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15:53, 21 April 2025 Rob talk contribs moved page Cells to The Song of the Cell
10:09, 13 April 2025 Rob talk contribs created page Das Ludwig Thoma Komplott (Created page with " Category:Books")
10:09, 13 April 2025 Rob talk contribs created page Atomic Habits (Created page with " Category:Consciousness Category:Books")
15:57, 12 April 2025 Rob talk contribs created page Why We Remember: Revealing the Hidden Power of Memory (Created page with "== Where is My Mind? == * By one estimate, the average American is exposed to 34GB (or 11.8hr) of information a day * Hermann Ebbinghaus “On Memory: A contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885) - tried to memorize trigrams, established the idea of a forgetting curve over time. * In essence, neurons function like a democracy with alliances or “cell assemblies”. * Somewhere is the brain’s speech centers a large coalition of neurons cases votes for “bath”,...")
15:20, 12 April 2025 Rob talk contribs created page The Inugami Curse (Created page with "The first book in the series was interesting as a locked room mystery, but ultimately disappointing. This one, with masks and mistaken identities is fine enough, but the main trick was easy to see through (even if the ultimate use of it was not). The influence of John Dickson Carr is pretty heavy here.")
15:18, 12 April 2025 Rob talk contribs created page The Village of Eight Graves (Created page with "Hmm. I think I’m out. There is some decent plotting here, but the murderer seemed obvious to me from quite early on and the motive (and means) are not very credible. The limestone caves are an interesting decor, but not well exploited and the constant gothic drama gets tedious.")
12:01, 23 March 2025 Rob talk contribs created page Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World (Created page with "* For my purposes I include as Viennese in this book all those who were educated in the city and contributed to its intellectual achievements, even if they were not born there. * In 1867, the emperor proclaimed the December Constitution, which included a bill of rights guaranteeing equality before the law for all of the empire’s ethnicities, as well as freedomes of expression, religion and assembly. This was one of the most progressive documents of its time and is stil...")
14:25, 15 February 2025 Rob talk contribs created page I am a Strange Loop (Created page with "== Heading text == == Prologue. An Affable Locking of Horns == Plato: Some Thoughts I think about consciously before uttering Socrates: In what sense do you think consciously about them? P: I don’t know. I suppose that I try to find the correct words to describe them. S: What guides you to the correct words? P: Why, I search logically for synonyms, similar words, and so on, with which I am familiar. S: In other words, habit guides your thought. P: Yes, my thought...")
17:04, 28 January 2025 Rob talk contribs created page A Brief History of Intelligence (Created page with "This was a perfect book for me to read at this moment, giving me insights into both the evolution of the brain and also AI learning methods, and I'll use his list of the five "breakthroughs" as the initial structure for my analysis: * 600m ya - Bilaterians and Steering * 500m ya - Vertebrates and Reinforcing * 200m ya - Mammals and Simulation * 15m ya - Primates and Metathinking * 100k ya - Humans and Speech")
17:28, 26 January 2025 Rob talk contribs created page Evolution of the Brain (Created page with "== 600m ya - Bilaterians and Steering == === Valence === * Bilaterians are the only animals that have brains * Nematodes (legless wormlike creatures about the size of a grain of rice) emerge in the Edicaran period from 635 to 539m ya. * Brain had 302 neurons (against 85 billion today * Initial steering is obtained through assessing the valence (goodness or badness) of a stimulus, and going towards the things that smelled good and away from the things that smelled bad....")
17:50, 21 January 2025 Rob talk contribs created page Kant and the Platypus (Created page with "I enjoyed parts of this and other parts were hard-core philosophy arguing over positions in semiotics that I don't hold and am not interested in. The main thrust of Eco's position seems to be that we cannot understand and navigate in the world without categorizing the objects that we encounter but that these categorizations are: * never perfect, * never perfectly understood * personal to each one of us and when we communicate, the words we use are based on our own defin...")
17:21, 21 January 2025 Rob talk contribs created page Foucault’s Pendulum (Created page with "I had a very good memory of reading this maybe 20 years ago. This time around, I thought it started off pretty slow, but after 100 pages or so things got interesting and the last 100 pages turned into a real thriller. The main body of the novel is the construction of the "plan" by our three heroes, who construct, for fun, a thousand year plot to find a point on the earth where they can control its magnetic forces. I haven't done my due diligence, but I'm guessing that...")
16:52, 2 January 2025 Rob talk contribs created page Films (Created page with "== Films to Watch == * Dune 2 == Films Watched == === 2025 === * === 2024 and Earlier === * The Big Lebowski * The Holiday * Love Actually")
16:33, 2 January 2025 Rob talk contribs created page Project (Created page with "== Thinking About Minds == I’m interested in getting to grips with four main things: * How did life evolve up to the point of producing human brains (13.4bn ya to 40,000 ya) * How did human culture develop to bring us to the current day * How do we interpret and interact with the world via our brains * Where are we going now (with a particular focus on screens, democracy, AI, and climate change) == Big Bang to Brains == How did the universe begin, how did life evolv...")
09:19, 6 December 2024 Rob talk contribs created page David Lynch (Created page with "* George Lucas wanted DL to [https://kottke.org/09/12/lucas-wanted-david-lynch-to-direct-return-of-the-jedi direct Return of the Jedi]")
17:03, 19 October 2024 Rob talk contribs created page The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (Created page with "== The Age of Form and the Age of Imagination == * Core Themes: ** Identity - the recognition of sameness, which is often taken for granted is in fact a spectacular product of complex, imaginative, unconscious work. Identity and opposition are finished products provided to consciousness after elaborate work; they are not primitive starting points. ** Integration - finding identities and oppositions is part of a much more complicated process of conceptual integration, whi...")
13:08, 19 September 2024 Rob talk contribs created page The Ancestor's Tale (Created page with "== The General Prolog == * The oldest genome on record is from a 700,000-year-old horse. * The genetic code itself is virtually identical in all species and must have been the same in the shared ancestors. * All vertebrates have a backbone and we assume that they inherited it from a remote ancestor which lived, the fossils suggest, more than half a billion years ago. == 0 All Humankind ==")
17:04, 10 September 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Pattern and Provability (Created page with "- No Notes! - (Chapter 10 of "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter)")
16:58, 10 September 2024 Rob talk contribs created page The Quandary (Created page with "* We humans are doomed, as spiritual creatures in a universe of mere stuff, to eternal puzzlement about our nature. * The presence or absence of animacy depends on the level at which one views a structure. Animate entities are those that, at some level of description, manifest a certain type of loopy pattern. * When perception at arbitrarily high levels of abstraction enters the world of physics and when feedback loops galore come into play, then "which" eventually turns...")
16:54, 10 September 2024 Rob talk contribs created page On Magnanimity and Friendship (Created page with "* I would point to individuals whose behavior is essentially the opposite of that of violent psychopaths: Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Raoul Wallenberg, Jean Moulin, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and César Chavez - extraordinary individuals whose deep empathy for those who suffer leads them to devote a large part of their lives to helping others, and to doing so in nonviolent fashions. Such people, I propose, are more conscious than normal adults are, which...")
16:48, 10 September 2024 Rob talk contribs created page A Tango with Zombies and Dualism (Created page with "* Category assignments go right to the core of thinking. * Consciousness is not an optional feature that one can order independently of how the brain is built. Consciousness is nothing but the upper end of a spectrum of self-perception levels that brains automatically possess as a result of their design. It is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories... once you've got self, you've got consci...")
16:44, 10 September 2024 Rob talk contribs created page A Brief Brush with Cartesian Egos (Created page with "* Something of Jim is surviving strongly - surviving in other brains, thanks to human love. * All of these things survive at different levels in many people who, thanks to having interacted with him intimately over many years of decades, constitute his "soular corona". * His soul will still exist, in partial, low-resolution copies, scattered about the globe.")
20:55, 9 September 2024 Rob talk contribs created page A Courteous Crossing of Words (Created page with "* What we know as our consciousness is nothing but the physical activity inside a human brain that has lived in the world for a number of years. * Some kinds of physical systems can mirror what’s on their outside and can launch actions that depend upon their perceptions. * To make an I you need meanings, and to make meanings you need perception and categories - a repertoire of categories that keeps on building on itself, growing and growing and growing. * What you call...")
16:48, 4 September 2024 Rob talk contribs created page German Vocabulary (Created page with "Part of German Language == Basics == da ist/sind - there is/are danke - thank you das ist - that is Entshuldigung - excuse me, sorry es geht - it's all right es ist - it is Fräulein - Miss hallo - hello, hi hier spricht - it's (here speaks) ja - yes nein - no und - and was ist das - what is that? == Pronouns == dein/deine - your Ihr/Ihre - your (polite) mein/meine - my sein/seine - his == Other == aber - but auch - too, also die beiden - both, the two dort dr...")
16:28, 4 September 2024 Rob talk contribs created page German Language (Created page with "* German Vocabulary")
16:24, 4 September 2024 Rob talk contribs created page The Blurry Glow of Human Identity (Created page with "* The "caged-bird metaphor" - one soul in one brain. * In fact, every normal adult human soul is housed in many brains at varying degrees of fidelity, and therefore every human consciousness or "I" lives at once in a collection of different brains, to different extents. * Common sense tells us, unnambiguously that we are always in just one place, not two or more. * But when watching a movie, you can feel you have been transported to a place where your body is actually no...")
16:50, 3 September 2024 Rob talk contribs created page How We Live in Each Other (Created page with "* The inner circuitry of cell phones has surpassed a certain threshold of complexity and that fact allows them to have a chameleon-like nature. I'll call it the Godel-Turing threshold, and once it is surpassed, a computer can emulate any kind of machine. * Turing realized that the critical threshold for this kind of computational universality comes at exactly that point where a machine is flexible enough to read and correctly interpret a set of data that describe its own...")
16:30, 30 August 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Grappling with the Deepest Mystery (Created page with "* The name Carol denotes for me , far more than just a body, which is now gone, but rather a very vast pattern, a style, a set of things including memories, hopes, dreams, beliefs, loves, reactions to music, sense of humor, self-doubt, generostiry, compassion, and so on… a pattern imbued with fantastic triggering power. * A person is a point of view - not only a physical point of view (looking out of certain eyes in a certain physical place in the universe), but more i...")
10:45, 21 August 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Entwinement (Created page with "* We all perceive and represent hundreds of other human beings at vastly differing levels of detail and fidelity inside our cranium. * We manufacture an enormously stripped-down version of our own strange loop of selfhood and install it at the core of our symbols for other people, letting that initially crude loopy structure change and grows over time. * In the case of people we know best - our spouse, our parents and siblings, our children, our dearest friends - each of...")
16:45, 20 August 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Strangeness in the I of the Beholder (Created page with "* How could a system. of pumping liquids ever house a locus of upside-down causality, where meanings seem to matter infinitely more than physical objects and their motions? * A careenium’s dancing simmballs will continue tracking the world, will stay in phase with it, will remain aligned with it. Simballs are systematically in phase with things going on in the world. * That is the only reason simmballs can be said to have meaning. Meaning, no matter what its substrate...")
09:42, 17 August 2024 Rob talk contribs created page The Origins of Creativity (Created page with "* Culture started about 1m years ago, around the nocturnal firelight of the earliest human encampments. * History is the story of cultural evolution, prehistory is that of genetic evolution. * The informed interplay between competition and cooperation is the flywheel of a successful social organization. * Three neural routes activated in the brains of human and other advanced primates during social interactions: ** Mentalizing - goals are formed and appropriate activitie...")
17:12, 7 August 2024 Rob talk contribs created page This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream (Created page with "I think about thinking. I think about: * how concepts and words are related, * what ‘thinking in French’ is, * what underlies slips of the tongue and other types of errors * how one event effortlessly reminds us of another * how we recognize written letters and words * how we understand sloppily spoken, slurred, slangy speech * how we toss of untold numbers of utterly bland-seeming yet never-before-made analogies and occasionally come up with sparklingly original one...")
16:54, 7 August 2024 Rob talk contribs created page On Souls and Their Sizes (Created page with "* Soul shards * Souls of different sizes: ** Lots of consciousness: *** normal adult humans *** mentally retarded, brain-damanged, and senile humans *** dogs, bunnies, chickens ** Less (but some) consciousness: *** goldfish, bees, mosquitoes, mites ** Little or no consciousness: *** microbes, viruses, atoms Lights on? * possessing intentionality * having semantics")
16:47, 7 August 2024 Rob talk contribs created page An Affable Locking of Horns (Created page with "Plato: Some Thoughts I think about consciously before uttering Socrates: In what sense do you think consciously about them? P: I don’t know. I suppose that I try to find the correct words to describe them. S: What uides you to the correct words? P: Why, I search logically for synonyms, similar words, and so on, with which I am familiar. S: In other words, habit guides your thought. P: Yes, my thought is guided by the habit of connecting words with one another systemati...")
17:06, 26 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Strange Loops, Or Tangled Hierarchies (Created page with "* Reasoning involves an infinite regress. * Machines may someday have wills despite the fact that no magic program spontaneously appears in memory from out of nowhere. Instead it will be by reason of organization and structure on many levels of hardware and software; * When humans think, we certainly do change our own mental rules, and we change the rules that change the rules, and on and on - but these are, so to speak, software rules. However, the rules at bottom do no...")
17:14, 25 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Artificial Intelligence: Prospects (Created page with "* I believe that "almost" situations and unconsciously manufactured subjunctives represent some of the richest potential sources of insight into how human beings organize and categorize their perceptions of the world. * The "slippability" of a feature of some event or circumstance depends on a set of nested contexts in which the event or circumstance is perceived to occur. We build up our mental representation of a situation layer by layer: * The lowest layer establishe...")
16:54, 24 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Artificial Intelligence: Retrospects (Created page with "* Tesler's theorem - "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." * Translation involves having a mental model of the world being discussed, and manipulating symbols in that model. A program which makes no use of a model of the world as it reads the passage will soon get hopelessly bogged down in ambiguities and multiple meanings. * Skillful game players choose their moves according to mental processes which they do not fully understand - they use their intuitions. Now there i...")
15:46, 23 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Church, Turing, Tarski, and Others (Created page with "* Every aspect of thinking can be viewed as a high-level description of a system which, on a low level, is governed by simple, even formal, rules. * The only way to understand such a comple system as a brain is by chunking it on higher and higher levels, and therby losing some precision at each step. What emerges at the top level is the « informal system » which obeys so many rules of such complexity that we do not yet have the vocabulary to think about it. And that...")
17:15, 19 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Self-Ref and Self-Rep (Created page with "* The word sequences are the tips of the icebergs and the processing which must be done to understand them is the hidden part. * Self-reproducing object = self-rep - we want to have the feeling that, to the max extend possible, it explicitly contains the directions for copying itself. There is an intuitive borderline on one side of which we perceive true self-directed self-rep, and on the other side merely copying being carried out by an inflexible and autonomous copying...")
16:33, 18 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Jumping out of the System (Created page with "* Gw was not clever enough to foresee its own embeddability inside number theory. * Any system, no matter how complex or tricky it is, can be Gödel-numbered, and then the notion of its proof-pairs can be defined - and this is the petard by which it is hoise. Once a system is well-defined, or "boxed", it becomes vulnerable. * TNT is "essentially incomplete". The downfall occurs essentially because the system is powerful enough to have self-referential sentences. * Some f...")
16:38, 17 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page On Formally Undecideable Propositions of TNT and Related Systems (Created page with "* The arithmetical version of quining - arithmoquining - will allow us to make a TNT-sentence which is "about itself". ** a' is the Gödel number of the formula gotten by arithmoquining the formula with Gödel number a'' ** a' is the arithmoquinification of a'' * It's not enough to quine - you must quine a quine-mentioning sentence * We have gradually pulled a high-level interpretation - a sentence of meta-TNT - out of what was originally a low-level interpretation - a s...")
16:40, 16 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page BlooP and FlooP and GlooP (Created page with "* Primitive recursivity and general recursivity * An orderly system of sufficient complexity that it can mirror itself cannot be totally orderly - it must contain some strange, chaotic features * Recursive function theory * Primitive recursive truths involve only predictably terminating calculations. These core truths serve for N as Euclid's first four postulates served for geometry; they allow you to throw out certain candidates before the game begins, on the grounds of...")
17:30, 15 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Minds and Thoughts (Created page with "* There can be no isomorphism between two brains on the neural or macroscopic suborgan level. * But on the symbol level, there could be functional isomorphisms between symbols and triggering patterns. * These would not be exact (even identical twins have different memories and thought symbols), but clearly some humans think more alike than others do. * What is a partial isomorphism or conceptual nearness? * It is not accurate to think of a symbol as simply on or off. Eac...")
13:10, 14 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Brains and Thoughts (Created page with "* Thought must depend on representing reality in the hardware of the brain. * We must have active symbols, rather than passive typographic symbols. * Not all descriptions of a person need be attached to some central symbol for that person, which stores the person’s name. Descriptions can be manufactured and manipulated in themselves. We can invent nonexistent people by making descriptions of them; we can merge two descriptions when we find they represent a single entit...")
15:13, 13 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Levels of Description, and Computer Systems (Created page with "* We go to the doctor, who looks at us on lower levels than we think of ourselves. e read about DNA and « genetic engineering » and sip our coffee. * Flickering dots and the moview we’re watching - we have these two wildly different representations of what is on the screen, but that does not confuse us. We can just shut one out, and pay attention to the other - which is what all of us do. Which one is more real? It depends whether you’re a human, a dog, a compute...")
11:48, 13 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Mumon and Gödel (Created page with "* One of the basic tenets of Zen Buddhism is that there is no way to characterize what Zen is. No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over. But Zen koans are a central part of Zen study, verbal though they are. Koans are supposed to be triggers which thought they do not contain enough information in themselves to impart enlightenment, may possible be sufficient to unlock the mechanisms inside one’s mind that lead to enlightenment....")
16:40, 11 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Typographical Number Theory (Created page with "* Three examples of indirect self-reference are included in the preceding dialog. To see them, you have to look at the form, as well as the content. * Open formulas with free variables, which express a property and quantified variables which express a truth or falsity. * A formula with at least on free variable, an open formula is called a predicate. * Assertion of existence and universal assertion. The five Peano postulates: * Genie is a djinn * Every djinn has a meta...")
16:26, 10 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page The Propositional Calculus (Created page with "* Propositional reasoning depends on the correct usage of the words "and", "if... then", "or", and "not". * The "fantasy rule" lets you write down any well-formed string and ask what if this were an axiom or a theorem * You can "push" into a fantasy, see its premise, a series of theorems and its outcome, and then "pop" back up to the previous level * You can carry over theorems from the level above into the fantasy, but you cannot export theorems out from the fantasy up...")
15:39, 9 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page The Location of Meaning (Created page with "When is one thing not always the same? The idea of an objective meaning of a message will turn out to be related to the simplicity with which intelligence can be described: * There are cases where by investing sufficient effort, you can pull very recondite pieces of information out of certain structures. In fact, the pulling-out may involve such complicated operations that it makes you feel you are putting in more information than you are pulling out. * a molecule of DN...")
16:43, 8 July 2024 Rob talk contribs created page Recursive Structures and Processes (Created page with "What is recursion? It is nesting and variations on nesting. The concept is very general (stories inside stories, moveies inside movies, paintings inside paintings, Russian dolls inside Russian dolls: * A recursive definition never defines something in terms of itself, but always in terms of simpler versions of itself. * To "push" means to suspend operations on the task you're currently working on, without forgetting where you are - and to take up a new task. The new task...")