Deric Bownds

LATEST ARTICLES ( 2549 )

• There Are More Living Cells on Earth Than Stars in the Universe: ~ 10^30 Vs. ~...

  These numbers come from a fascinating piece by Dennis Overbye summarizing work by a team of biologists and geologists. Selected clips: According to the fossil... Read more

  Posted on 11 December 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Goggle's Bard and Chat GPT-4 on Using AI to Explore Beyond Language and Words...

  I show first the prompt I addressed yesterday afternoon to both Bard and ChatGPT-4. The more nuanced response I received from Bard makes me wonder if Google... Read more

  Posted on 07 December 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Flash of Clarity on What Current LLMs Can and Can Not Do. An AI Apocalypse Doe...

  In his most recent newsletter, Venkatesh Rao pulls up a twitter thread he wrote in 2017 making what he calls an ontological distinction between boundary... Read more

  Posted on 03 December 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Meta-Learned Models of Cognition

  I pass on the text of a recent email from Behavioral and Brain Sciences inviting commentary on an article by Binz et al. I am beginning to plow through the... Read more

  Posted on 29 November 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Feasibility of Artificial Consciousness Through the Lens of Neuroscience

  Some interesting perspectives from Aru, Larkum, and Shine in Trends in Neurosciences. Motivated readers can obtain a copy of the article's text from me. Read more

  Posted on 27 November 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Religious Wars in the Tech Industry.

  In this post I continue to use MindBlog as my private reference library to put down essential ideas I want to hang onto by extracting relevant clips, in this... Read more

  Posted on 26 November 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• AI is Infusing Our Daily Lives. Is It an Existential Threat?

  As AI is being subtly melded into our daily lives by the Google, Apple, and Microsoft clouds there is continuing debate over whether it is or Isn’t an... Read more

  Posted on 19 November 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Personalized Chatbots and Wearable AI Devices for Melding AI with Our Everyday...

  Personalized GPTs are here, but apparently not yet at the level of consumers like myself who don't want to do coding. I've been looking into making my own... Read more

  Posted on 10 November 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Self-Organization: Nature's Intelligent Design

  I was to pass on this link to a talk by Clint Sprott, who initiated the Chaos and Complexity Discssion group that I was an active member of before leaving... Read more

  Posted on 08 November 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Visual Event Segmentation Alters Higher-level Thought.

  An interesting piece of work from Ongchoco et al.: Significance Numbers can be unexpectedly powerful. Suppose you must provide the last two digits of your socia... Read more

  Posted on 06 November 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Our Genes Support Our Illusory Selves - the "Baldwin Effect"

  I have been thinking about giving more explanation of a paragraph from my Oct. 25 post, A Materialist's Credo: Modern neuroscience has proved that our... Read more

  Posted on 03 November 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• David Brooks on "What is a Person?"

  David Brooks has an astounding ability to simplify and present important ideas. I pass on a few clips from Chapter 5 - titled "What is a Person? Read more

  Posted on 01 November 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• MindBlog's First Talk Therapy Session with a Bot.

  I go to https://pi.ai/talk, and...... Hey there, great to meet you. I’m Pi, your personal AI.My goal is to be useful, friendly and fun. Ask me for advice, for... Read more

  Posted on 30 October 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Our Baysean Brain and the Placebo Effect

  I'm passing on a few clips that give the take home message from a recent NYTimes piece by Haravard Medical School's Ted Kaptchuk, who directs the Harvard-wide... Read more

  Posted on 27 October 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• A Materialist's Credo

  This post passes on a recent effort to put down some basic ideas in as few words as I can manage. A Materialist’s CredoIn the beginning was the cosmos,... Read more

  Posted on 25 October 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Architectural Experience Influences the Processing of Others’ Body Expressions

  An open source article by Presti et al: Significance The motor system has been recognized as a fundamental neural machinery for spatial and social cognition,... Read more

  Posted on 23 October 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Does a "P-factor" Underlie Core Attributes of Mental Health Maladies?

  I want to point to an open source "Core Concepts" article in PNAS by David Adam that presents "the views of some psychiatrists who argue that the same bit of... Read more

  Posted on 20 October 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Mental Problems from Early Life Adversity Passed Down Three Generations.

  Early life adversity can result in emotional and behavioral problems throughout adulthood in both humans and mice. Battaglia et al. show than in mice this effec... Read more

  Posted on 18 October 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Using AI to Find Retinal Biomarkers for Patient Sex That Opthalmologists Can Be...

  Delavari et al. do a demonstration of using AI to find aspects of human retina images that identify whether they are male or female retinas, a distinction that... Read more

  Posted on 16 October 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Blithe Spirits and Heavy Souls

  This post is another abstracting/condensation of a recent Ventkatesh Rao essay with the title of this post (Its subtitle: ‘ Learning an experiential posture... Read more

  Posted on 13 October 2023 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE