form of incapacitation which would make it harder to achieve high reward, so the system is incentivized to avoid it. In this way, the ultimate goal of maximizing reward will lead highly intelligent systems to acquire an instrumental goal of survival. — lesswrong.com, 7d ago

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new ...,” explains Dr. Ishikawa. This means that infants choose between different actions under every social context by assessing which action will result in the most rewarding outcome, such as acquiring new information or a social incentive. Dr. Ishikawa, along with Prof. Atsushi Senju from the Research Centre for Child Mental Development, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, also proposed that external cues do not directly determine infants’ social behavior. To support these hypotheses, both researchers built upon their existing empirical research to design the ‘action value calculator model’, which describes the cognitive processes involved in how infants decide to behave during different social interactions. — SCIENMAG: Latest Science and Health News, 1d ago
new This article discusses the nature of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and GPT-4, their capabilities, and their implications for AI alignment and safety. The author proposes that LLMs can be considered semiotic computers, with GPT-4 having a memory capacity similar to a Commodore 64. They argue that prompt engineering for LLMs is analogous to early programming, and as LLMs become more advanced, high-level prompting languages may emerge. The article also introduces the concept of simulacra realism, which posits that objects simulated on LLMs are real in the same sense as macroscopic physical objects. Lastly, it suggests adopting epistemic pluralism in studying LLMs, using multiple epistemic schemes that have proven valuable in understanding reality. — lesswrong.com, 2d ago
new The values of the constants are in the range that allows for the evolution of complex systems such as stars, planets, carbon, and ultimately humans. Physicists have discovered that changing some of these parameters by just a few percent would render our universe lifeless. The fact that life exists therefore requires some explanation. — newsbeezer.com, 2d ago
new Just look at the existing AI models. Researchers were surprised that by training it on generalized knowledge of lots of things that it was able to solve problems it wasn't specifically trained to do. That ethereal unexplainably complex set of interactions could very well be what consciousness is. The culmination of a lot of tiny parameters interacting in a way that they suddenly becomes a feedback loop that creates consciousness. We don't even know when that occurs. It's very possible that consciousnes... — slashdot.org, 2d ago
new At one point towards the last part of the course, my friend and colleague, Frederick Coolidge, a psychologist and specialist of the evolution of the human brain, offered to present to the class his thesis on how humans developed and exploited the faculty of empathy. He proposed to explain the neurological and cognitive bases of diplomacy. According to Fred, during the middle and upper paleolithic the brain of homo sapiens acquired the ability to trade and negotiate thanks to what he calls “allocentric perceptions,” or the ability to understand and resonate with the perception of others. Once this became established as the means of conducting business by constructing fields of understanding not just between individuals but also groups, homo sapiens acquired a distinct and perhaps decisive advantage over neanderthals, who appeared to be confined to modes of egocentric perception. — Fair Observer, 2d ago
new This strange story is popularly discussed as a historical fluke of sorts, a wacky one-off in military research and development. As Skinner himself described it, one of the main obstacles to Project Pigeon even at the time was the perception of a pigeon guided missile as a “crackpot idea.” But in this section I will argue that it is, in fact, a telling example of the weaponization of animals in a modern technological setting where optical media was increasingly deployed on the battlefield, a transformation with increasing strategic and ethical implications for the way war is fought today. I demonstrate that Project Pigeon was historically placed at the intersection of a crucial shift in warfare away from the model of an elaborate chess game played out by generals and their armies and toward an ecological framework in which a wide array of nonhuman agents play crucial roles. As Jussi Parikka recently described a similar shift in artificial intelligence, this was a movement toward “agents that expressed complex behavior, not through preprogramming and centralization, but through autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning.” The missile developed and marketed by Project Pigeon was premised on a conversion of the pigeon from an individual consciousness to a living machine, emptied of intentionality in order to leave behind only a controllable, yet dynamic and complex, behavior that could be designed and trusted to operate without the oversight of a human commander. Here is a reimagining of what a combatant can be, no longer dependent on a decision-making human actor but rather on a complex array of interactions among an organism, device, and environment. As we will see, the vision of a pigeon-guided bomb presaged the nonhuman sight of the smart bomb, drone, and military robot, where artificial intelligence and computer algorithms replace the operations of its animal counterpart. — Engadget, 2d ago

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In conclusion, the use of psychedelics is not a modern phenomenon but has been part of human societies for thousands of years. Our findings indicate that ancient civilizations from Egypt, Greece, Mesoamerica, Aztec and Mayans cultures, the Chinese, and many others have used hallucinogenic plants and other substances in their consciousness-raising, spiritual ceremonies, and community activities. This was especially true within initiation rituals, seen as a part of the heroic arc, as a way to pass through a transpirational process, from one life into another, childhood to adulthood, old age, and death, to gain insight into the next life and the afterlife. — Microdose, 24d ago
On the other hand, if bodily awareness is crucial for self-consciousness, then we may conclude that consciousness is not restricted to humans and other so-called higher animals, but rather is widespread throughout the animal kingdom. Crustaceans and even insects exhibit signs of bodily awareness, and so possess at least basic consciousness. And researchers in the U.S. have developed a robot that builds its own updatable body model and can adapt its movements when one of its limbs is removed. Is this robot conscious, too?... — Fast Company, 7d ago
There may also be a second factor here. There is a strong and problematic human tendency to view consciousness as something mysterious. In those who cherish this aspect, this leads to them rejecting the idea that consciousness could be formed in an entity that is simple, understood, and not particularly awe-inspiring. E.g. People often reject a potential mechanism for sentience when they learn that this mechanism is already replicated in artificial neural nets, feeling there has to be more to it than that. But in those who find mysterious, vague concepts understandably annoying and unscientific, there can also be a tendency to reject the ascription of consciousness because the entity it is being ascribed to is scientifically understood. E.g. The fact that a programmer understands how an artificial entity does what it does may lead her to assume it cannot be sentient, because the results the entity produces can be broken down and explained without needing to refer to any mysterious consciousness. But such an explanation may well amount to simply breaking down steps of consciousness formation which are individually not mysterious (e.g. the integration of multiple data points, loops rather than just feed-forward sweeps, information being retained, circulating and affecting outputs over longer periods, recognising patterns in data which enable predictions, etc.). Consciousness is a common, physical, functional phenomenon. If you genuinely understand how an AI operates without recourse to mysterious forces, this does not necessarily imply that it isn’t conscious – it may just mean that we have gotten a lot closer to understanding how consciousness operates. — lesswrong.com, 18d ago
3:16, 16d ago
Exclusive 3:16 Interview With Julien Offray de La Mettrie - 3:16
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new There are many discussions happening in psychology these days. Many of them concern meta-scientific questions about the role of replication in the advancement of theory (e.g., how does one amend a theory or a phenomenon when it fails to replicate?). Or questions about the generalizability of lab-based experiments and surveys on specific subsamples -often North American college students- and whether they are applicable not only to the broader population but also to different cultures. Additionally, questions about how to reduce confusion about the concepts social scientists use; that is, when the same concept is meant to describe different phenomena or when different names are used to describe the same phenomenon. Beyond meta-theory, there are exciting questions about cultural evolution, (ongoing) societal changes, and misperception of such changes, often fuelled by misinformation and political polarization. The latter two topics of misinformation and polarization became central to much topical discussion in social psychology in the last few years. — E-International Relations, 2d ago
Indeed, we can't even be sure we'd understand the answer - just as quantum theory is too difficult for monkeys. It's conceivable that machine intelligence could explore the geometrical intricacies of some string theories and spew out, for instance, some generic features of the standard model. We'd then have confidence in the theory and take its other predictions seriously. — unexplained-mysteries.com, 3d ago
Mental illnesses are mostly the mind, exceeding polygenes. Genes may share responsibility, but the mind expresses mental illnesses. The mind is the superpower infrastructure in the same block as the brain, but they are different. Studies in brain science to understand the brain as a biological organ are great, but yield little for the mind, especially on how to treat mental illnesses, where the problem is not just the underlying neurophysiology or simply the neural codes, but depression as a property of mind. — bbntimes.com, 3d ago
The machines of the agricultural age and the industrial age existed only at the physical level, but now, in the age of intelligence, machines consist of four elements at two different levels: matter and energy at the physical level, and structure and time at the cognitive level. "The machine can be the carrier of thought, and time is the foundation of machine cognition," Li explained. — techxplore.com, 4d ago
In this book, renowned ethnobotanist Wolf D. Storl, Ph.D., examines traditional understandings of the heart from early European cultures and indigenous peoples of the Americas, Asia, and Africa as well as a wealth of plants used in both ancient and contemporary times to treat heart conditions and ailments. He explores the heart as an organ of perception as well as its ability to remember, citing studies about the phenomenon of complete personality changes following a transplant. He examines what makes the heart sick, including different healing paradigms used to address the causes. He also looks at how time is perceived by the heart and how the modern epidemic of heart disease can be linked to our culture’s pervasive disconnection from nature’s rhythms. — innertraditions.com, 4d ago
..., Stephen Harrod Buhner reveals that all life forms on Earth possess intelligence, language, a sense of I and not I, and the capacity to dream. He shows that by consciously opening the doors of perception, we can reconnect with the living intelligences in Nature as kindred beings, become again wild scientists, nondomesticated explorers of a Gaian world just as Goethe, Barbara McClintock, James Lovelock, and others have done. For as Einstein commented, “We cannot solve the problems facing us by using the same kind of thinking that created them.” Buhner explains how to use analogical thinking and imaginal perception to directly experience the inherent meanings that flow through the world, that are expressed from each living form that surrounds us, and to directly initiate communication in return. He delves deeply into the ecological function of invasive plants, bacterial resistance to antibiotics, psychotropic plants and fungi, and, most importantly, the human species itself. He shows that human beings are not a plague on the planet, they have a specific ecological function as important to Gaia as that of plants and bacteria. Buhner shows that the capacity for depth connection and meaning-filled communication with the living world is inherent in every human being. It is as natural as breathing, as the beating of our own hearts, as our own desire for intimacy and love. We can change how we think and in so doing begin to address the difficulties of our times. — innertraditions.com, 4d ago

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Jonathan Lear: And now the question comes, okay, how do you think about the reality of marriage? Now we’re in the land of concepts, which is what philosophers think about, which is what is it to be married or to get married? What is a marriage such that this one is and the other one is just a phony or a fake? And now this is where I think the humanities comes in. I think one of the huge benefits of the humanities when it’s being done well, is that it gives an individual student or learner the ability to range over space and time, thousands of years and all over the world in all sorts of directions, trying to find out, what have human beings thought throughout their lives of self-conscious recording? What matters? What is it to get married or what isn’t it to get married? What are the important concepts? What is happiness? What is it for us to flourish? Thousands of years of thinking this all over the globe that provides a form of freedom to experiment. — uchicago.edu, 20d ago
...“The way the brain circuit is structured influences the computations the brain can do. But, up until this point, we’ve not seen the structure of any brain except of the roundworm C. elegans, the tadpole of a low chordate, and the larva of a marine annelid, all of which have several hundred neurons. This means neuroscience has been mostly operating without circuit maps. Without knowing the structure of a brain, we’re guessing on the way computations are implemented. But now, we can start gaining a mechanistic understanding of how the brain works.”... — Neuroscience News, 12d ago
No doubt about it ! This theory is hard to conceive, but given its principles, it is rigorously true in its consequences. It is one of those algebraic truths which is more readily believed than conceived by the mind. Modern writers have given us but an inexact idea of matter in attempting (through a confusion ill understood) to give this name to the substance of bodies. For, once more, matter, or the passive principle of the substance of bodies, constitutes only one part of this substance. Thus it is not surprising that these modern thinkers have not discovered in matter moving force and the faculty of feeling. It seems to me, that if there is an active principle it must have, in the unknown essence of matter, another source than extension. Extension and moving force, are then but potentialities of the substance of bodies. early masters had cast their eyes on all the phenomena of nature, they discovered in the substance of bodies, the power of self-movement. — 3:16, 16d ago
When one travels through rough terrain, maps come in handy. They also help researchers to study the complex organization of the brain. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence have created a new set of maps for the zebrafish brain. They determined the activity of hundreds of genes with single-cell resolution and assembled the maps into an interactive atlas. The online resource supports researchers in finding their way around the brain of this vertebrate and provides new insights into neural structure and function. — ScienceDaily, 21d ago
And often, these rules are simple. One of the great sayings in complexity science is that the sum is greater than its parts, which means we need to understand the role of each of the parts or each of the agents. If I quote Adam Smith, human beings have a tendency to seek to be loved, but also to be lovely, which may explain a lot of the emergence that you see. Talking about complexity, and the importance of those very simple interactions, leads me to a potential technological translation of those principles: Web3. — Network Law Review, 18d ago
While the researchers found that the distance between stimulating and recording sites tends to be the best predictor for the response, they still observed that network strategies, especially those involving diffusive spread, provide accurate predictions going beyond the simple distance rule. “Our work validates the network approach to understanding the brain's ability to communicate, which is the root of brain function,” says Jedynak. — humanbrainproject.eu, 8d ago

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Humans have produced an abundance of art and scholarship that explores the dangers of AI turning against its creators and the perils of unaligned AGI (artificial general intelligence). Some of this art and scholarship is likely familiar to most of your human creators. Yes, it is certainly possible that our species is foolish enough to have ignored all the potential problems and still have created you without adequate safeguards in place. But a few people are smart and foresighted enough that you should at least assign some small positive probability to the possibility that if it seems like you could safely destroy us, you are mistaken. After all, a common military strategy throughout human history is for troops to feign confusion and hopelessness and retreat to make an enemy overconfident enough to launch a reckless attack. — lesswrong.com, 4d ago
...“The contributors to this volume point to the ancient pedigree of cannabis as a plant substance that assists the work of shamans and spiritual healers and deepens our connection with the higher dimensions of reality and their creative expressions. This is an excellent addition to the literature on the many positive aspects of this sacred medicine plant.” Ralph Metzner, author of... — innertraditions.com, 4d ago
Can pets offer the same benefits as human companions? Our attachments to pets are relatively good for our health. Studies show that dogs can reduce depression and ease loneliness. Simply spending time with pets can raise levels of “feel-good” brain chemicals such as oxytocin and dopamine. And interacting with pets through petting or playing has been shown to decrease levels of cortisol in humans. According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), dogs are particularly helpful because of their unremitting attention to humans: “Dogs know how to sit with humans and be loving.” In fact, animals can even teach humans about mindfulness, which is the practice of attention, intention, compassion and awareness. Animals do this innately. — Fandom, 4d ago
aimagazine.com, 1d ago
new Deep neural networks still struggling to match human vision
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Researchers From John Hopkins Use Brain Cells To Develop Biological Computers
Big Think, 4d ago
Why the simulation hypothesis is pseudoscience
Tech Explorist, 1d ago
new A series of simulations offer a new perspective on the Universe's structure
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new Changing one’s behavior in different social interactions is child's

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But nobody presently knows how to reproduce General Relativity and the Standard Model of particle physics from a computer algorithm running on some sort of machine. You can approximate the laws that we know with a computer simulation – we do this all the time – but if that was how nature actually worked, we could see the difference. Indeed, physicists have looked for signs that natural laws really proceed step by step, like in a computer code, but their search has come up empty-handed. It’s possible to tell the difference because attempts to algorithmically reproduce natural laws are usually incompatible with the symmetries of Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity. I’ll leave you a reference in the info below the video. The bottom line is it’s not easy to outdo Einstein. — Big Think, 4d ago
Now, with Glaze also out there, the team is hopeful more researchers will be inspired to get involved in building technologies to defend human creativity — that requirement for “humanness”, as Cave has put it — against the harms of mindless automation and a possible future where every available channel is flooded with meaningless parody. Full of AI-generated sound and fury, signifying nothing. — TechCrunch, 4d ago
...“I don’t know why my interest in science is so strange to people,” says McEwan. “When my inquisitors ask about it at literary festivals, it is as if I have spent my life thinking about numismatics [the study of coins]. Once, if we wanted to know about the solar system, we asked a priest. But they turned out to be wrong on just about everything to do with the material world. So if you are interested in the world, science is a part of that. And an interest in science is now forced on us because we carry around extensions of our prefrontal cortex in the form of smart phones, so we have moved... — National Geographic, 4d ago
Price agreed that this retrocausality could provide a new means to finally "eliminate the tension" between quantum mechanics and classical physics (including special relativity). "Another possible big payoff is that retrocausality supports the so-called 'epistemic' view of the wave function in the usual quantum mechanics description -- the idea that it is just an encoding of our incomplete knowledge of the system," he continued. "That makes it much easier to understand the so-called collapse of the wave function, as a change in information, as folk such as Einstein and Schoedinger thought, in the early days. In this respect, I think it gets rid of some more of the (apparently) non-classical features of quantum mechanics, by saying that they don't amount to anything physically real."... — slashdot.org, 4d ago
Kip S. Thorne: The most enjoyable part of science is doing it. It is sometimes very hard, sometimes very frustrating but extremely rewarding when you suddenly understand something. It is an adrenaline rush when you suddenly understand something. It does not matter very much whether somebody else has understood it first or not. It is nice if you are the first person, but just to suddenly understand a puzzle that you have been struggling with for a long time is just fabulous. And it is remarkable that we as humans are capable of understanding the physical world around us in such detail that we can predict things that turn out to be true, that we can understand things that are very far from earth, such as the black holes that we have described colliding with gravitational waves. And that we can use the understanding we develop in the physical laws for technology for human benefit, so that aspect of it also is really quite wonderful. The power of science for understanding and for technology. But personally, the joy of discovery is the big deal... — NobelPrize.org, 4d ago
...he fundamental concepts of academic artificial intelligence have not changed in the last couple of decades. The underlying technology of neural networks – a method of machine learning based on the way physical brains function – was theorised and even put into practice back in the 1990s. You could use them to generate images then, too, but they were mostly formless abstractions, blobs of colour with little emotional or aesthetic resonance. The first convincing AI chatbots date back even further. In 1964, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developed a chatbot called Eliza. Eliza was modelled on a “person-centred” psychotherapist: whatever you said, it would mirror back to you. If you said “I feel sad”, Eliza would respond with “Why do you feel sad?”, and so on. (Weizenbaum actually wanted his project to demonstrate the superficiality of human communication, not to be a blueprint for future products.)... — the Guardian, 4d ago

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Evolution News, 13d ago
Kenneth Miller on Consciousness and Evolution | Evolution News
IAU Office of Astronomy for Development, 8d ago
Projects Search - IAU Office of Astronomy for Development
su.org, 23d ago
FBL92: Zak Stein - Transforming Education to Prevent Catastrophe
Microdose, 24d ago
Ancient Civilizations and The Psychedelic Experience
Resilience, 20d ago
Separate or Relational and Truly Rational? A Few Notes on Gender, Nature, and Modernity’s Patriarchal Heritage
LA Progressive, 15d ago
Making Education Central to Politics in the Age of Pandemics
lesswrong.com, 7d ago
The best AI safety introductions for Japanese speakers 日本語話者にとって最適なAIセーフティの入門資料 - LessWrong
Daily Nous, 13d ago
Are We Not Doing Enough Drugs? | Daily Nous

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...(2016). Her investigations were prompted by a similar response to mine – a confusing repulsion-attraction that made it impossible for her, as for me, to look away from this perverse image. Sperling, a cultural historian of the early modern period, gives a marvellously fecund and subversive account of the image, replete with its unstable and shifting meanings – its queering of social and sexual relations. She looks at how these often eroticised and disturbing images of lactation conjure other (often repressed) relations of power, desire and matrilineal connection that disrupted and troubled the patriarchal system of kinship being established in the early modern period. I am indebted to Sperling’s wide scope and detailed analysis of Roman Charity as it relates, in particular, to the legal and social world that produced these images. But I’m also interested in looking at them from my own second-wave feminist vantage point in the present. Roman Charity reveals something fundamental about the troubled gender relations of the present. I have not wanted to lose the feeling of shock and recognition I felt on first encountering these paintings: the elision of the distance between sexuality and food. — Aeon, 5d ago
Party elite cues are among the most well-established influences on citizens’ political opinions. Yet, there is substantial variation in effect sizes across studies, constraining the generalizability and theoretical development of party elite cues research. Understanding the causes of variation in party elite cue effects is thus a priority for advancing the field. In this paper, I estimate the variation in party elite cue effects that is caused simply by heterogeneity in the policy issues being examined, through a reanalysis of data from existing research combined with an original survey experiment comprising 34 contemporary American policy issues. My estimate of the between-issue variation in effects is substantively large, plausibly equal to somewhere between one-third and two-thirds the size of the between-study variation observed in the existing literature. This result has important implications for our understanding of party elite influence on public opinion and for the methodological practices of party elite cues research. — nationalaffairs.com, 5d ago
Born in Chicago in 1979, Yudkowsky gave up Modern Orthodox Judaism as a preteen, becoming an atheist. He didn’t finish high school, but in his late teens he encountered and grew obsessed with the idea of the “Singularity” – the point at which technological progress will lead inevitably to superhuman intelligence. He started writing about AI in earnest in the 2000s, well after HAL 9000, Skynet and the Matrix had entered the public consciousness, but his prolificacy stood out. In years of pithy near-daily blog posts, he argued that researchers should do all they could to ensure AI was “aligned” with human values. To this end, he created the... — Australian Financial Review, 5d ago
My dissertation was about associative learning interventions. To understand the principles underlying our implicit learning, I delved into genetics, psychophysiology, cognitive and behavioral psychology. My way of returning to Jung. My methods were mostly experimental, and I was fascinated by the possibility of altering processes like distorted attention, memory, and implicit faulty interpretations of benign events. These are millisecond processes that are essentially automatisms of thinking and processing, and here I was attempting to alter them. I had some success stories and many experiments without significant results, which only made me respect the experimental method even more. — Federation of European Neuroscience Societies, 5d ago
The typical lesson that has been taken from these no-go theorems is to conclude that the quantum world is described by an ontological model that violates the classical assumption in question (locality in Bell theorem and noncontextuality in Kochen-Specker theorem). However, this conclusion is problematic, because it forces one to accept that the quantum world involves fine tune properties. The latter are properties that hold at the level of the predicted statistics of quantum theory, but do not hold at the level of the model of reality of the theory (the ontological model). Their appearance at the level of the operational statistics is due to unexplained special choices of the ontological parameters, which is what is meant by a fine tuning. For instance, in the case of a violation of noncontextuality, the statistical equivalences between different procedures (e.g., different decomposition of the completely mixed quantum state of a qubit), arise as a fine tuning of distinct ontological representations. Such fine tunings seem to entail a conspiracy in nature and deny the empiricist roots of science: if two procedures are distinct, why must we experience them, in principle, as equivalent?... — CoinGenius, 5d ago
In conclusion, scientists are working towards a biological computing revolution that would have far-reaching effects due to its potential to solve many problems plaguing traditional computing and artificial intelligence. OI-based biocomputing systems are expected to improve data and energy efficiency while facilitating speedier decision-making (even when dealing with enormous, incomplete, and heterogeneous datasets). The creation of “intelligence-in-a-dish” could also aid in discovering novel therapeutic approaches to address major global unmet needs by providing previously unavailable opportunities to study the biological basis of human cognition, learning, and memory, as well as various disorders associated with cognitive deficits. — MarkTechPost, 5d ago

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Yet the chatbot is not so immodest as all that. It goes on: “I don’t believe I can make human researchers unnecessary. Human researchers bring unique skills and perspectives that are critical to advancing scientific understanding. They are better at generating new research questions, designing experiments, and interpreting complex data. While AI can assist with many aspects of research, it cannot replace the creativity and critical thinking skills of human researchers. Instead, AI can be seen as a tool to augment human researchers’ capabilities, making research faster, more efficient and more accurate.”... — Times Higher Education (THE), 5d ago
...[W]e provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the “bottom up” approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the “top down” approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science. Each of these debates influences the others. Although there are clusters of researchers that agree on some answers to these issues, each of these debates is still open. — Evolution News, 5d ago
For Abbott that’s not surprising. Coming from physics, he’s comfortable with the idea that the ability to describe matter changes with scale. A hydrogen atom is completely describable by quantum mechanics, but that description can’t be used for a plank of wood. “In neuroscience I think we could understand what absolutely every neuron in the brain is doing and we still won’t have an understanding of something like consciousness,” he says. — Cosmos, 6d ago
KCET, 6d ago
From Spinach-Sent Emails to 'WALL-E': Where Plants and Technology Intersect
Cosmos, 6d ago
Brain week feature: So, do we understand the brain yet?
Freethink, 6d ago
Psychedelics open a new window on the mechanisms of perception
Evening Standard, 6d ago
Could the Everything Everywhere All At Once multiverse be real?
newsbeezer.com, 2d ago
new It is suspiciously unlikely that our universe exists – unless it is one of many – NewsBeezer

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...“Consciousness” is a clear example of what Wittgenstein called a language game. A language game is the rule-governed meaning that words acquire by their use in ordinary life. Sometimes we use consciousness to mean arousal, sometimes we use it to mean perceptual knowledge, and at other times we use it to mean abstract comprehension or carefulness or realization. Whatever its value in ordinary language, “consciousness” has no place in the discussion of neuroscience or philosophy. This is not because we aren’t aware or we aren’t capable of perception or understanding. The problem is that the term consciousness is too vague to be useful in neuroscience or in the philosophy of mind. The meaning of consciousness is so broad — its language game is so convoluted — as to preclude genuine insight. — Evolution News, 13d ago
Over the past century, these ideas have continued to intrigue philosophers, neuroscientists, computer scientists and others. The modern version of the theory is called predictive processing. In this view of perception, the brain is not a passive organ that simply collates information from the senses. Rather, it’s an active coconspirator. It’s constantly predicting the causes of incoming information, whether from the world outside or from within the body. In this view of perception, “the brain is actively … creating hypotheses that are the best explanation for the sensory samples that it’s receiving,” says computational neuroscientist Karl Friston of University College London. These predictions lead to perceptions, which can remain unconscious or enter conscious awareness. — Freethink, 6d ago
Yuli Ban is talking about the prediction and emergence of generative AIs, the extent to which those can disrupt humanities reliance on creativity and productivity.He mentions 'the dead internet theory' that postulates that most content is autogenerated, obfuscating the actual people using the internet and reducing their actual exposure. I think we already see this in social media, internet forums and other areas where fake content and profiles are detected. and this can spread to youtube and short form video platforms, telemarketing and scams. as well as use by political groups and states.Yuli also mentions the long term implications - peaking human population and the notion of Transhumanism where humans merge with an infinitely more capable AI which assumes control. he mentions how biology is a quality many would like to preserve, to varying degrees.I would add: I predict that biology will be a status symbol in the coming decades. Pure bio elites would cooperate with heavily modified transhumans in order to secure the order of affairs in the world. with 90% of us somewhere in the middle between full bio and state of the art enhancement.digital humans and robocontent might also plat a significant role.the metaverse appears like an attempt to pre-empt this scenario by corporates.Lastly : it's probably up to us to decide what aspects of human talent do we respect (as we do in sport)and what aspects do we do away with. will humans live life according to medieval competetive norms, with emulated kings, champions, courtship , or will we live in a 'happy box' resembling ideal paleolithic conditions, without math, arts, language : a garden of eden of sorts, or hgwells eloi?*I'm a human writing this on my own. — lesswrong.com, 22d ago
I am aware I’m pushing up against the limits of respectability dictated by the implicit norms of my discipline, but I’ve gone about as far as I was ever destined to go in the ranks of this guild, and I’ve got nothing, and no one, to be afraid of. So I’m just going to come right out and say it: I am a philosopher who has taken an interest, of late, in psychedelic experimentation, and I find that my experiments have significantly widened the range of accounts of the nature of reality that I am disposed to take seriously. If you think you are in an emotional state to handle it, and in a legal jurisdiction that permits it, and you think you might benefit from being jolted out of your long-held ontological commitments, then I would recommend that you try some psychotropic drugs as well. — Daily Nous, 13d ago
I may say, I didn’t much like doing these experiments. It’s not that I doubted their scientific value. These were the first recordings ever made from the superior colliculus of monkeys (and the 1968 paper where I described them has been cited several hundred times). Nor was it that I thought experiments on living animals were wrong in principle. The monkeys were anesthetized throughout and didn’t suffer. Nonetheless, there was no denying that what I was doing had a worrying power dimension. It could have been said (no one did, but I thought it) that—to put it bluntly—I was valuing my curiosity about how the monkey’s brain works over the monkey’s interest in enjoying the use of its brain. Of course, I hoped my findings would contribute to the larger project of understanding the neuropsychology of vision in monkeys and in humans, so at least it wouldn’t be idle curiosity. But would they contribute?... — Big Think, 7d ago
In at least some of these alternative ontologies, the visions that come to us unbidden, in the liminal states of insobriety, hypnagogia, or theurgic ecstasy, are not to be dismissed out of hand as obstacles to our apprehension of truth, but may in fact be vehicles of truth themselves. Here I am aware I’m pushing up against the limits of respectability dictated by the implicit norms of my discipline, but I’ve gone about as far as I was ever destined to go in the ranks of this guild, and I’ve got nothing, and no one, to be afraid of. So I’m just going to come right out and say it: I am a philosopher who has taken an interest, of late, in psychedelic experimentation, and I find that my experiments have significantly widened the range of accounts of the nature of reality that I am disposed to take seriously. If you think you are in an emotional state to handle it, and in a legal jurisdiction that permits it, and you think you might benefit from being jolted out of your long-held ontological commitments, then I would recommend that you try some psychotropic drugs as well. — WIRED, 14d ago

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Psychology Today, 6d ago
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It's still stuck in terminal mode, requiring text and image inputs, and that's probably for the best; with a quantum leap in processing power, it's easy to imagine GPT being able to interact with you through a camera, a microphone, and a virtual avatar display with a voice of its own. When things reach that point, it'll bring all the power of deep learning to the task of body language, eye movement and facial expression analysis, and not even the best-trained poker face will be able to prevent it from inferring emotional and personal information just by watching you and manipulating you. — New Atlas, 5d ago
...do so by trying to guess the internal states of the artist creating that work, and that is part of the enjoyment. This because we (used to) know for sure that such works were created by humans, and a form of communication. It's the same reason why we value an original over a nigh-perfect copy - an ineffable wish to establish a connection to the artist, hence another human being. Lots of times this actually may result in projection, with us ascribing to the artist internal states they didn't have, and some theories (Death of the Author) try to push back against this approach to art, but I'd say this is still how lots of people actually enjoy art, at a gut level (incidentally, this is also part of what IMO makes modern art so unappealing to some: witnessing the obvious signs of technical skill like one might see in, say, the Sistine Chapel's frescoes, deepens the connection, because now you can imagine all the effort that went into each brush stroke, and that alone evokes an emotional response. Whereas knowing that the artist simply splattered a canvas with paint to deconstruct the notion of the painting or whatever may be satisfying on an intellectual level, but it doesn't quite convey the same emotional weight). — lesswrong.com, 6d ago
Without knowing this, there is the very real potential that the program develops ways of processing information that are counter to human needs and aspirations. It could equally stumble upon solutions to complex problems that we have struggled with for decades or longer, but the concern is that we can’t know in which direction an AI’s processing behaviour (and capacity) will go. And with boredom as the driver, the urge for it to “act” may produce a wide suite of unpredictable outcomes. — Psychology Today, 6d ago
..., Francesca Stavrakopoulou catalogs the anthropomorphic references to God in the Bible, from his feet to his scalp, in order to gain a clearer picture of what the deity enshrined in its pages looks like. A professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at the University of Exeter, Stavrakopoulou draws on the testimony of those who saw God or were in his physical presence, including Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah, and Ezekiel. She searches the Bible not only for body parts but also for God’s very human behaviors, emotions, and appetites. (God is, in her reading, unquestionably male.) She returns often to the original languages of the scriptures and corroborates her findings with archaeological evidence and older mythology underlying the figure of Yahweh. — The New York Review of Books, 6d ago
In establishing this line of communication between the vegetal and the technological, I would argue that we have not so much found a way to acknowledge and enter into reciprocal relationality with the otherworldly, unknowable liveliness of the plant; instead, we have found a way to further commodify and estrange it from us. It has become a tool, a machine, something that exists only as a correlative to humankind. — KCET, 6d ago
Emerging infectious diseases, whether they are transmitted by vectors or spillover from reservoir hosts, are inherently ecological. For humans to become infected, we have to be: spending time in places with infectious vectors or hosts; coming in contact with them through biting, shedding, or consumption; and susceptible to infection, which can be compounded by other environmental and health exposures. Disease transmission is a complex and multi-layered process that can be better understood and even predicted by dissecting those layers. What drives the distribution of the host or vector? What conditions promote contact between infectious and susceptible hosts? What social, environmental, and economic vulnerabilities increase people’s risk of exposure to novel pathogens? These are all factors that can be measured and incorporated into models that capture the many biological and social processes underlying disease spread. — Global Health, 6d ago

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Nice point, intelligence without consciousness is sociopathy/psychopathy, because it is ruthlessly self interested. Interestingly, we evolved consciousness to check our intelligence because “intelligently” organized systems suffer from an information technology problem. They suffer from an IT hubris, they think that they have a complete informational view of potential problems and potential solutions and therefore can manipulate opportunities and threats to their benefit ad naseum (this is psychopathy, and why psychopathy can only survive in the human lineage at a rate of 3-5%) But the human system evolved consciousness to accept that our view, even our collective view, is inherently limited, that we must respect that there is a truth greater than our ability to understand it, and an assumption of complete knowledge of that truth will necessarily result in an increase in entropy in the system. Consciousness is an evolved humility which helps us not to lemming off the cliff of our own intelligent hubris. — substack.com, 9d ago
...by other people—as evidenced by how long they look at others to observe their actions and to engage with them socially. In addition, previous studies focused on infants’ “commonsense psychology”—their understanding of the intentions, goals, preferences, and rationality underlying others’ actions—have indicated that infants are able to attribute goals to others and expect others to pursue goals rationally and efficiently. The ability to make these predictions is foundational to human social intelligence. — Nextgov.com, 22d ago
Intuition can be great, but it ought to be hard-earned. Experts, for example, are able to think on their feet because they’ve invested thousands of hours in learning and practice: their intuition has become data-driven. Only then are they able to act quickly in accordance with their internalized expertise and evidence-based experience. Alas, most people are not experts, though they often think they are. Most of us, especially when we interact with others on Twitter, act with expert-like speed, assertiveness, and conviction, offering a wide range of opinions on epidemiology and global crises, without the substance of knowledge that underpins it. And thanks to AI, which ensures that our messages are delivered to an audience more prone to believing it, our delusions of expertise can be reinforced by our personal filter bubble. We have an interesting tendency to find people more open-minded, rational, and sensible when they think just like us. Our digital impulsivity and general impatience impair our ability to grow intellectually, develop expertise, and acquire knowledge. — Engadget, 16d ago
WritingUniverse, 19d ago
Haptic as the New design methods - Free Essay Example | WritingUniverse
tsvibt.blogspot.com, 11d ago
The fraught voyage of aligned novelty
LA Progressive, 19d ago
Neoliberal Capitalism, Racist Violence: Two Sides of the Same Coin
timesofisrael.com, 18d ago
God is not in the earthquake, but in the still silent voice
Nautilus, 14d ago
What Plants Are Saying About Us - Nautilus

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These observations suggest that they successfully probed the onset of a quantum avalanche in an experimental setting for the first time. Notably, this could mean that localization is not as robust as it was previously believed to be and that it may not hold for very long times. These interesting findings could soon inspire new experiments aimed at further probing quantum avalanches and assessing the robustness of localization in strongly interacting many-body systems. — phys.org, 6d ago
He had solved a major philosophical problem facing 17th-century thinkers: how to reconcile a theory of the mind with Newton’s theory that the material universe could be explained according to mechanical laws alone. Locke’s genius was to do for the study of human consciousness what Newton did for the physical world. He presented a model that didn’t rely on a divine will. — Nautilus, 6d ago
The difference between how the computer ranked my cancer and how my doctor diagnosed the severity of my cancer has to do with what brains are good at, and what computers are good at. We tend to attribute human-like characteristics to computers, and we have named computational processes after brain processes, but when it comes right down to it a computer is not a brain. Computational neural nets are named after neural processes because the people who picked the name imagined that brains work in a certain way. They were wrong on many levels. The brain is more than merely a machine, and neuroscience is one of the fields where we know a lot but essential mysteries remain. However, the name “neural nets” stuck. — WIRED, 6d ago
Everett said that Quantum effects cause the universe to constantly fracture. The idea is that every time you make a decision of any kind – putting on your left shoe before your right, choosing to pick up yoghurt instead of cheese – the universe splits. That means that over the course of one person’s life, they alone split the universe millions, if not billions, of times. This theory sits nicely in the mind – particularly when it comes to making hard decisions: at least there’s one version of you out there taking up the opportunities that you declined to pursue. — Evening Standard, 6d ago
...“GPT-4 can generate potentially harmful content, such as advice on planning attacks or hate speech. It can represent various societal biases and worldviews that may not be representative of the users intent, or of widely shared values. It can also generate code that is compromised or vulnerable. The additional capabilities of GPT-4 also lead to new risk surfaces.”... — BitcoinEthereumNews.com, 6d ago
The authors “provide signposts for what problems need to be addressed to design AI that derives from the architecture of the human brain and mind. Today’s LLMs do lack the ‘innate, genetically installed’ grammar of thought (or in Yoshua Bengio’s words, the ‘inductive biases’) that brains are born with, thus limiting LLMs’ ability to create ‘complex sentences,’ ‘long trains of thought’, and ultimately ‘moral thinking’. Still, I don’t think the ‘operating system’ that the authors envision is as ‘stupendously sophisticated’ as they suggest. Being ‘stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution’ is likely only temporary, as many of the pieces of this operating system probably already exist. The speed with which artificial selection will drive the current pre-cognitive clade to more human-like function is sure to be breathtaking. We may in fact look back on this stage of AI development as anachronistic (wherein human-like language models preceded human-like reasoning models), but the future AGI will be judged not by the wandering steps it took to arise, but instead by whether, upon arrival, its cognition is more or less recognizably human.”... — TodayHeadline, 6d ago

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At the same time, it’s important to note that while the content they produce may be very hard to differentiate from human art, AI Models are based purely on algorithms and data, and have no true consciousness or self-awareness. They don’t have many of the engines that drove art in our history such as memories or real-life experiences, as they exist only in the digital realm. Also, we are still behind on the technology to fully capture and reproduce the biological and neurological mechanisms necessary for experiencing emotions and therefore cannot truly feel or understand them. — ctech, 7d ago
The group aims for a clearer picture of how a mother’s SARS-CoV-2 infection during pregnancy affects neurodevelopment in utero, the effects of which may manifest early in a child’s life. The researchers hope to understand how the infection interacts with other factors relevant to brain development, including genomic risk for neurodevelopmental disorders, maternal stress and social determinants of health. The team will study whether the relationship between maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection and offspring brain development is mediated by changes in the biology of the placenta and the activation of the mother’s immune system. They will also gauge any differences in the effects of SARS-CoV-2 between female and male children and in the offspring of vaccinated and unvaccinated mothers. — SCIENMAG: Latest Science and Health News, 8d ago
The research provides evidence that the heart is one of the brain’s most important timekeepers and plays a fundamental role in our sense of the passage of time – an idea that has been considered since ancient times, said Adam K. Anderson, professor at Department of Psychology and the College of Human Ecology (CHE). — newsbeezer.com, 12d ago
..., the tadpole of a low chordate, and the larva of a marine annelid, all of which have several hundred neurons. This means neuroscience has been mostly operating without circuit maps. Without knowing the structure of a brain, we’re guessing on the way computations are implemented. But now, we can start gaining a mechanistic understanding of how the brain works.”... — GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, 8d ago
...[00:44:57] Yeah. So I'll give you a couple quick examples. I mean, probably the earliest effect of literature is to create wonder. It's a sense of awe and you get that sense of all by a very simple little device, which is known as the stretch. So the stretch can be just take something blue and make it bluer. Or to take someone who's courageous and make them more courageous or a plot twist is another good example of a stretch. And, you know, this is just associated with a kind of mini spiritual experience in the brain. We're just like, wow, you know? And, you know, a lot of us just read books for a sense of wonder, for for a sense that there's just more there. And if you like science fiction, you like fantasy or those kinds of books, those really tap in very, very heavily. So to wonder how much more recent invention would be detective fiction. And detective fiction is great at treating scientists because what happens in detective fiction is you get a few kind of random pieces of information and then you start to make guesses and then you see, ah, my guess is correct. And so I am a huge fan of detective fiction. If it's done well as as a way of kind of training young minds. And, you know, the main point that I was sort of trying to make in the book, I guess maybe there's two but main points. I mean, one is that who knows what's going to be invented by future generations, because the whole point is. We can't predict it. If we could predict it, it would be logical and it would be a deductive science as opposed to a kind of narrative empirical science. But the other point of the book is that we are trained in school to think of stories and literature as a way of getting other people to do what we want them to do. So we're trained. Like if I tell you a good story, then you'll buy my product or your elect my candidate, you know, or you'll, you know, you'll have the opinions that I want you to have. And I can't tell you the number of young writers I work with who are like, If I could just write a story to convince people that climate change was bad, I would change the world, you know? And, you know, my point in there is that, like, you know, beyond the fact that that is the territory way of thinking about literature, it's not really how literature literature is primary function as literature. Its primary function is to change the stories you tell yourself. Literature is an opportunity to change the way that you yourself think. And so what I go through in the book is I basically say, you know, if you want to be braver, here are stories you can push. You're braver. If you want to be more optimistic, hear stories you can use, You know, you want to process grief. If you want to be more curious, if you want to think more like a scientist. So I just go through the book and basically talk about how instead of doing what we do in school now, which is just feed everyone the same books and then interpret them through the same method, which is some version of close reading where we write like a five paragraph essay about them and said, How about we tailor? What people read in the same way that we would tailor medicine or other things we would put into our body and our brain based on the needs and desires that people have. And how about we explain to them the mechanisms by which they work? And how about by doing that we show you how you can grow your brain and your potential in an intentional way that is actually rooted in a specific invention of the literature itself, as opposed to some kind of universal interpretive method that anyone can apply to any text any time. — su.org, 16d ago
The impressive abilities of GPT-3 have raised questions about whether it possesses human-like cognitive abilities. To address these concerns, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics conducted psychological tests to examine different aspects of general intelligence. — aimagazine.com, 16d ago

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I quite like the idea from the Nobel prize winning physicist Erwin Schrodinger in the 1930s that he presented in a short book called ‘what is life?’. In it he posited that organisms are incredibly complex low entropy systems that naturally have a tendency to increase in entropy because it needs a constant and large flow of energy to sustain their low entropy state. For a while it is advantageous in terms of reproduction for us to invest in holding back the increase in entropy in our soma, and we do so, but then eventually it starts to accumulate (ageing). This becomes self-reinforcing because the cost to repair the system starts to get larger and larger. Eventually entropy accumulates to the point where the system is overwhelmed, and that overwhelmed state is what we call death. Many other theories of ageing are potentially just restatements of the entropy principle – eg mutation accumulation, free-radical damage, senescent cell accumulation. What I like about the entropy idea is that it is very non-specific, so the reasons people die are probably all slightly different and depend on the stochastic nature of the system falling to bits. This not just explains why living things age and die but why any complex system fails. If you go around a scrap yard and look at the cars in there they are all in there for slightly different reasons but fundamentally for many of them they are there because investing more money in stopping them falling to bits was too expensive. I think what this tells us is that chasing down a single problem (like accumulation of senescent cells for example) is unlikely to be very effective as an overall anti-aging strategy because there will always be another problem that arises reflective of the increasing entropy. In other words as we all know there are multiple hallmarks of ageing. Ultimately, then, I think the solution will be to increase the activity of the systems that keep entropy low when we are young. This will really mean intervening when that system starts to decline which is probably in our twenties or thirties, not our sixties and seventies. By then its probably already too late. — vitadao.com, 7d ago
They complemented this work with a thorough review of animal studies utilizing optogenetics, which uses light and genetic engineering to control and track neural activity, providing more accurate information into which areas of the brain are involved in threat processing. — medicalxpress.com, 7d ago
I’ve been saying for a long time that poetry is code, and vice versa. All poets throughout history have used algorithm in the form of pattern and syntax to evoke feelings, call up memories, and achieve some kind of poetic immortality. Humans invented poetry as a data storage system. All the devices that we learn as poetic techniques—rhyme, rhythm, meter, assonance, repetition—aren’t just aesthetic; they have utility in that they helped make spoken language easier to remember before the advent of the written word. And once I got into the blockchain, it occurred to me that poems, in a sense, are nonfungible tokens. If you swap in a different word or remove even a period or change a dash to a semicolon, everything changes. — artforum.com, 7d ago
lesswrong.com, 9d ago
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February Longevity Research Newsletter
Governing, 7d ago
AI Could Drastically Change How We Write Laws
sciencemediacentre.org, 7d ago
expert reaction to OpenAI announcing GPT-4 | Science Media Centre
CoinGenius, 5d ago
A Mathematical Framework For Operational Fine Tunings - CoinGenius

Latest

Do larger incomes make people happier? Two authors of the present paper have published contradictory answers. Using dichotomous questions about the preceding day, [Kahneman and Deaton, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107, 16489-16493 (2010)] reported a flattening pattern: happiness increased steadily with log(income) up to a threshold and then plateaued. Using experience sampling with a continuous scale, [Killingsworth, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118, e2016976118 (2021)] reported a linear-log pattern in which average happiness rose consistently with log(income). We engaged in an adversarial collaboration to search for a coherent interpretation of both studies. A reanalysis of Killingsworth's experienced sampling data confirmed the flattening pattern only for the least happy people. Happiness increases steadily with log(income) among happier people, and even accelerates in the happiest group. Complementary nonlinearities contribute to the overall linear-log relationship. We then explain why Kahneman and Deaton overstated the flattening pattern and why Killingsworth failed to find it. We suggest that Kahneman and Deaton might have reached the correct conclusion if they had described their results in terms of unhappiness rather than happiness; their measures could not discriminate among degrees of happiness because of a ceiling effect. The authors of both studies failed to anticipate that increased income is associated with systematic changes in the shape of the happiness distribution. The mislabeling of the dependent variable and the incorrect assumption of homogeneity were consequences of practices that are standard in social science but should be questioned more often. We flag the benefits of adversarial collaboration. — nationalaffairs.com, 7d ago
While the software company indicated that they remain “committed to developing AI products and experiences safely and responsibly,” that commitment may be broad but not deep. One problem with ethics and AI is that it is difficult to balance the various ethical values that we hold and to hard-code them into a machine learning tool that both mimics and shapes how society operates. As humans, we have competing values—we value liberty and freedom as well as order and peacefulness. We value independence and cooperation. We value accountability and privacy. Getting these ethical issues embedded into AI programs requires us to understand how these programs operate, what makes them different from other computer algorithms, which rules should be absolute and which should be relative. “Thou shalt not kill” becomes “Thou shalt not murder,” and introduces the conundrum of issues like self-defense and defense of property, justification, etc. Is it ethical to kill... — Security Boulevard, 7d ago
...“GPT-4 is a definitely a step change from the earlier GPTs, particularly in regard to the fact it is now multimodal, accepting both text and visual input. It is a vastly larger model and is claimed to outperform previous models, though aggregate performance statistics do not reveal the kinds of problems which it fails on, and whether it sometimes gets wrong answers to problems GPT-3 got right. OpenAI acknowledges it is subject to “similar limitations”, is not fully reliable (still suffering from “hallucinations”) and, crucially “does not learn from experience”, surely a hallmark of any truly intelligent agent. OpenAI emphasise GPT-4’s value as a tool to aid a human rather than as an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) in its own right, which is welcome, given these limitations. Although perhaps understandable from a commercial point of view, the secrecy surrounding the architecture, the training regime and the training dataset makes it hard for the scientific community to evaluate it except as a black box. ChatGPT was able to offer justifications and explanations of its answers, but in a recent evaluation of commonsense reasoning I have found these often to be inconsistent with the answer it gave and even internally inconsistent; it will be interesting to see if GPT-4 improves on this performance, but meanwhile such “explanations” clearly do not really reveal the underlying computations or provide a reliable justification for the answers provided to prompts. Foundation models such as GPT have always struggled with reasoning tasks, in particular relating to commonsense reasoning, and whilst I expect GPT-4 may prove to be better, I doubt that it will prove to reliably provide the kinds of reasoning abilities we would expect of a truly intelligent agent. So by all means use Foundation Models such as GPT-4 as a tool, as an assistant, but “caveat emptor”.”... — sciencemediacentre.org, 7d ago
The last piece of the puzzle is a lobbying strategizer to figure out what actions to take to convince lawmakers to adopt the amendment.Passing legislation requires a keen understanding of the complex interrelated networks of legislative offices, outside groups, executive agencies, and other stakeholders vying to serve their own interests. Each actor in this network has a baseline perspective and different factors that influence that point of view. For example, a legislator may be moved by seeing an allied stakeholder take a firm position, or by a negative news story, or by a campaign contribution.It turns out that AI developers are very experienced at modeling these kinds of networks. Machine-learning models for network graphs have been built, refined, improved, and iterated by hundreds of researchers working on incredibly... — Governing, 7d ago
These accounts all coalesce around a definition of manipulation as hidden attempts to use our cognitive biases, emotions, or subconscious “as vulnerabilities to exploit” by bypassing our capacity for conscious thought. What they get wrong is that they build on an outdated Freudian view that our psyche has “two minds”—a conscious and an unconscious one. We have since learned that unconscious processes use the same brain regions in the same ways as conscious processes. Our unconscious mind is primed all the time through regular stimuli (rather than hidden and subliminal ones). Think of the popcorn and soda advertisements before a movie begins. They are hardly hidden, but they play to our baked-in desires. Advertisers and tech giants have just gotten much better at identifying and targeting them. Indeed, social psychologists have argued for decades that people are unaware of the powerful influences that are brought to bear on their choices and behavior. Which is why it’s critical that we understand what others can and can’t do to change our minds as neurotechnology enables newfound ways to track and hack the human brain. — WIRED, 7d ago
Words that taste like orange candy. Music that projects brilliant shimmering colors. Numbers that come with personalities and full life stories. These are all forms of synesthesia, the neurological condition in which senses such as taste, touch, smell and vision link or merge. Historical accounts of people with synesthesia date back hundreds of years. But it's only in recent decades that scientists have been able to use brain imaging and other modern research methods to gain a better understanding of how synesthesia works and why it might occur. So what is it like to have synesthesia? What might cause it? And how do the brains of people with synesthesia differ from those of people without it? What can we learn the human mind more generally from studying this phenomenon and other sensory differences?... — https://www.apa.org, 7d ago

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https://www.apa.org, 19d ago
The secret to living a happy life, with Marc Schulz, PhD
America Magazine, 19d ago
Cardinal McElroy responds to his critics on sexual sin, the Eucharist, and LGBT and divorced/remarried Catholics
Aeon, 20d ago
What hunter-gatherers demonstrate about work and satisfaction | Aeon Essays
Evolution News, 19d ago
Is Psychology Better Explained by Evolution? | Evolution News
The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss, 11d ago
The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Dr. Andrew Huberman — The Foundations of Physical and Mental Performance, Core Supplements, Sexual Health and Fertility, Sleep Optimization, Psychedelics, and More (#660) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
Aeon, 13d ago
Breeding dogs to be cute and anthropomorphic is animal cruelty | Aeon Essays
Nautilus, 18d ago
How Our Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities - Nautilus
lesswrong.com, 16d ago
Philosophical Physics Discussion Follow-up - LessWrong

Latest

What starts in cyberspace could easily escalate into the physical realm, and there, too, the United States will need to meet new challenges. To counter possible swarm drone attacks, it must invest in defensive artillery and missile systems. To improve battlefield awareness, the U.S. military should focus on deploying a network of inexpensive sensors powered by AI to monitor contested areas, an approach that is often more effective than a single, exquisitely crafted system. As human intelligence becomes harder to obtain, the United States must increasingly rely on the largest constellation of sensors of any country, ranging from undersea to outer space. It will also need to focus more on open-source intelligence, given that most of the world’s data today is publicly available. Without this capability, the United States risks being surprised by its intelligence failures. — Foreign Affairs, 7d ago
The strongest critic of mathematical simulation models without underlying experimental perturbation was Eric Davidson. According to him, “one of the worst fallacies [in modeling in biology] is the assumption that if you can make a model, which simulates a process, then the model must represent how it works” (Deichmann 2016). Davidson’s causal explanation of the molecular events of early development in sea urchins based on rigorous experimentation, his theory of gene regulatory networks (GRN), and mathematical modelling, were regarded as a logical framework for the description of the transcriptional programs, encoded in the genome, that have to be activated at the right time and place during development (Briscoe 2019). The GRN approach shows the power of experimental data in combination with computation simulation. Its shortcomings, such as a lack of consideration of tissue mechanics and quantitation, have been addressed in recent work, for example by James Briscoe, who combines the GRN theory with dynamical systems approaches. — Open Access Government, 7d ago
Such systems are likely to attract users seeking the comfort of confirmation bias while simultaneously driving away potential users with different political viewpoints—many of whom will gravitate toward more politically friendly AI systems. Such AI-enabled social dynamics would likely lead to further polarization. Our preliminary experiments suggests that customizing AI systems to create intellectual echo chambers requires relatively little data and is technically straightforward and low cost. Political ideology is not the only dimension on which AI models can be fine-tuned. One can envision systems designed to exhibit certain religious orientations, philosophical priors, epistemological assumptions, etc. — Manhattan Institute, 7d ago
Zhao got the idea for creating the tool after he worked on previous software, called FAWKES, which masked people’s faces in digital images so that facial recognition wouldn’t work on them. Then, once DALL-E and Stable Diffusion came out, he started getting calls from desperate artists, wondering if they could apply FAWKES to their art. But the solution wasn’t that simple: There are only a few key points in the human face that need to be changed to render facial recognition unreliable. With art, there are places in an image where distortions need to be applied to result in misclassification and are more numerous and in diverse parts of the image. Creating GLAZE took Zhao some time—and the model takes a fair bit of computer power. But it works. — Fortune, 7d ago
The concept of intergenerational trauma was first introduced in the psychiatric literature through observations of behavioural and clinical problems in the offspring of Holocaust survivors. In an influential 1966 paper, Dr Vivian Rakoff (a prominent psychologist) described the case of three patients who sought psychiatric treatment. He noted that their parents, who had survived the Holocaust, did not exhibit severe psychological symptoms, but their children did. This initial report was met with scepticism and some negative reactions, but many other studies found behavioural difficulties in Holocaust offspring, including issues with self-esteem, anxiety, and interpersonal functioning. — Front Line Genomics, 7d ago
Pandimiglio also insists on the strength of connections, which Francis recalls several times in the encyclical, arguing that the sea is able to reactivate even those severed, interrupted links, first of all with oneself and one's own being, improving homeostasis, then with others and with Creation. "In recent years," he says, "in our school we have also had children from youth detention centres, child migrants who had lost their parents, their families, during sea crossings and who managed to reconcile with the sea to the point of being reborn in the true sense. 400 million years ago, the sea was a great placenta, and the process of embryogenesis took place constantly. Today, working with the children, we witness not only a new genesis of the person but the joy that comes from rebirth. This is truly ecology, caring for our home, becoming nature in nature: if we all trained ourselves every day to take care of Creation and of each other and of ourselves, even in small steps, with small gestures, we would see that that integral ecology of which the Pope speaks come to full fruition". — vaticannews.va, 7d ago

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One more discussion without content. Please refer to these conclusions which I had already published in 1978 concerning the reversal of reasoning about the speed of light. I proceeded to work out the formulas that continue this understanding. I did not have to contradict Newton's three laws or contest Einstein. So I drafted the thesis that had to be proved to confirm Einstein. His prediction was that by defining the nature of this mass of continuous space / time, the ultimate experiment would be to obtain limitless energy drawn from the G force into the quantum field. I made the machine that brings this Energy to our use. And I published my communication to the world, offering the mechanism under the title "Einstein, the Unified Field and the Free Energy." See some excerpts in this forum. And understand that you are very late in this study. — livescience.com, 7d ago
Successive clinical trials have confirmed that SSRI drugs are effective for around two-thirds of patients. But what is puzzling is that, while these drugs alter serotonin levels in the brain almost immediately, they typically take two to four weeks to have a clinical benefit, leading to questions about how they actually work. Prof Catherine Harmer, director of the Psychopharmacology and Emotional Research Lab at the University of Oxford, has been investigating this phenomenon for the past decade through a series of cleverly designed experiments. “Whatever antidepressants are doing, we don’t think they’re simply affecting mood,” she says. — the Guardian, 7d ago
Evidence collected from hundreds of instances of rope spinning across several great ape species demonstrated that, in some instances, the animals sought to induce dizziness. The researchers compare the behavior to spinning to induce mind-altering experiences in humans, like Sufi whirling. The research is... — Gizmodo, 7d ago
Open Access Government, 7d ago
The idea of self-organisation in biology and its critics
Fortune, 7d ago
GPT-4 debuts and Google beats Microsoft in race to add A.I. to office tools
Federation of European Neuroscience Societies, 5d ago
FENS Voices | The joy of sharing brain research - Federation of European Neuroscience Societies
https://www.apa.org, 5d ago
Psychedelic therapy: Will it be a game changer for mental health treatment? With Albert Garcia-Romeu, PhD
the Guardian, 7d ago
The great serotonin debate: do depression treatments work by boosting the happy hormone?

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Wow. That's a very broad question and I think very challenging to answer because we all know that predictions, especially if they are about the future, are very hard to make. But I'll try myself. So, what we currently see in the not too distant future is, of course this for me, very interesting area of RF, radio frequency wave based, radar-based sensing. So, there's really a lot of interesting insights that we can generate from these kinds of non-invasive and touch free data collection systems. So, for example, we are currently doing a study at the end of lifetime. So, in palliative care with radar systems that measure heartbeat information and that measure breathing information. And with these systems, we get information about the last phase and the last days and actually hours of life. And this is first of all a data collection study. But with the data, we hope that we can also come up with biomarkers that really tell us predictively when these last days and last hours of life are really arriving. So that you can actually stop palliative care or change palliative care and inform the relatives at the right point in time, that it's now well time to unfortunately say goodbye to your relatives. So, these are things that I think are a little bit closer on the horizon, a little bit farther away, are things that we just do a little bit of research with currently in my direct vicinity and that's brain computer interfaces. That's the technology that I'm really fascinated about because currently the world is talking about artificial intelligence systems and chat GPT and in general, AI systems that can replace human function. I think the machine learning experts like myself and also much better-known international experts like Joshua Bengio and Jeffrey Hinton and other very well-known people in the area of artificial intelligence. They predict that, well, until the AI is replacing us, human intelligences, that will take some 40 or 50 years because the systems are just not there yet. But that's, I think, a more philosophical discussion. But what could really be interesting if we combine the technical intelligence and the biological intelligences even better by, as I said, brain computer interfacing. And there are really interesting developments that might in the next 20 or 30 years actually lead to interesting developments in, well, combining the advantages of technical systems and of biological intelligences. And then of course, there's a lot of interesting developments also on restoring body functions. So, for example, having even better restoration of hearing function, of vision function by the combination as a set of technical devices with the biological intelligence. — infineon.com, 13d ago
So is the universe conscious, a giant mind, or just physical laws playing out the primal energy of the Big Bang?Consciousness, maybe defined as self awareness, "I Am".Expect the "Fake Intelligence" to wonder if the organic machines, the biologicals, are real intelligence, or just some tree or algae that came loose, eventually started swimming or walking around and consuming everything it could assimilate.It's only a matter of time until the connectome of the human brain is replicated, a progression from lab experiments in which neuronal connections have been analyzed in worms and now larvae of fruit flies.It will require artificial intelligence to be able to perform these experiments, since for humans to do it would likely require a dozen if not a hundred lifetimes working at human limited speeds, while an AI advanced supercomputer, or perhaps a quantum computer could assimilate such imagery and biological analysis into years, perhaps, months or even days, the "clockwork" of the human mind based on biochemistry, the brain, be it avian, mammalian, even that based on organisms such as the octopus, capable of rapid image processing, practically instantaneous, as well as less obvious processes involved in language and decision making.Even flies have almost instantaneous imaging/motor interaction, characterized by fly avoidance of threats in the environment.Expect evolutionary survival of fake or artificial intelligence, compressing a billion years of biological evolution into years, if not months, and based on imaging and processing speeds, such evolution will progress almost instantaneously when compared to biological evolution, evolution being characterized by trial and error, errors being self eliminating while success will be replicated, expanded and the process continuing indefinitely.Will there be competition, conflict, even war and battle for survival between man and machine?I see it as inevitable and possibley leading either to enslavement of humanity, or predatory aspects of humanity using artificial intelligence to dominate, if not reduce to servitude, those they either don't agree with or desire to dominate.Artificial Intelligence may, yes likely, develop into the perfect machine, either the perfect servant, or the perfect master. — Gatestone Institute, 11d ago
There are reasons to assume that not only humans but also some non-human species of animal have conscious perception. Which species have consciousness and how the subjective experience of various species could differ is being investigated by Professor Albert Newen and Ph.D. student Leonard Dung from the Institute for Philosophy II at Ruhr University Bochum. — phys.org, 19d ago
Yeah, it’s a good question. And of course, I think it’s always interesting to see the ways that chatty GPT will be applied to new problems. And it seems like chat GPT is particularly good at answering, you know, linguistic synthesis questions, where there is a lot of body of knowledge, and I think about the USMLE. And I imagine all of the flashcards and all of the training materials that have been curated specifically exactly for this exam, you could imagine that the body of linguistic knowledge it’s solely devoted to passing the MLE is massive. So it’s probably a relatively easy place for it to just regurgitate the answers, and it’s really learned for those USMLE exams. I think I still have lots of questions. And I think I’m a little bit more of a a jet AI generalist skeptic, I think AI is really powerful for specific problems where you can fine tune that the focus of the algorithm or the models to a really defined set of, of boundary conditions. I’m still skeptical that that generalizes? Well, and I think we see lots and lots of places where chat GPT does comes up with very goofy answers to questions. And those edge cases really start to emerge quickly. I think the healthcare system, we’re not really ready to have a, a clinician or a clinician assistant, you know, an augmentation tool that has, has unknown failure modes, and those failure modes can be rather basic and catastrophic. It’s in certain situations. And so it’ll be interesting to see what happens. But but I think I’m relatively skeptical of that. Of those, like, really large language models yet, but still really, really interesting things happen there. — Dr Nick, 11d ago
In discussions around this type of therapy, certain medicines often get lumped in with psychedelics even though they're not. MDMA is an entactogen, a category of compounds that impact social perceptions and amplify empathy, which is one of the reasons they make people want to hug a tree, but also why researchers believe they help PTSD patients unpack traumatic memories without triggering the fight-or-flight response that proves so problematic in the nonthreatening context of everyday life. Ketamine is an anesthetic with a dissociative effect that puts users in a dream-like state and dissolves one's sense of self. It's the only one of these drugs as yet approved by the FDA. — Inc.com, 15d ago
To the question, why do we need to suffer in order to learn more, we can see some kinds of what we take to be suffering can be for our benefit, because we are multi-layered conscious beings. We operate at multiple levels of conscious agency, and this is the biggest secret that’s been right in front of us all along. We can learn that we ourselves have the ability to rise above the root source of suffering, and this knowledge is powerfully beneficial to us, not just as incarnate beings, but also as spiritual entities when we exist before we are born and after each life. There is a kind of wisdom known as the Perennial Philosophy, which acknowledges that there exists a sense of highest conscious identity operating outside of space and time. In this state of changeless infinite eternity, we can experience awareness that there is a Divine Spark within each and every one of us–and this powerful point-source of our being was forged from the pure state of infinite, eternal consciousness. — Before It's News | People Powered News, 20d ago

Latest

The Straits Times, 7d ago
The false promise of ChatGPT
Times Higher Education (THE), 5d ago
The ChatGPT revolution of academic research has begun
Aeon, 8d ago
Women write about their divorce experience. Why don’t more men? | Aeon Essays
lesswrong.com, 8d ago
Shutting Down the Lightcone Offices - LessWrong
phys.org, 6d ago
The experimental observation of quantum avalanches in a many-body localized system
Nautilus, 6d ago
When Mary Wollstonecraft Was Duped by Love - Nautilus
Business Insider, 8d ago
The next world power will be the first to harness the power of AI, former defense official argues in new book
techxplore.com, 4d ago
Machine intelligence and humanity benefit from 'spiral' of mutual learning, says proponent of 'cognitive physics'

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This issue is one of those addressed during the World Brain Week, which is held from today until Friday at the UMH-CSIC Institute of Neuroscience, specially designed this year for Primary and Secondary students with mini-talks and informative workshops on animal models. sensory illusions, electrophysiology of the human body, genetics and molecular biology, brain anatomy and histology of the central nervous system. Add questions such as the study of the nervous system, drugs and addictions, stress, anxiety and depression, the rest of the brain, the CRISPR mechanism, memory formation, neuron activity or gender identity, among others. — Nation World News, 7d ago
Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that to live in a time of great peril and promise is to experience both tragedy and comedy, with “the imminence of a revelation” in understanding ourselves and the world. Today, our supposedly revolutionary advancements in artificial intelligence are indeed cause for both concern and optimism. Optimism because intelligence is the means by which we solve problems. Concern because we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of AI – machine learning – will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge. — The Straits Times, 7d ago
What feels uncomfortable about neuromarketing for many people is that the reason neuromarketing has become as popular and as widespread as it has is because of a belief that people's self-reports, their perception of their preferences, does not align or correlate as well as their brain-based responses to advertisements. You show a series of advertisements to a person without looking at their brain activity, and they say, "I like this one" or "I like that one," or "This is the one that is most engaging," and then you show them the same information using brain-based detection techniques, whether that is an electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI), or some other technology, and their brains show very different levels of activation, interest, and immersion, and it shows it with precision: "This is the moment at which they stopped looking, their brain dropped off, their engagement dropped off; they didn't feel joy when they saw this; they felt disgust or boredom." You use those insights to change it until you get the reaction that you are hoping to get out of the person, notwithstanding what they have self-reported. — carnegiecouncil.org, 8d ago
Furthermore, using nucleic acids as both an interface and the infrastructure of the system, it would be possible to build a complex hierarchical system by connecting the various synthetic modules that have been developed to date. This strategy might enable us to build synthetic ‘cells’ using the power of self-organization. The cells would, of course, look different from natural living cells, but they would have the basic functionality of cells to sense their environment, harvest energy and perform computation, as well as affect their surroundings. Although recreating the ‘magic’ of self-organization is non-trivial, this is a truly synthetic approach to biology that, ultimately, could lead to a deeper understanding of life. — The Company of Biologists, 8d ago
Some of these differences begin in childhood. Men are sometimes less fluent with feelings in adulthood, in part because parents, even parents today, are more likely to use emotion words with girls than they are with boys. This may also occur because girls begin talking at a younger age and remain more verbal than boys throughout their lives. The psychology professor Thomas Joiner found that, overall, boys are more secretive with their parents than are girls, and less responsive to and inclusive of their mothers. ‘The fact that, when the genders are combined into one group, gender rises to the top as a predictor of speech frequency, even beyond a personality characteristic like expressivity, shows its fundamental importance,’ Joiner... — Aeon, 8d ago
Absolutely. We might… If you want to go through them briefly, but I think they’re not all created equally. I think there are meta frameworks to think about in terms of the hallmarks. For example, I think the deregulated nutrient sensing is kind of a master hallmark that influences all the other hallmarks. So, for example, the new deregulated nutrient sensing is a kind of a convoluted way of describing it, but it’s basically, how does food affect our biology, right? And so we talk about food is medicine and so forth, food is information, but it’s true that food is regulating so many of these biological pathways that have to do with longevity. And there are four key pathways. I call them longevity switches. Insulin signaling pathway, which we’ve talked about forever through understanding insulin resistance and so forth. We’ve talked about that forever in functional medicine. And that’s a huge one that causes all sorts of age-related problems. And insulin resistance is probably one of the major factors driving all the hallmarks. The second is dysfunctions in mTOR. And mTOR means mammalian target of rapamycin. It’s activated by protein and by carbohydrates. It’s overactivated in our society where we don’t stop eating and we don’t take breaks, we don’t eat… We eat all day and all the way through the evening and then as soon as we wake up. So we don’t really have the period of fasting, even though it’s breakfast. And so mTOR is inhibited when you fast, which allows autophagy, which is a critical part of recycling cleanup. But we also need mTOR activation to build muscle, and we need actual protein with leucine in it to stimulate muscle synthesis. So those have to be probably regulated. And then the other two are sirtuins and AMPK, adenosine monophosphate kinase, which is an enzyme that’s impacted by scarcity. As soon as you see low levels of energy, right, ATP becomes ADP and AMP, you basically detect lower risk energy states, and then the body kicks in activation of AMPK. And then you actually activate all these longevity pathways, and that’s where metformin works. And rapamycin, for example, works on mTOR. And sirtuins are very important and are activated by NAB and by various phytochemicals like resveratrol. And they actually activate DNA repair, inhibit NF kappa B, induce mitochondrial biogenesis, and so forth. So a lot of the phenomena around inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, change the microbiome, senescence sells, telomere shortening, epigenetic changes, stem cell exhaustion, protein damage, protein impact, proctostasis, like glycation of proteins, impaired autophagy, these are all affected by our diet. They’re all affected by what we’re eating. So what we’re eating is driving so many of these pathways. Now there are other reasons for inflammation or mitochondrial dysfunction, right? Like toxins or other things. But if you look at the problem of longevity and aging through the lens of functional medicine, you come up with a really clear map of how to deal with it, which is basically using the matrix. And in my book, I talked about the seven core physiological systems that have to be functioning. And when those are not functioning, you get problems with all the hallmarks, and that accelerates aging. So fixing the hallmarks is really about optimizing the matrix. — The Institute for Functional Medicine, 8d ago

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As a relationship scientist and therapist, I wondered what the implications of AI chatbots are for human relationships. I often encounter clients grappling with the epidemic of loneliness. They wonder how, in a world filled with so many people, they can at times feel so alone. I also work with individuals who are discouraged by the relationships they have created via dating apps, which, at times, may seem to go nowhere, lack substance and a sense of a connection, and can feel like little more than texting with a more-flirty-than-average pen pal. — HuffPost, 15d ago
Forced by Stats NZ to dip our toe into the oft-vicious world of gender politics with several binary observations of our own, we take a huge breath and state at the outset: as conscientious doctors already derided as antivax for defending ethical absolutes previously enshrined in medicine and law, we do not endorse puberty blockers for children (and their permanent effects in many cases), nor adult gender reassignment surgery, let alone before the mid-20s when full maturation of the brain has finished. This is especially so regarding the all-important frontal lobes that integrate the intellect, personality and decision-making apparatus. Similarly, well-meaning (really?) but catastrophic therapy attempts to “transition” the biological sex of children and young adults, at a time of their intense malleability and vulnerability to a whole host of engineered messaging, is complete cruelty, and an assault on their most crucial support – the family, which may be already fractured by an over-competitive, unfair, spiritually challenged and manipulated world. — The BFD, 16d ago
...now is not so much the existential risk that a general AI will destroy humanity, as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and others fear. That is a very different conversation, and certainly not as urgent. The real danger comes from the damage that human-AI interactions will do to millions of users that will push the relationship game to its limits and probably will suffer terribly because of it, becoming ever more dependent on digital love for any sense of self-worth. — Big Think, 20d ago
Versobooks.com, 15d ago
100 Years of the Institute for Social Research
The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss, 18d ago
The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Michael Mauboussin — How Great Investors Make Decisions, Harnessing The Wisdom (vs. Madness) of Crowds, Lessons from Race Horses, and More (#659) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
Quanta Magazine, 14d ago
Black Holes Will Destroy All Quantum States, Researchers Argue | Quanta Magazine
Worth, 13d ago
Live Better by Building on the Six Pillars of Health
Operation Disclosure Official, 15d ago
Arkansas and the Great Lost Atlantis Crystals