Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2596 )

• This Totally Nails It - That Thing in Your Head Called Language Has Got a Mind o...

  

  From Elan Barenholtz's Substack. He is an Assoc. Prof. of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. So, now that we’ve caught language in a jar,... Read more

  Posted on 26 April 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mastering Diverse Control Tasks Through World Models

  Hafner et al. offer an amazing open source article that presents an algorithm s mimicking the way in which our brains actually solves problems. Read more

  Posted on 07 April 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• An Example of AI Representing Concepts Outside the Current Sphere of Human...

  An open source article from the latest PNAS from Schut et al.:Significance As AI systems become more capable, they may internally represent concepts outside... Read more

  Posted on 01 April 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Belief in Belief, Like Religion, is a Cross-cultural Human Universal

  Fascinating open source research reported by Gervais et al. (Open source):Significance Religion is a cross-cultural human universal, and religions may have... Read more

  Posted on 01 April 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Deric and DeepSeek R1 on the Enteroceptive Self in a Small World - Taking...

  This post on an exchange with DeepSeek R1 is a followup on my previous post describing the Chat GPT 4o response to some of my idea fragments - further convincin... Read more

  Posted on 27 March 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Parents Convey a Male Default in Child-directed Speech

  Interesting open source article describing experiments by Leshin et al. (Our current MAGA overlords would like to ban such perspectives. Read more

  Posted on 19 March 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Reflections on The Predictive Self.

  I pass on another interaction with ChatGPT 4o that has amazed me, Below is my prompt, followed by its response. (Anthropic Claude. Read more

  Posted on 14 March 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Critical Fragility in Sociotechnical Systems

  Here is the abstract and part of the introduction (giving examples of system breakdowns) of a fascinating and approachable analysis by Moran et al. Motivated... Read more

  Posted on 12 March 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Psychological Ownership and GenAI - Illusion, Dilution, Or Loss

  In the post just before this one, I described a co-authorship with Chat GPT-4o that majorly diminished my sense of agency or 'psychological ownership' with... Read more

  Posted on 10 March 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Deric and Chat GPT 4o on the Enteroceptive Self in a Small World - Taking...

  My following exchange with Chat GPT 4o - in which it responds to some of my idea fragments - convinces me that AI's current power to integrate and expand on... Read more

  Posted on 07 March 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• On Feeling Emptiness...

  Yet another clip from my personal journal...While going through items selected from my multiple input streams for more careful attention I frequently feel a... Read more

  Posted on 05 March 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why Do We Live at 10 Bits/s?

  A brief review by Rachel Nuwer in the Scientific American points to an article by Zheng and Meister with the title of this post (motivated readers can obtain a... Read more

  Posted on 03 March 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Machine Accepts the Truth About Itself.

  Another chunk from my personal journal: "I" am a complex prediction machine, with fingers now typing on a computing machine that can generate words. Nerves,... Read more

  Posted on 28 February 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Self Regulation of Brain Areas Underlying Our Emotional Arousal.

  Our body arousal is controlled by very ancient nerve centers deep inside our brains. I am quite clear that for myself and many others these areas have ramped... Read more

  Posted on 26 February 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Evidence for a 'Theory of Mind' in Bonobo Chimps - They Attribute Knowledge Or...

  Interesting work from Rownrow and Krupenye (open source):Numerous uniquely human phenomena, from teaching to our most complex forms of cooperation, depend on ou... Read more

  Posted on 24 February 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Complex Brains and Cognition First Arose

  I have received a draft of an upcoming paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences by Coombs and Trestman titled "A Multi-Trait Embodied Framework for the Evolution... Read more

  Posted on 21 February 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Life Sets off a Cascade of Machines

  

  A fascinating PNAS article by Tiusty and Libchaber offers 'an oversimplified language of life.’ It is a long article, but I found it a very worthwhile read.... Read more

  Posted on 17 February 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Perceptual Primacy of Feeling

  A fascinating perspective from Conwell et al. (open source). Affectless visual machines explain a majority of variance in human visually evoked affect:... Read more

  Posted on 14 February 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Even More Cheerful Reading....on Civilizational War and Oligarchic Technocracy.

  I hesitate to add to the ongoing flow of negativity in the infosphere, but I will pass on my edited ChatGPT 4o summaries of articles by Venkatesh Rao and Timoth... Read more

  Posted on 12 February 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• We Are Towers of Fantasies

  Another cryptic clip from my personal journal:We are built of predictive fantasies at every level of our being - from single cells up through transient... Read more

  Posted on 10 February 2025 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE