Debbie Foster

How to feel nothing, which I mistook for the ideal state of being. How to feel like nothing, which, at the time, I believed was the only reasonable position.

I thought this was wisdom. Now, I see it was self-defense. Worse, it was a self-defense tactic that I'd unconsciously employed many times in the past, in the lulls between depressive episodes.

build your experience by turning your interests into action, focusing on how you can create value for others

The path back to sanity begins by acknowledging that intelligence is more than logic enriched with generative bursts of randomness. Randomness is capricious and wasteful—while intelligence is purposeful and prudent. This is why the human brain is not random…

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

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

It is known that the likelihood of long-term therapeutic gains increases with the likelihood of the subject having a mystical experience, prima facie evidence favoring a critical role for subjectivity. It is precisely the high emotional impact of the memories of the vivid and highly unusual psychedelic experience that serves as the primary source

"Reality” may just be a boundary we can’t see past.

The computational tricks we discussed above—non-linear transduction, compression, recurrent memory and attention—are ubiquitous tools in AI research. They have already proved their mettle in multiple non-linguistic domains, helping deep networks to recognize faces, generate videos and play board games at expert levels. Moreover, they are also

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