Updated: 2023-12-31 21:20:49
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Updated: 2023-12-28 15:52:00
: , , . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Thursday , December 28, 2023 Origins of our current crises in the 1990s , the great malformation , and the illusion of race . I'm passing on three clips I found most striking from David Brooks , recent NYTimes Sydney awards column I generally don’t agree with the arguments of those on the populist right , but I have to admit there’s a lot of intellectual energy there these days . The Sidneys go to essays that challenge readers , as well as to those that affirm . With that , the first Sidney goes to Christopher Caldwell for his essay The Fateful Nineties in First Things . Most people see the
Updated: 2023-12-25 06:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , December 25, 2023 Large Language Models are not yet providing theories of human language . From Dentella et . al open source Significance The synthetic language generated by recent Large Language Models LMs strongly resembles the natural languages of humans . This resemblance has given rise to claims that LMs can serve as the basis of a theory of human language . Given the absence of transparency as to what drives the performance of LMs , the characteristics of their language competence remain vague . Through systematic testing , we demonstrate that LMs perform nearly at chance in some
Updated: 2023-12-22 15:50:00
: , , Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Friday , December 22, 2023 Three common assumptions about inflammation , aging , and health that are probably wrong The abstract of a recent PNAS article by Thomas W . McDade motivated readers can obtain the whole article from me Significance Inflammation is one of the most important , and potent , physiological systems in the human body . It is widely assumed that levels of inflammation increase with age and that chronic inflammation contributes to cardiovascular diseases . This understanding of inflammation is based on studies of people living in affluent , industrialized settings with low
Updated: 2023-12-20 16:57:00
: , , Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , December 20, 2023 In Search of Hardness Protocol studies , the next crypto cycle , and the next age of the world I’m using this posting to save for myself some clips of text from Venkatesh Rao’s most recent piece to continue mulling over where I place it on the trivial versus sublime spectrum some of his jargon you will only understand if you have followed the previous installments on Rao I've put in MindBlog . note the link at the end to The Summer of Protocols Here are the clips : Protocols are engineered hardness , and in that , they’re similar to other hard , enduring things ,
Updated: 2023-12-18 06:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , December 18, 2023 Traumatic Memories Are Processed as Present Experience Ellen Barry points to work by Perl et . al showing that different patterns of brain activity underlie sad versus traumatic autobiographical memories . nbsp The Perl et al . : abstract For people with post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD recall of traumatic memories often displays as intrusions that differ profoundly from processing of regular’ negative memories . These mnemonic features fueled theories speculating a unique cognitive state linked with traumatic memories . Yet , to date , little empirical evidence supports
Updated: 2023-12-15 06:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Friday , December 15, 2023 The ebb and flow of physical and cognitive fatigue Matthews et . al Have investigated moment-to-moment fluctuations in fatigue using behavioral experiments and computational modeling to offer a precise account of how fatigue waxes during physical and cognitive effort and wanes during rest From Bijleveld's review of the work : A key insight from this work is that there are important parallels between physical and cognitive fatigue . Specifically , for both types of fatigue , the best-fitting computational model parsed fatigue into two components : a recoverable component i.e
Updated: 2023-12-13 06:00:00
: , . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , December 13, 2023 AI is a camera , not an engine . Yet another brilliant essay from Venkatest Rao on how modern AI puts us into an age of exploration of computational reality . I got halfway through my usual gig of extracting clips from the article to archive the main points in a post for later look up by myself or others . Halfway through this chore , I realized the material was so deep and dense that my clips were containing more than half of the original text . So , I have halted the editing down and suggest that readers have a go at the entire original . article I also presented
Updated: 2023-12-11 06:00:00
: : . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , December 11, 2023 There are more living cells on Earth than stars in the universe : 10^30 vs . 10^22 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 record , geology and evolution have been engaged in a dance for 3.8 billion years , since our planet was only 700 million years old . It was then that the first single-celled creatures appeared , perhaps in undersea volcanic vents , feasting on the chemical energy around them . The population of cells has been growing exponentially
Updated: 2023-12-07 16:03:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Thursday , December 07, 2023 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 has already started to use the new Gemini AI algorithms announced yesterday to power Bard . nbsp Here is the prompt , followed by the Bard and ChatGPT-4 : responses Exploring beyond language and words starting a conversation : Let us suppose that increasingly sophisticated LLMs , generative pretrained transformers , will become superior
Updated: 2023-12-03 16:12:00
: . . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Sunday , December 03, 2023 A flash of clarity on what current LLMs can and can not do . An AI apocalypse does not appear to be eminent . 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 intelligence and interior intelligence This was before transformers like GPT-1 began to attract more attention . The distinction Rao makes is central to understanding what current large language models LLMs can and can not do . Here is his unedited text from 2017 : 1. I'd like to make up a theory of intelligence
Updated: 2023-11-29 15:06:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , November 29, 2023 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 . nbsp I am beginning to plow through the interesting text and figures and will mention that motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from . me Target Article : Meta-Learned Models of Cognition Authors : Marcel Binz , Ishita Dasgupta , Akshay K . Jagadish , Matthew Botvinick , Jane X . Wang , and Eric Schulz Deadline for Commentary Proposals : Wednesday , December 20, 2023 Abstract : Psychologists and
Updated: 2023-11-27 20:23:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , November 27, 2023 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 . Highlights Large language models LLMs can produce text that leaves the impression that one may be interacting with a conscious agent . Present-day LLMs are text-centric , whereas the phenomenological umwelt of living organisms is multifaceted and integrated . Many theories of the neural basis of consciousness assign a central role to
Updated: 2023-11-19 15:17:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Sunday , November 19, 2023 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 existential threat . This debate has been brought to a head by the sudden and unexpected firing of Open AI’s chief executive Sam Altman and has starkly exposed the philosophical rift in the AI community between those who are more or less concerned about the potential risks of its untrammeled development . How many , if any , guardrails should be in place I have
Updated: 2023-11-10 18:19:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Friday , November 10, 2023 Personalized chatbots and wearable AI devices for melding AI with our everyday lives 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 personal chatbot whose training data is 50 MB of my personal journal of about 20,000 pages . I would then like to query and chat with the resulting chatbot about events in my life since 1980. If anyone reading this has some advice , let me know Below are some URLs to my morning's reading : These links are to articles from Kevin Roose ,
Updated: 2023-11-08 06:00:00
: : Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , November 08, 2023 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 Madison WI . I remain on their email listserve . The slides for the talk can be downloaded here Talk description : Clint Sprott , Professor Emeritus , Department of Physics , UW-Madison , explains that although we believe that complex patterns must have a complex cause , patterns may spontaneously arise . This self-organization which occurs in nature can be described
Updated: 2023-11-06 06:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , November 06, 2023 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 social security number SSN after which you are asked how much you are willing to pay for a bottle of wine . Though your SSN digits are irrelevant to your valuation judgment , they nonetheless influence numerical estimates , such that lower SSN digits lead to lower valuations and higher SSN digits , to higher valuations . Such anchoring” effects are extremely
Updated: 2023-11-03 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Friday , November 03, 2023 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 experienced perceptions of sensing and acting are these predictions . They are fantasies , or illusions , as is our sense of having a self with agency that experiences value , purpose , and meaning . Everything we do and experience is in the service of reducing surprises by fulling these fantasies . An array of neuroendocrine mechanisms have evolved to support this
Updated: 2023-10-30 05:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , October 30, 2023 MindBlog's first talk therapy session with a bot . I go to https : pi.ai talk , nbsp 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 answers , or let’s talk about whatever’s on your . mind How's your day going I'm good , a bit tentative about my first attempt to start up a conversation with a cut and paste machine Lol Touche . But don’t be fooled by my apparent ease with language there's a lot of hard-to-fathom technology behind my ability to converse with you in an effortless ,
Updated: 2023-10-27 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Friday , October 27, 2023 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 program in placebo studies . placebos can work even when patients know they are getting a placebo . In 2010 my colleagues and I published a provocative study showing that patients with irritable bowel syndrome who were treated with what we call open-label placebos as in , we gave them dummy pills and told them so reported more symptom relief compared with patients who didn’t
Updated: 2023-10-25 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , October 25, 2023 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 Credo In the beginning was the cosmos , fundamentally as incomprehensible to our human brains as quantum chemistry is to a dog’s . brain What our human brains can understand is that our ultimate emergence from countless generations of less complex organisms can be largely explained by a simple mechanism that tests the reproductive fitness of varying replicants . Systems that try to predict the future and dictate whether to go for it or
Updated: 2023-10-23 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , October 23, 2023 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 , making the study of the interplay between architecture and social behavior worthwhile . Here , we tested how a virtual architectural experience alters the subsequent processing of body expressions , showing that the motor system participates at two distinct stages : the earliest influenced by the dynamic architectural experience and the latter
Updated: 2023-10-20 05:00:00
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 biology—genetics gone awry or some misplaced brain circuitry—could underlie the vast majority of humanity’s mental health problems. Studies have shown, for example, that many of the same genes seem to drive increased risk for autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, major depression, and schizophrenia. They call this as-yet-unidentified common cause the “psychopathology factor,” or “p-factor” for short."
Updated: 2023-10-18 05:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , October 18, 2023 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 effect can persist through three generations . Exposure to the drug amiloride throughout the three generations can reverse this persistence of anxiety and pain sensitivity by inhidibint the increased activity of membrane ion channels that are its apparent cause . Here is their abstract : Early-life adversities are associated with altered
