Debbie Foster

Common to many transformative experiences is the dissolution of the self, including loss of ego and the body it is chained to.

In learning to drive, walk, see or talk, in our very being, we are a massive interpenetrating collection of paths and routines worn by repetition; we are each a landscape, shaped by recurring patterns of force and formed by desire.

It's a loss and a gift that part of me stands a little bit outside of every experience, grasping for words.

Design is what happens when we uncover rules latent in the world and use these to define the logic of a new, separate system. The inventors of chess abstracted the different capabilities of army divisions to invent the rules of a game that's entertained us for centuries. We can't change reality, but we can tinker with designed systems to encourage

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

The legend most strongly associated with Knossos is that of Theseus and the Minotaur, and it is arguably the oldest surviving European story.

In what’s known as the planning fallacy, we tend to be overly optimistic when we map out timelines, goals, targets, and other horizons. We look at the best-case scenario instead of using the past to determine what a more realistic scenario would look like.

Precognitive dreams, Dunne argued, show that at night, as well as other times when the brain is in a relaxed state, our consciousness can wriggle free of the present moment and scan ahead (as well as behind) on our personal world-line, like a flashlight at night illuminating a spot on the path ahead.

There is no first-person point of view.

Our access to our own thoughts is just as indirect and fallible as our access to the thoughts of other people. We have no privileged access to our own minds. If our thoughts give the real meaning of our actions, our words, our lives, then we can’t ever be sure what we say or do, or for that matter, what we