Debbie Foster

"Snowfall in Sequoia National Park, California," …

That kind of title might not seem remarkable to you, but the wording works wonders because it falls into a marketing Goldilocks zone called the curiosity gap . You know what snow looks like, but you don't know what snow in Sequoia National Park looks like, so you become slightly more curious. You've

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

When AI systems start to behave collectively, we risk provoking externalities that will make the trillion-dollar flash crash look like a storm in a teacup. But these side-effects are unlikely to be the direct result of goals that we give to AI. They will be network effects: unanticipated phenomena that emerge as multiple autonomous systems interact

The past never ceases being made by the future, and we ourselves never cease being made in the intra-actions that create this new knowledge. We and time are all of a piece—an

It was like this passage opened an unnoticed door into a new chamber of my heart, or my brain, or a shortcut between the two. I didn't know if it had just appeared, or if it had always been there, a primordial part of my being. Suddenly it was clear to me that books did not work on everyone the way they worked on me, on Roland, on A. S. Byatt. I

[C]onventions of self-consciousness and inward scrutinizing [were] not common much before the Renaissance and not highly developed until people in the later eighteenth century became obsessed with “personality.” Paul Fussell The Norton Book of Travel

My journalist brain turned on. The light in the waiting room started to take on texture. Background sounds moved into the foreground, demanded engrossment. I felt close to something, the way some days when the air was cold and the sun was bright, I felt more alive. My mom used to describe these kinds of days as baking-soda days—when everything was

The joy I felt in that measure of time occurred not only because of the recognition of similarity, but because of all the difference that surrounded it, and the awe of recognizing the great distance that small word, for , had to bridge.

The legend of Theseus and the Minotaur is full of imagery and incident that lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretation: the minotaur - half man, half animal - embodies the essential conflict between ego and id; the labyrinth, which coincidentally resembles the sulci of the cortex, suggests the complexities of the mind. In 1927, Freud told an