Debbie Foster

So approximations to many of the rules that linguists proposed to explain human language learning may actually emerge in LLMs, and remain hidden among the near-infinite complexity of their billions of trainable weights. Ironically, the transformer does seem to have been serendipitously named – it learns from scratch to carry out some of the very

It is, however, a matter of historical record that people have been impacted by their extraordinary experiences, discovering the biblical "peace of God that passeth all understanding," altering their way of life. Thus a more nuanced approach is to accept these reports as authentic and honest descriptions. They teach us that our central nervous

Magic is not a procedure that produces effects, but a symbolic system with a social function

Despite having more options than ever, we may see true individuality flattened in favor of what a select group of others like, because that's what algorithms do. They don't recommend content for you ; they recommend content based on others similar to you.

… even when supposedly conveying an objective reality, people become storytellers, and which stories they tell depends on the groups to which they belong.

if you believe in computational functionalism, then a sufficiently accurate simulation of your connectome will be conscious (whether it will be your mind, let alone a sane rather than a mad mind, is a different matter). If you believe that consciousness is a structure of causal relationships, an essential aspect of reality tied to its physical

Memory and imagination are closely linked. One reconstructs based on the gist; the other builds on whatever desire or dread is fuelling your image of the future. Both are essentially creative activities; where they differ is not in form but in their source of inspiration.

Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.

Mere computation, the transformation of information, is not enough for the making of meaning.