emergence – Yohan J. John, PhD This essay was originally posted on April 21, 2014 at 3 Quarks Daily. No one knows exactly how life began, but a pivotal chapter in the story was the formation of the first single-celled organism — the common ancestor to every living thing on the planet. I like to think of the birth of life

I've written a bunch of stuff about emergence, of course.😂

yohanjohn.com/tag/emergence/

Here's something I've written about symmetry. Don't think I've written anything about complexity.

3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily...

"To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago."
If you think it is necessary to be on Twitter to communicate your fact-based worldview, the reality is that worldview is being smothered.

Multiverse? It's called having an imagination

Capitalist (sur)realism.

"I would position AI as a post-enlightenment project. Stripped of an enlightenment telos and shorn of its commitment to absolute knowledge, what remains is a logocentric husk which reveals a distinct mode of explanation that stubbornly resists universalisation." @cavvia.bsky.social just brilliant.

How good are AI tools at recreating bibliographies? If you're an AI-for-science enthusiast, have you tried getting an AI tool to recover all the papers *you* think are important for your little corner of research space?

(In my experience, the ability to dive deep is still limited.)

Oh I am extremely skeptical that free energy is a coherent concept in neuroscience, so I have no idea.

Uhh... Not sure how these wildly different scales can be linked. 😅

Exactly! What indeed?

I think some people just sort of wave in the general direction of the hippocampus and/or offline consolidation, but I haven't seen this idea fleshed out. How exactly does the consolidation process 'sample' from memories? Are there proposals for a neural mechanism for, say, softmax?

2/2

A lot of AI/ML relies on sampling from large datasets. These samples need to be relatively unbiased in order to get good performance. Animals learn continually from highly correlated — and therefore biased — behavioral episodes. Is there work exploring how brains circumvent the issue of bias?

1/2

I think the point he's making is that people need to collect new data, but right now the zeitgeist in many disciplines is to focus on existing datasets.

"As AI-augmented research proliferates, the scope of scientific inquiry is contracting."

www.ft.com/content/0c63... [paywalled]

Nice!

'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird' might be my favorite poem.

He's so good. One the one hand superficial, but on the other, a compressed file of aphoristic insight.

What are they from? Two different books?

Do you work or study in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence, or philosophy?

What does the term 'representation' mean to you?

We invite you to participate in a brief survey on key conceptual questions across fields.

eu.surveymonkey.com/r/VX9GNXM

Seriously! I was so disappointed when I saw the painting after reading this.

"This storm is what we call progress."
- Walter Benjamin

I've been inspired to become a founder of a new startup that develops brain-to-brain interface technology. It's called Talk. We're going to reinvent communication for the digital age.

The best part is that we're able to zero-shot transfer the full computational stack already used by your brain!

Just gonna leave this here.🤓

3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily...

Supercharging the phenomenon of'searching where there's available light'? 😅

Newspaper cutting: The owls are not what they seem ARLINGTON, North Military Road, 3000 block, 5:20 p.m. Nov. 10. Responding to a call about an injured owl on the side of the road, an officer found a large mushroom.

Morning Bluesky.

Quilicura, Chile, one of the communities I wrote about in EMPIRE OF AI, has launched a brilliant initiative to inspire more responsible AI prompting. Today, don't use AI; ask the townspeople instead: quili.ai. So heartened to see this creative act of resistance.

Thanks! I'll have a look.

... what prevents us from hallucinating whenever we think of high-level concepts?

This is a huge and fun area for speculation! If I could directly activate a "little people" category-detector that is (presumably) in some higher order cognitive-visual area, would it lead to the subjective percept? Perhaps through top-down activation?

And if that *can* happen...

Good point. I am aware of some of these. The specificity is what I find striking here: little people are a highly particular sort of hallucination that presumably requires quite a bit of "hijacking" of low-level visual circuitry.

'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans Only recently described by science, the mysterious mushrooms are found in different parts of the world, but they give people the same exact visions.

"With L. asiatica, though, "the perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported", Domnauer says."

Wild. The implications for human perceptual systems are... hard to wrap one's head around.

www.bbc.com/future/artic...