Mary Martin

As we train our sights on what we oppose, let’s recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the

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Physically speaking, humans are a middling mammal with an odd hair pattern, a badly evolved back, and a mouth that no longer fits all our adult teeth. All of which is why we really like brains.

This example brings home the difference between advising and shared planning. If you and someone else are genuinely doing something together, you’ll treat a practical question about what you both should do as a shared responsibility, and aim to form a shared plan for which you’re both responsible. In contrast, if you are advising someone, you will... See more

your emotional experiences feel like they are the truth of the world around you, when in reality the culture we live in shapes your emotions...and your emotions serve as a lens for interpreting the world around you.

the pregnant person body is not an ‘external environment’ within which the foetus is solitary and ‘confined’, waiting for the ‘lightbulb’ of consciousness to be switched on at a given timepoint when the neurogenesis is completed. Here I propose that both the easy and hard problem of developmental consciousness cannot be addressed without putting

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One problem is that consciousness means different things to different people. For example, some researchers focus on the subjective experience — what it is like to be you or me. Others study its function — cognitive processes and behaviours enabled by being conscious. These differences muddy attempts to compare ideas.

Though our collective forgetting is enormous, it is mostly unremarkable to those who study the transmission of culture. What puzzles me, and others who study transmission, is why so much unwritten knowledge has survived. Despite the brittleness of cultural practices, skills proliferate with and without records, chaining generation to generation,... See more

Patient Perceptions of In Vivo Versus Virtual Reality Exposures f