Debbie Foster

According to Friston's way of thinking, which he calls active inference, the brain is not the body's helmsman or puppeteer, but its dreamer. Brain and body are bound up in a mutual project to predict the world successfully. Sometimes the brain does the work, sometimes the body.

The Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan instead identifies human-algorithm interactions as a complex system : a nonlinear phenomenon that can't be boiled down to an easily explained model. Instead, the results of these interactions are emergent: They exist only in the context of the greater system.

Could it be that quantum computers really compute across time

For a piece of information to be meaningful, it needs to be reliably paired with another piece of information that gives it context or serves as its cipher.

we are forever limiting ourselves to this or that identity, culture, or religion, exclusively believing our belief systems and mythologies (including our scientific ones) and not looking “behind” them to know the presence that is creating or projecting th

This word of Woolf's, this for, this small and central black square was enough for me to hold both sentences in my mind at once--"For there she was," "For it was a snail"--and feel their piecemeal combination of snail and woman, or rather of the moments the sentences record, moments when the snail and Clarissa Dalloway are perceived, recognized,

a high-functioning Silicon Valley executive suffers from partial seizures in a region within the posteromedial cortex (on the inward-facing side of the cortical hemisphere, along the midline) during which his sense of self is distorted, including his perceived location in space; he eavesdrops on his own thoughts, a form of depersonalization. Direct

We're drawn to artwork that subtly deviates from our predictions of the world—“Too much prediction error is unpleasant or even disturbing; none or too little is boring"--and new art movements may emerge as our predictions adjust to (and get bored with) the new images around us. (We initially reject cutting-edge art because it's too far afield from

When I dream, I exist for myself, although without any insight into my condition, as the "self" is muted during dreaming. When transitioning into a deep, dreamless sleep, I cross the Great Divide of Being. My consciousness ceases to exist. Likewise when I become comatose following a stroke or accident. I am still alive, albeit on life support, but