Neuroscience
Abie Cohen and
Neuroscience
Forgetting: Not a Flaw, But a Brain's Hidden Feature of Memory - Neuroscience News
Neuroscience Newsneurosciencenews.com
In a changing world like the one we and many other organisms live in, forgetting some memories would be beneficial, they reasoned, as this can lead to more flexible behavior and better decision-making. If memories were gained in circumstances that are not wholly relevant to the current environment, forgetting them could be a positive change that improves our well-being.
We now know that the brain’s capacity to learn, to adapt, to change in response to experience is so fundamental that it strikes the wrong note to say that an activity (like meditation) ‘changes the brain’ as if such change is special or unusual. In fact, everything we do changes the brain on some level. Or rather, the brain is constantly changing,... See more
Transforming Minds
many of the quant-ities related to suffering are based on perceptions and similar uncertain infer-ences. The uncertainty will necessarily increase frustration since it means the predictions of reward often go wrong . More fundamentally, the computed reward loss can be uncertain, even illusory .
Aapo Hyvärinen • Painful Intelligence: What AI can tell us about human suffering
If consciousness really can arise in a jumble of silicon chips, we run the risk of creating countless AIs — beings, really — that can not only intelligently perform tasks, but develop feelings about their lives.
…
Rather than asking if each new AI system is finally the one that has conscious experience, focusing on the more fundamental question of
... See more
Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned... See more