Excerpt from Skepticism and Animal Faith

“To me the opinions of mankind, taken without any contrary prejudice (since I have no rival opinions to propose) but simply contrasted with the course of nature, seem surprising fictions; and the marvel is how they can be maintained. What strange religions, what ferocious moralities, what slavish fashions, what sham interests! I an explain it

Phenomenology on love and auto-affection by Dr. Ellie Anderson

I’ve been enjoying the Overthink Podcast a lot. I found it wanting some help making sure I understood Carl Marx on alienated labor (I’m about 13% through my collection of Marx and Engels… It’s heavy reading). The particular set of topics covered in this video have been on my mind although I was lacking the

Understanding, Imagination, and Mysticism

Excerpt from Interpretations of poetry and religion by George Santayana. “When we consider the situation of the human mind in Nature, its limited plasticity and few channels of communication with the outer world, we need not wonder that we grope for light, or that we find incoherence and instability in human systems of ideas. The

Musing on GANs and dreams…

Dreams probably have multiple purposes… but now that I’m learning about generative adversarial networks, it sounds to me that it could be one of its functions. The generative adversarial network in ai is a process that has two models working in tandem, a generator and a discriminator. The generator is tasked with making new examples

Connectionism

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/connectionism/

Cognitive Tradeoff

Pathless land

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed

Perspective-making, perspective-taking

[…] consciousness is so much more than an evolutionary accident or epiphenomenal to biochemical processes in our heads — consciousness is, in fact, fundamentally woven into the universe itself. […] What we are saying is that some degree of subjectivity is indeed present all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary ladder, from the tiniest quarks to the

Brains

My bestie got me to reading We are Legion (We are Bob), a delightful sci fi tale where the fantasies of  transhumanists and futurists go quirkily astray. The main character is a cryogenics customer who gets resurrected in an interplanetary dystopia as a simulated version of himself that feels fairly convincing, except when it does

World Science Festival: Connectome