Debbie Foster

Those are the kinds of friends you want, where your heartbeat only raises to just the perfect pitch of anticipatory excitement, where all that awful effort of the beginning of things is over, the paths beaten and the shovels shelved. Look out for those kind. They are hard to find, and difficult to lose.

there is an essential meaning of the word “consciousness,” one that contemporary neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, or philosophers can recognize, even though they approach the phenomenon with varied methods and explain it in different ways. For all of them, more often than not, “consciousness” is a synonym of mental experience. And what

Being a high self-monitor allows you to shape-shift when necessary, without rearranging your entire personality.

I found this to be an uplifting take on personality change: that it can be temporary, but still valid. Free traits allow you the flexibility to act out of character while knowing there's something inside you that's constant and steady.

our imaginations allow us to experience the things we hear and see as if they were our own, which leads to powerful connections.

The sum of the phi’s of all distinctions and relations is the integrated information of the circuit in this state, symbolized by the uppercase letter phi, Q. This number measures the irreducibility of the substrate. Something with no integrated information does not exist as an integrated entity, as it can be reduced to two or more subsystems

… to build AI systems with social cognition, so that they can interact meaningfully with the user over the long term, we first need to solve two foundational problems in how memory systems work. These problems, called oneshot learning and continual learningare currently (as of early 2024) missing in publicly available LLMs.

“You become a big winner when you lose,” Dan says. “Everyone plays well when they’re winning. But can you control yourself and play well when you’re losing? And not by being too conservative, but trying to still be objective as to what your chances are in the hand. If you can do that, then you’ve conquered the game.”

IN SOME WAYS, the nervous system is like a thunderstorm, the controlled chaos of gathering electrical activity occasionally rendered visible in a bolt of lightning. The delicate skin of every neuron is studded with proteinaceous pumps that siphon positively charged ions—potassium, sodium, calcium—out of the cell and into its watery surroundings

What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure.”