Debbie Foster
@dafinor
Debbie Foster
There is no magical missing ingredient, no 'unobtanium' that forever elevates human cognition to a mystical higher plane. The assertion that LLMs cannot ever 'think' or 'know' because they lack some vital human spark is just a twenty-first-century version of Richard Owen's argument about the hippocampus minor - a spurious justification of our own
... See moreChristopher Summerfield • These Strange New Minds
state changes in several areas (specifically the insular cortex, anterior cingulate, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens) allowed them to predict moments when participants would switch between new emotional states.
Emma Barratt • Mixed emotions may not be mixed after all
he had the appearance of someone who would be completely at ease in the human world, but he often entered it like a scuba diver with forty-five minutes of air and a weight belt to keep himself down.
Sebastian Junger • In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife
So language is meaningful not just because of the way it refers to external physical objects that you can pick up and hold, but because its own internal structure mirrors that of the external world. LLMs can 'think' and 'reason' because titanic computational power allows them to encode that structure in their weights, via a series of mental
... See moreChristopher Summerfield • These Strange New Minds
“That’s what happens when you’ve had great success in life—when you’ve achieved the one goal you always desired. You lose a sense of purpose. Your smallest anxieties fester and magnify. Your fears turn inward, and attach themselves to irrational concerns.”
Alastair Reynolds • Elysium Fire
Karma is a natural consequence. Badness accrues. It affects the way you live your life, how you perceive the world. When you do evil things, you see the world as petty and selfish and cruel. And what you experience in Hell is just the final ripple effect of your original evil. You get precisely what you asked for. And I think the whole point of
... See moreR. F Kuang • Katabasis: A Fantastical Descent into Hell, Rivalry, and Redemption in the Pursuit of Academic Glory from Author of Yellowface—R. F. Kuang
Large Print ed.
Located at the base and back of the brain in two kumquat-shaped lobes, the cerebellum is small—it occupies only 10 percent of brain volume—but it is powerful: it contains a full 75 percent of the neurons of the brain.
John J. Ratey • Adhd 2.0
Place your warm hand on your cool belly. Does your belly feel the warm or does your hand feel the cool? This, I think, is one of the fundamental mysteries.
Matthew J. C. Clark • Bjarki, Not Bjarki
Mere computation, the transformation of information, is not enough for the making of meaning.