Friday, September 05, 2025

The case against reality

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I've dipped into and out of Donald Hoffman's ideas several times, looking back at Geffer's article in Granta Magazine , Hoffman...
Wednesday, September 03, 2025

Resetting my brain…

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After a jolt of caffeine or intense exercise I sometimes feel a sudden quiet - a mind reset or emptying during which a quiet space appears t...
Monday, September 01, 2025

Selected MindBlog posts on defining what our human self or "I" is.

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This post collects the titles and texts of selected posts on what a human self is that I have composed since June 2022, and this link takes...
Friday, August 29, 2025

Why You Are Probably An NPC (Non playing character)

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I want to pass on this outstanding piece of writing from Gurwinder on Substack, in which he describes five different robotic human characte...
Wednesday, August 27, 2025

AI is a Mass-Delusion Event - and - Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress

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I want to recommend two articles whose titles are this post's title, the first by Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic and the second by Kyl...
Monday, August 25, 2025

Gaze patterns can serve as a sensitive marker of cognitive decline

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From Wynn et al. : Abstract Eye movements are closely linked to encoding and retrieval processes, with changes in viewing behavior reflect...
Friday, August 22, 2025

Predictability and the pleasure of music

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Mas-Herrero et al. do an interesting study on how predictive processes shape individual musical preferences . Significance Using a novel de...
Wednesday, August 20, 2025

A brain-computer interface that reads inner thoughts.

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Inampudi does a description of work by Kunz et al. , who isolated signals from a brain implant so people with movement disorders could voic...
Monday, August 18, 2025

Polarization may be inherent in social media

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Science news reports on a fascinating recent study suggesting that just the basic functions of social media—posting, reposting, and follow...
Friday, August 15, 2025

Points on having a self and free will.

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  A  podcast by Sam Harris  done several years ago summarizies his ideas on the question of whether we have free will and motivates me to do...
Wednesday, August 13, 2025

The number of fake scientific journal articles is doubling every year and a half.

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I am so saddened by the demonstration by Richardson et al.(open source) of the disintegration of the safeguards against scienfic fraud tha...
Monday, August 11, 2025

A 25 year study of what distingiushes 'Super-Agers'

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The results of a long term study by a group at Northwestern University are described by Weintraub et al. (open source) . Here is the abstrac...
Friday, August 08, 2025

Face (e)motion and the third visual pathway.

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Important and ground breaking work from Yan et al. on our social brain pathways. For an excellent summary of this work, with useful graphi...
Wednesday, August 06, 2025

Why we put off things we enjoy doing.

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Interesting perspective from Hagen and Brien :  Abstract People commonly experience long gaps of time between getting to do things they lo...
Monday, August 04, 2025

The coming societal collapse

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I want to pass on t his review in The Guardian by Damian Carrington , pointed out to me by a friend, titled   ‘Self-termination is most like...
Friday, August 01, 2025

Everything we experience comes from inside us

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Everything we experience is coming from inside us - our illusion of having a self, our sense of agency. This includes attributing causal age...
Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Is liberal democracy still viable in our complex world?

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I pass on the background reading for this Sunday's (8/3/25)Austin Rainbow Forum, which I host at my house on the first Sunday of every m...
Monday, July 28, 2025

An epilogue from Glaude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) at 90 years of age

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I want to pass on a clip from the epilogue of Jim Holt's  2012 book "Why Does the World Exist?  An Existential Detective Story...
Friday, July 25, 2025

The optimistic brain - fMRI reveals shared thought patterns.

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From Yanagisawa et al .:   Significance Optimism, defined as maintaining positive expectations for the future, is a crucial psychological ...
Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Losing Loneliness

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Paul Bloom has written an insightful article on the use of A.I. ‘companions’ to solve the problem of loneliness.  I pass on a few clips: Fo...