Sublime

Over the last few decades biologists have reached the firm conclusion that the man pressing the buttons and drinking the tea is also an algorithm.

(one study describes our minds as a “menu of illusions”2).

Their own experience of their own nature might have contributed something to this idea of a self within but somehow independent of the body.

Look, sometimes you have to make quick decisions. You can’t just have humans make them; you have to combine human and machine methods.”

Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of “national identity,” which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. (“National traits” might be great for movies, they might help a lot with war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity—yet, for example, both

Without conditional predictions of this kind, there would be no way for the brain to know which action, among countless possible actions, would be most likely to reduce sensory prediction errors.

une idée est plus crédible lorsqu’elle est la conséquence d’études dans différents domaines45.

Psychologist Philip Tetlock once wrote: “We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.”