Bbenzon
Description
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 ( 7626 )
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Flowers | The Street Where I Used to Live
Posted on 28 August 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Mind as a Polyviscous Fluid
About a year ago I uploaded a post with a typically ungainly title, The structured physical system hypothesis (SPSH), Polyviscous connectivity [The brain as a... Read more
Posted on 28 August 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A New Park and Playground in Hoboken
Posted on 27 August 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Xanadu, GPT, and Beyond: An Adventure of the Mind
I've posted a new working paper. Title above; links, abstract, table of contents, and introductory material below. Download at: Academia: https://www.academia. Read more
Posted on 27 August 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: May Flowers
Posted on 25 August 2023
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Ramble on STUFF: Intelligence, Simulation, AI, Doom, Default Mode, the Usual
Time for another one of these. Lots on my mind. Difficult to sort it out. So, some quick hits just to get them all into the same space. Read more
Posted on 25 August 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Street Where I Used to Live (11th St. in Hoboken)
A remark on symmetry and balance: The second photo is roughly symmetrical around the central vertical axis. The third photo is divided in half horizontally,... Read more
Posted on 24 August 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
New Posts at 3 Quarks Daily [AI, Mind Hacks, Blues&Jazz, Kids&Dance]
I’ve posted some articles at 3 Quarks Daily in the last few months: Beyond Artificial Intelligence From the opening: I’m stumped. I’ve hit a wall. More than... Read more
Posted on 24 August 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is This the Beginning of the End for LLMS [as the Royal Road to AGI, Whatever...
It’s hard to tell, but it sure is...shall we say...interesting. Back in the summer of 2020 when GPT-3 was unveiled I wrote a working paper, GPT-3: Waterloo or... Read more
Posted on 24 August 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Steven Wolfram on AI Alignment
Joe Walker has a general conversation with Wolfram about his work and things and stuff, but there are some remarks about AI alignment at the very end: WALKER:... Read more
Posted on 20 August 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
GPT4 Still Challenged by Artithmetic
References: The Faith and Fate Paper is available here: https://t.co/YaOYbPFZNuVideo of this great talk here: https://t.co/bT2MFhQH5D— Alex Dimakis... Read more
Posted on 16 August 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What If Rachmaninoff & Gershwin Co-composed a Piano Concerto? (ft. Yuja Wang,...
Tonebase Piano 145K subscribers Listen to the Abrams Concerto! 0:00 Intro – "People are still writing piano concertos?" 3:37 Chapter 1 – Piano concertos from... Read more
Posted on 14 August 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Emergent Self-repair in Language Model Computations
The Hydra Effect: Emergent Self-repair in Language Model Computationspaper page: https://t.co/e8oycGaZCvinvestigate the internal structure of language model... Read more
Posted on 02 August 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Meaningless Jobs
Many people feel they work in pointless, meaningless jobs, research confirms https://t.co/9fdJWP4gHT via @physorg_com— Sabine Hossenfelder (@skdh) August 2, 202... Read more
Posted on 02 August 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Current LLMs Can Be Tricked in Ways That Would Never Trick a Real Human
LLMs output impressively human-like text, but are just pattern replication algorithms trained on human-generated prose. A vivid illustration of this... Read more
Posted on 29 July 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Open Source LLMs
When language models first gained recognition, most LLMs were only accessible via APIs. Although this seemed to be a new standard, the proposal of a few... Read more
Posted on 25 July 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Kind of Smart Device Passes AP Exams but Can't Play a Decent Game of...
5/5 So even when we achieve general human-level performance ("AGI"), AIs likely to still have incomparable skills to humans, and will continue to have this for ... Read more
Posted on 21 July 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Strangler Fig Tree
This is a strangler fig tree, Inside this tree is a hollow space where a different tree stood The strangler fig's seeds have made their way into the canopy of... Read more
Posted on 20 July 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Speculative Look at the Current AI Business Ecology
6 months ago it looked like AI / LLMs were going to bring a much needed revival to the venture startup ecosystem after a few tough years. Read more
Posted on 18 July 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Who Owns the Gates to Culture and Knowledge?
Julia Angwin, The Gatekeepers of Knowledge Don’t Want Us to See What They Know, NYTimes, July 14, 2023. From the article: We are living through an information... Read more
Posted on 15 July 2023 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
