Debbie Foster

There is no action that takes place between humans in which secrets do not play a part, whether it be a game of cards or the selling of a cow. The advantage is always to the one who is shrewder in what secret to reveal and when.

The computational tricks we discussed above—non-linear transduction, compression, recurrent memory and attention—are ubiquitous tools in AI research. They have already proved their mettle in multiple non-linguistic domains, helping deep networks to recognize faces, generate videos and play board games at expert levels. Moreover, they are also

there is an essential meaning of the word “consciousness,” one that contemporary neuroscientists, biologists, psychologists, or philosophers can recognize, even though they approach the phenomenon with varied methods and explain it in different ways. For all of them, more often than not, “consciousness” is a synonym of mental experience. And what

There are good evolutionary reasons why strong emotion might play an important role in precognition (or James Carpenter’s “first sight”): It needs to orient us to new information relevant to our survival so that we can update our knowledge about the world in a fruitful way.

The quality of our lives is the sum of decision quality plus luck.

We increasingly live in our maps of reality instead of in reality itself. The territory has been replaced with towering layers of abstractions: sovereign nations, states, counties, personal properties, deeds, mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, mortgage-backed credit default swaps, and so on.

an error that has been repeatedly committed in the quest for consciousness has been to treat it as a “special” function, even a separate “substance,” a fragrance wafting over the mind process but unconnected to it or to its underpinnings.

That seemed to be the Iranian way: to undermine every certainty and recognize how every presumption was provisional.

How we imagine children to be turns out to reflect how we imagine the world ought to be, which is what makes the death of an innocent child (or, for some, that of an unborn fetus) so hard to bear: a possible world, a better world, seems to have died with it.