I don’t find any reason why G_d would have any better answer to “I…?” than I do.

The tension (tanos) between “the I” and “the Me” is something all humans live constantly with, even if they never notice the tension, let alone make an intentional study of. This self in the mirror (Behold! It is I! Whomst is Brushing Minest Teeth!), this self we refer to in the third-person (I), this… thing […]

Is there a metaphor in machine learning for the following concept?

Given a list of ideas, which also has some “pseudo-notation” that may be more harmful than helpful, but I think is helping me: I would like to understand something meaningful about Y. Y seems to me to be dependent upon something about it’s relationship with an unknown, labeled X. Y|~X “Y given unknown entity X” […]

Attention is not directed, it is gathered

Maybe even better, “it gathers”. There is not “a source of attention” that “points” attention somewhere. Rather attention itself gathers in clumps, providing salience as, and of, something that seems like “a coherent group that notices itself”. Attention is the single resource in the universe that can be leveraged to introduce novelty into the system.

Buggy system

Human cognition, when it is tasked with making a JUDGEMENT ABOUT X, has a bug where it reaches around blindly in the dark for any thing that makes sense and returns the very first thing it arrives at to the user — usually with an unreasonably high confidence flag that seems to be inversely proportional […]

On the idea that consciousness creates 4D reality from a 2D hologram

I’m blocked on all my current tasks at work so I went to MacNiven’s to take a break, and, like I do, I’m reading a physics book. This one is about the various “Universe as Holographic Information” hypotheses. Short version The deepest reality of our universe is two-dimensional hologram, one of Space and one of […]

Reading: “The hard problem of consciousness is a distraction from the real one”

There is a final twist to this story. Predictive models are good not only for figuring out the causes of sensory signals, they also allow the brain to control or regulate these causes, by changing sensory data to conform to existing predictions (this is sometimes called ‘active inference’). When it comes to the self, especially […]