Mary Martin

Supportivelistening differs from other types of listening (e.g., listening during chit-chat or aconflict, informational listening) because it requires that the support listener demon-strate emotional involvement and attunement while attending to, interpreting, andresponding to the emotions of the support seeker—a complex and challenging task.

Decades later, scientists are starting to unravel how our wet, spongy, slippery organs talk to the brain and how the brain talks back. That two-way communication, known as interoception, encompasses a complex, bodywide system of nerves and hormones. Much recent exploration has focused on the vagus nerve: a massive, meandering network of more than... See more

Roshi Joan Halifax tells a story about witnessing a conversation in the early 1970s between Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, and Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist and systems theorist, about the mind. Bateson asked, “Where is the mind?” Salk pointed to his own head. Bateson chuckled, shook his head, and pointed to the space between... See more

Content filtering doesn’t catch implicit deception. Safety guardrails don’t prevent fabricated intimacy if the AI isn’t saying anything explicitly harmful. Warning labels don’t help if users don’t understand that emotional manipulation is happening. The control mechanisms are fundamentally different depending on whether we’re addressing harm or... See more

the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?... The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes... "

Jeremy Bentham (1748 - 1832)

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.