Debbie Foster

It’s natural to experience some level of distress when faced with disruption. The best course of action is to process the emotion with curiosity and self-compassion so you can calmly deal with the consequences.

It seems likely that in the near future, LLMs will actively seek to attain states rather than just passively guessing what comes next. This will dramatically change how AI systems function, and make them more powerful and more dangerous. In a notorious thought experiment, the philosopher Nick Bostrom imagines a powerful AI system that is programmed

The mind is made up by what it feeds upon.

In the past, phrasal templates existed only as particularly catchy turns of phrase. They were still structures for words to spread, but the internet took them to a completely new level through meme culture, building our humor out of easily combined patterns of mutual references.

Tellingly, these patterns are called meme templates . Whenever an image

The real power of digital memories will be to trigger our human ones.

a long history of research has demonstrated that emoional states are closely related to landscapes

We want to be reconciled, somehow, to loss and failure, injustice and human suffering. We are hoping for a truth that will take the edge off our despair.

A central tenet of Buddhism is that the self is illusory. We are more than our conscious minds and we are wrong to think of our autobiographical self as a 'true self'. Freud's 'ego' is also illusory, insofar as it generates a misleadingly comprehensive sense of selfhood, whereas in reality it is only a small part of a much larger, opaque totality.

One of the main components of the modern idea of the self is interiority or inwardness, the feeling that there is a personal inner space that we alone have access to.