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 ( 5616 )
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Processes Mediated by Consciousness
I don't believe these are functions of consciousness, but rather functions of cognition that one can be conscious of.I'm not sure if consciousness can even be... Read more
Posted on 30 May 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bullet Train [Media Notes 92] – Whitewashing
Bullet Train is a 2022 action comedy starring Brad Pitt and a supporting ensemble. Pitt plays a hitman who takes a job to steal a briefcase full of cash that... Read more
Posted on 28 May 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication
0:00 - Introduction 1:29 - What Turing got wrong 6:53 - MIT Center for Bits and Atoms 20:00 - Digital logic 26:36 - Self-assembling robots 37:04 - Digital... Read more
Posted on 28 May 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AI Decisions for This Year
Some large-scale decisions we can make about #AI in 2023:https://t.co/Kp4UcGUio5 pic.twitter.com/HAyNlB6Fxa— Bryan Alexander (@BryanAlexander) May 23, Read more
Posted on 23 May 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Question and Answer [flowers]
Posted on 21 May 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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A Phylogenetic Approach to the Neural Basis of Behavior
It provides a much better way to think about all this than simplistic shorthand notions like the "lizard brain" pic.twitter.com/ixVspsdCHZ— Kevin Mitchell... Read more
Posted on 04 May 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Medieval Nature of Arguments About AGI, Etc.
Anselm in particular: 1: God, by definition, is the greatest thing imaginable (OK)2: Something that exists is greater than something that does not (sounds... Read more
Posted on 04 May 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How Large Language Models Recall Factual Associations
We prompt GPT-{2|J} with subject-relation queries (“Beats Music is owned by”) from CounterFact (@mengk20 @davidbau) and intervene on attention edges (similar... Read more
Posted on 03 May 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Looking out the Windows Orf My Breakfast Joint
Posted on 01 May 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Using an LLM to Decode fMRI Images of Continuous Speech
Oliver Whang, "A.I. Is Getting Better at Mind-Reading," NYTimes, May 1, 2023. The study centered on three participants, who came to Dr. Read more
Posted on 01 May 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Thoughts Are an Emergent Property of Brain Activity. [working Memory]
From the YouTube page: Earl Miller runs the Miller Lab at MIT, where he studies how our brains carry out our executive functions, like working memory, attention... Read more
Posted on 30 April 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Teaching a Humanoid Robot to Move Around in the World is Difficult and...
From the YouTube page: Robert Playter is CEO of Boston Dynamics, a legendary robotics company that over 30 years has created some of the most elegant,... Read more
Posted on 29 April 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ellie Pavlick: The Mind of a Language Model {good Stuff!}
From the YouTube page: Ellie Pavlick runs her Language Understanding and Representation Lab at Brown University, where she studies lots of topics related to... Read more
Posted on 25 April 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Metaphysics and Large Language Models @ 3 Quarks Daily
I’ve got another article at 3 Quarks Daily: World, Mind, Learnability, Large Language Models, and the Metaphysical Structure of the Cosmos I take another crack... Read more
Posted on 25 April 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
From the Poetics: Beginning, Middle, End
Posted on 25 April 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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How Not To Destroy the World With AI - Stuart Russell
From the YouTube page: About Talk: It is reasonable to expect that artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities will eventually exceed those of humans across a... Read more
Posted on 24 April 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Michael Jordan: How AI Fails Us, and How Economics Can Help
Jordan argues that AI, which is mostly machine learning these days, remains dominated by the Dr. Frankenstein notion of creating an artificial human. He... Read more
Posted on 24 April 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Another Crazy/interesting Video About AGI and the Future [Goertzel]
I've been aware of Ben Goertzel since, I believe, the 1980s or 1990s, when I read and article he published in The Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, a... Read more
Posted on 23 April 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An Interesting Video About the Implications of Current AI (GPT) [Vervaeke]
I'm only thirty minutes into the this, but I'm posting it, though I've got doubts. The doubts? The language and the framing, including the fact that the guy... Read more
Posted on 23 April 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Orthogonal Views in Hoboken
Posted on 23 April 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY