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 ( 6484 )
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Do the People Have Any Influence on National Politics in America?
Daniel Bessner, The End of Mass Politics, Foreign Exchanges, Jan. 5, 2022: If social media is any indication—and, despite what people might say or hope, it... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Programming for the Masses?
Craig S. Smith, ‘No-Code’ Brings the Power of A.I. to the Masses, NYTimes, March 15, 2022: Mr. Cusack is part of a growing army of “citizen developers,” who... Read more
Posted on 17 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Flush with Thought [What's Computation?]
Izhikevich's "Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience" book had a great section about how toilets are nonlinear oscillators, and the brain could be modeled as a... Read more
Posted on 15 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Beyond AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
Tyler Cowen recently posted "Holden Karnofsky emails me on transformative AI" over at Marginal Revolution. I made two comments. Read more
Posted on 15 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Neural Programming Language for the Reservoir Computer
Okay okay, what do I mean by a programming language for RNNs? RNNs are usually trained on data using a cost function. In contrast, computers are programmed to... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An Interesting Twitter Thread on the Russian Economy
After a bunch of tweets, including a series on Mexican avocado cartels, we get this: Why old oil and gas tycoons were expropriated, while metallurgy oligarchs... Read more
Posted on 09 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Relationship Between Theory of Consciousness and Methodology
"We found that supporting a specific theory [of consciousness] can be predicted solely from methodological choices, irrespective of findings." https://t. Read more
Posted on 09 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What is Cognitive Science?
While I’m thinking about definitions, I came up against the problem of defining “cognitive science” when I wrote my dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literar... Read more
Posted on 09 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Useful Definition of AGI (artificial General Intelligence)
The term, I believe, was coined sometime in the 1990s because, by then, work in AI had concentrated on narrow application domains of one sort of another (e.g.... Read more
Posted on 09 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
One Reason Why GPT-3 Cannot Be Scaled up to AGI
I found this remark by David Piepgrass (a software developer) buried deep in a discussion at Astral Codex Ten: I think people misunderstand GPT in general,... Read more
Posted on 06 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
These Bleeding-edge AI Thinkers Have Little Faith in Human Progress and Seem to...
I suspect, though, if you put the question to them, they’d deny it. “Are you crazy! Of course we believe in human progress.” Don’t believe them. It’s not that... Read more
Posted on 05 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Brian Cantwell Smith, Effing the Ineffable: What AI Teaches Us About What Can an...
Abstract: A classical story takes the world to consist of objects exemplifying properties and standing in relations. Machine learning and other recent... Read more
Posted on 04 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Psychedelic Iris
Posted on 04 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Rodney Brooks Has Been Making Predictions: Concerning AI, “We’re Still Back in...
Back on January 1, 2018 Rodney Brooks issued fairly specific predictions in three areas: 1) self-driving cars, 2) Artificial Intelligence, machine learning,... Read more
Posted on 04 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Agency in Machines and Humans
Those who fear that AIs will go rogue (e.g. the alignment folks) seem to think that agency comes with human-level intelligence. For all I know, they may have... Read more
Posted on 04 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What is AI Alignment About?
There are people who believe that sooner or later artificially intelligent systems will have human level intelligence. Some of those believe this also fear... Read more
Posted on 03 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Stop Calling It the Lizard Brain [it's a Misleading Characterization of...
Cesario, J., Johnson, D. J., Eisthen, H. L. (2020). Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside. Current Directions in Psychological Science,... Read more
Posted on 03 March 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws @3QD [plus Further Notes]
It’s time to finish my work on Steven Spielberg’s Jaws with a piece in 3 Quarks Daily: Shark City Sacrifice: A Girardian reading of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws,... Read more
Posted on 28 February 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Being the Ricardos is Wonderful in Its Virtuoso Juggling of Recollection, Life,...
With Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnez, Being the Ricardos (2021) does a delightful job of telescoping events though three time... Read more
Posted on 25 February 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Overlap Between Cognition and Emotion
that EA does not stem fully from affective mechanisms distinct from domain-general cognition. Instead, those with high EA were more cognitively reflective... Read more
Posted on 25 February 2022 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY