Debbie Foster

There's a membrane between imagining God's love as a thought experiment and experiencing it as absolute reality, and if you slip across it, the entire known universe shatters and reassembles itself to be more whole and beautiful than you thought was possible. I had forgotten.

it is not any local mythology or religious ideation that appears to produce the globally distributed phenomena that is the UFO. It is the spine, the brain, and the body and—lest I be heard reductively—whatever in turn might shine or transmit through these

Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.

The intensity of reality was somehow distancing him from reality. He looked up at the sky, hoping to ground himself.

There is no way, strictly, to ask Quine's question in Nahuatl. The language lacks a term for "is." The language similarly lacks what we English speakers call "words."

As mentioned in the previous chapter, instead of words, the Aztecs had nuclear clauses—meaning that each basic component of a sentence could be its own sentence. As a result of this

Sentience implies that an agent experiences the world subjectively. This means that as the brain goes about its business, it generates phenomenal states , that is, mental experiences that are detectable by its bearer.

By stacking transformers one on top of the other, each using self-attention, language can be filtered through a computational skyscraper that learns the connections that each word in every position has to every other. Combined with gigantic training data, these innovations allow LLMs to begin to model very long-range interactions in text—not just

Mere computation, the transformation of information, is not enough for the making of meaning.

there is no objectivity in taste, simply more or less intelligent expression of why you like or dislike something, an idea which may seem threatening or even dangerous if you're the sort of person who has based your identity on a sense of cultural superiority or on sensitivity to imaginary elitists who are sitting in judgment. The only truly "bad