Debbie Foster

My whole life I had believed that understanding myself required to keep others at a distance, lined up on the far side of a river. That evening of counting I had not felt so certain. That evening I felt like a room with doors open, for others to explore, and that from their explorations I could start to ascertain my shape. We are not the people we

In the human brain, language is the window to our inner simulation. Language is the interface to our mental world. And language is built on the foundation of our ability to model and reason about the minds of others--to infer what they mean and figure out exactly which words will produce the desired simulation in their mind.

…without incorporating an inner model of the external world or a model of other minds--without the breakthroughs of simulating and mentalizing—these LLMs will fail to capture something essential about human intelligence. And the more rapid the adoption of LLMS—the more decisions we offload to them—the more important these subtle differences will

The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.

"Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves."

It is through seeing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, and feeling the untouchable that humans imagine, predict, and infer. The problem is that humans have weak imaginations, inaccurate predictions, and fallacious reasoning. That’s why humans repeat the same mistakes, get easily excited, are deceived by absurd fictions, and fight over pointless

I learned that it takes a special kind of vision to truly appreciate what it means to exist.

There is nothing more beautiful than a formal system with axioms that are perfectly internally consistent. Such systems can be right, and they can be wrong, but that is beside the point. The beauty is that there is no room for bias or prejudice, no tolerance for interference.

The truth that we will never fully be at one with ourselves and that our necessarily imperfect self-knowledge will always constrict and distort our knowledge of the world. The truth that no "alternative" path to esoteric wisdom exists to release us from the intrinsic uncertainties of human knowledge and action. The truth that the beauty of the