Juan Orbea

At the end of high school, most graduating seniors are given their diplomas with a heaping side of platitudes, many of them patently preposterous. Such as, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” Or “You can be anything you want to be.” And especially, “With grit and determination, there’s nothing you can’t do."

The Problem: “DAO” Has Lost all Clear Meaning

A more controversial application than this scanning-the-brain-to-understand-it scenario is scanning-the-brain-to-download-it. When an entire network of neurons receives input (from the outside world or from other networks of neurons), the signaling amongst them appears at first to be frenzied and random. So the question addressed by the San Diego... See more

This style of thinking is foreign to me, but I find it fascinating, and important. Stereotypical "wealthy white liberals" ignore this at their peril: these more "traditional" values are actually quite popular even among some ethnic minorities in the United States, and even more so in places like Africa and India, which is exactly where Balaji is... See more

And so, the Enlightenment undertook a major strategic retreat. If the only way to stop people from killing one another about the right way to open an egg involved a world where nobody thought about it too much, then the intellectual cost of ceasing such thought seemed a small price to pay. The question of human nature was abandoned because it is... See more

His whole journey is documented both in YouTube videos and on his personal blog.

But I regard the freeing of the human mind from its severe physical limitations of scope and duration as the necessary next step in evolution. In making this statement, it is important to emphasize that terms like evolution, destiny, and spiritual quest are observations about the end result, not the basis for these predictions. The primary force... See more