Friday, August 30, 2024

The delusions of transhumanists and life span extenders

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One futurist story line is that we all will be seamlessly integrated with AI and the cloud, and bioengineered to live forever. This simplist...
Wednesday, August 28, 2024

Regulating our subjective well being - our brain's axes of arousal, valence, and agency

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I've now read several times through a daunting review article by Feldman et al.  in the July issue of Trends in Cognitive Science  title...
Monday, August 26, 2024

The brain simulates actions and their consequences during REM sleep

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During REM sleep our brains make up and work though simulated scenarios, while putting our bodies into paralysis so we don't thrash abou...
Friday, August 23, 2024

An epilogue

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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"...
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Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Human distinctiveness and Artificial Intelligence

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I pass on some random thoughts occasioned by the previous post. What is distinctive about humans? -There are millions of humans, there can...
Monday, August 12, 2024

Human Distinctiveness in Different Cultures

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I want to pass on a clip of text from Samuel Arbesman's recent Substack email, on the path dependence of fundamental ideas about ourselv...
Friday, August 09, 2024

Selections from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS.org)

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Below are URLs of journal articles  I find interesting and think might be of interest to some MindBlog readers.  Most are open source. Email...
Wednesday, August 07, 2024

The Art of Pretending to Govern

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Venkatesh Rao's most recent installment of his RibbonFarm Breaking Smart series has comments on the seminal ideas of James Scott, a wri...
Monday, August 05, 2024

Psilocybin desynchronizes our brains during ego dissolution

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From Siegel et al (open source).: A single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic that acutely causes distortions of space–time perception and e...
Friday, August 02, 2024

The Ooze is Growing

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In case you haven't seen enough pessimistic predictions about the next ~10-20 years, I pass on the following clips from a recent instal...
Wednesday, July 31, 2024

How we got to where we are

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In the beginning was the cosmos, fundamentally as incomprehensible to our human brains as quantum chemistry is to a dog’s brain. What our h...