Mary Martin

we tell ourselves that humans do something clever or tactical because our brains have simulated that this course of action will produce favourable outcomes, but when we learn that ants do the same thing by enacting preprogrammed responses to pheromones, surely that doesn’t count.

Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned... See more

I need a greater facility with multispecies languages. I am engaging in a conversation across cultural divides with other multitudes, whose languages and modes of perception we have only just begun to explore.

When the mind searches for the future, it sees the past.

In other words, rather than trying to please humans, Scientist AI could be designed to prioritize honesty.

Realize it’s Saturday and you were planning to be OOO tomorrow to admire your creation and everything, but I’m hoping you can keep rolling on this through the weekend. Need to get this in front of my exec team by EOD Monday so hoping to sync up EOD Sunday. Will be around all weekend via email and chat if anything comes up. Looking to you and your... See more

The brain evaluates the images it is processing against a “reality threshold.” If the signal passes the threshold, the brain thinks it’s real; if it doesn’t, the brain thinks it’s imagined.

If my hypothesis is right then consciousness exists in a broader quantum field-based system and biological death is only a transition point that we could potentially interrupt on a quantum level and transfer consciousness. Consciousness may not die in a classical sense but could exist in a temporally distributed state, hinting at the possibility of... See more