Bbenzon
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. Intellectually, I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
MY BLOGS
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New Savanna
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 6320 )
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Trees, and the Sun
Posted on 14 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Review of Empirical Research into Musical Grooves [Born to Groove]
I just got off the phone with Charlie Keil. He told me about a recent review of the empirical literature on the groove: Takahide Etani, Akito Miura, Satoshi... Read more
Posted on 13 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Are You Sure About That?
Posted on 13 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Multi-tasking and Its Vicissitudes [consciousness]
Anna Borges, A Multitasker’s Guide to Regaining Focus, NYTimes, March 11, 2024. Doing a single task: First, “multitask” itself is typically a misnomer. Read more
Posted on 13 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Night and Day
Posted on 13 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI, Chess, and Language 3.1: Search! What Enables Us to Entertain the Idea That...
John McCarthy – who, you may recall, coined the phrase “artificial intelligence” – has written a well-known article with the title, “Chess as the Drosophila of... Read more
Posted on 12 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Christian Resonance of AI Apocalypse
Thomas Moynihan, Untangling Religion From Our AI Debates, No�ma, February 27, 2024. From the article: Despite vehement disagreement on almost everything... Read more
Posted on 12 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Return to Jersey City
Posted on 12 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Similarities Between a Kumquat and a MiG: ChatCPT Chases Analogies
We all know that not so long-ago Geoffrey “AI Godfather” Hinton went up on a mountain where he received a heavy granite tablet. Read more
Posted on 12 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Northern Exposure [Media Notes 114]
I’m somewhere into the fourth season of Northern Exposure on Amazon. At ran for six seasons on CBS starting in 1990, though the first two seasons only had 8... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Blue in Green
Posted on 11 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Silicon Valley is Pricing Academics out of AI Research
That's an article by Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski and Gerrit De Vynck in today's Washington Post. ... the sky-high cost of working with AI models is boxing... Read more
Posted on 10 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Does ChatGPT Understand the Concept of Tragedy? Symbolic AI & Neural Nets
New working paper. Title above, links, abstract and contents below: Academia.edu:... Read more
Posted on 10 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
David Bordwell, 1947 - 2024
I was privileged to have some correspondence with Bordwell over the years, including a helpful suggestion about King Kong that panned out. Here is his... Read more
Posted on 10 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
They're Watching Us [between the Birds]
Posted on 10 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A.I. and Biology [search and Smarts]
Carl Zimmer, A.I. Is Learning What It Means to Be Alive, NYTimes, Mar. 10, 2024. Here's how the article opens: In 1889, a French doctor named Francois-Gilbert... Read more
Posted on 10 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
America's Contradictory Foreign Policy for Israel/Palestine
Peter Baker and Michael Crowley, Providing Both Bombs and Food, Biden Puts Himself in the Middle of Gaza’s War, NYTimes, Mar. 9, 2024. From the skies over... Read more
Posted on 10 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Some Pedestrian Photos for a Hazy Saturday Morning [cosmos]
Posted on 09 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Abstraction in Neural Networks & Abstract Concepts
W. Jeffrey Johnston Stefano Fusi, Abstract representations emerge naturally in neural networks trained to perform multiple tasks, Nature Communications 14:... Read more
Posted on 09 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Strange Beasts Are These AI Rogues?
medieval encyclopaedia about nature reminds me a lot of current thinking around llm cognition https://t.co/k9SnWCFl2N— rohit (@krishnanrohit) March 9, 2024GPT-3... Read more
Posted on 09 March 2024 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY