Debbie Foster

I have a stronger memory of visiting Bekonscot Model Village, "the world's oldest and original model village" … We encountered the village as the scholar Yael Padan argues tourists often do, as a representation of the nation in which—like an orrery—time and space are condensed. Bekonscot was first opened to the public in 1929, and while some of the

Games, a universal in human societies, might have emerged as a framework for building mental models of one another. They may have been preserved and elaborated across generations thanks to their benefits in teaching people how to reason about one another. Players must understand the beliefs and preferences of other players to secure the best

"You are long-lived!" exclaimed Durga.

"Our health is matched to the duration of our interests," said Agassiz. "Isn't that how it should be?"

Current LLMs are simply not equipped with the memory systems needed to form a durable impression of the user, which would allow them to explicitly personalize content to suit our views or tastes.

The basic modus operandi of a neural network—in which information is repeatedly transformed non-linearly, to map inputs onto outputs—is a loose description of how computation unfolds in biological brains. Attention (in the transformer) and short-term memory (in recurrent networks or LSTMs) may now be critical tools in deep learning, but they have

Heidegger's special word for consciousness (or, at least, the kind of consciousness that most humans seem to have) is Dasein: literally a kind of being that is able to ask questions about its own being.

There is no first-person point of view.

Our access to our own thoughts is just as indirect and fallible as our access to the thoughts of other people. We have no privileged access to our own minds. If our thoughts give the real meaning of our actions, our words, our lives, then we can’t ever be sure what we say or do, or for that matter, what we

ChatGPT effectively has anterograde amnesia—with the caveat that its active trace of what is going on is approximately book length—more generous than the half-minute-or-so typical of a human amnesia patient.

“To read oneself into another person's tale is the opposite of how and why I read. To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one's existence."