Updated: 2024-01-31 22:46:27
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Updated: 2024-01-29 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 , January 29, 2024 Mind blog’s first 18 years what next A space for discussions among MindBlog readers This is post number 5,537 of Deric's MindBlog , which will soon be celebrating its 18th birthday . nbsp I started this blog on Feb . 6, 2006, in the middle of the golden age of Blogging , with a post titled Dangerous Ideas In the late 2000s the rise of social media like Facebook , Twitter , and Instagram shifted audiences towards shorter more engaging posts , and after 2010 multimedia platforms like YouTube , Twitch , and TikTok became popular . Max Read laments the increasing effort required
Updated: 2024-01-26 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 , January 26, 2024 Tolerance of uncertainly as a key to resilience . As a followup to the previous post on The Neurobiology of Stress I want to point to Maggie Jackson's opinion piece in the NYTimes titled How to Thrive in an Uncertain World . A few : clips a wave of new scientific discoveries reveals that learning to lean into uncertainty in times of rapid change is a promising antidote to mental distress , not a royal road to angst , as many of us assume . Studies of the pandemic era offer a starting illustration of the links between uncertainty and flourishing . Ohio State researchers have
Updated: 2024-01-24 16:02:00
: : , , 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 , January 24, 2024 The Neurobiology of Stress : Vulnerability , Resilience , and Major Depression A valuable trove of open source articles is provided in the Special Feature section of the Dec . 5 issue of PNAS with an introductory article by Akil and Nestler with the title of this post . nbsp The special : feature explores the consequences of the broad-scale increase in psychological stress and the evidence that we are facing a second pandemic of depression , anxiety , and other stress-related disorders . The authors of this feature describe challenges faced and scientific advances
Updated: 2024-01-21 21:35:00
: 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 , January 21, 2024 Titles and URLs for key MindBlog posts on selves I pass on a chronological list of titles and URLs of MindBlog posts assembled in preparation for a video chat with a European MindBlog : reader An Apostle's Creed for the humanistic scientific materialist https : mindblog.dericbownds.net 2006 03 apostles-creed-for-humanistic.html Some rambling on Selves and Purpose” https : mindblog.dericbownds.net 2007 10 some-rambling-on-selves-and-purpose.html Self , purpose , and tribal mentality as Darwinian adaptations or Why why aren’t we all enlightened https : mindblog.dericbownds.net
Updated: 2024-01-10 21:14:00
I pass on from a recent issue of PNAS this informative "News Feature" article by Carolyn Beans (open source). It discusses studies trying to determine the brain mechanisms by which therapeutically effective psychedelics such as MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, commonly known as ecstacy), psilocybin, and LSD have their effect. They all act on serotonin receptors.
Updated: 2024-01-08 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 . Monday , January 08, 2024 The Importance of Not Being Earnest I pass on some of the paragraphs from Rao's latest piece to archive them for myself here on MindBlog , and to make them available to other : readers For my purposes , I will define earnestness as being helplessly locked into a single way of looking at what you’re doing , unaware of other . ways I suspect there are only a few known and culturally familiar modes of being non-earnest I think they are humor , irony , and surrealism . I’d guess humor is at least as old as civilization and possibly as old as life . Irony proper seems like an
Updated: 2024-01-05 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 , January 05, 2024 Capturing non-dual reality in language For my own future reference and for MindBlog readers interested in my previous MindBlog posts on non-duality , nbsp I want to pass on the start of a discussion thread in the Waking Up Community at WakingUp.com written by Rish Magal , London , U.K , on the subject of capturing nondual reality in language One of the discussants makes reference to the Laukkonen and Slagter article whose ideas were referenced in my recent lecture on New Perspectives on how our Minds Work From Rish Magal , nbsp London , UK Prompted by a really great
Updated: 2024-01-03 06:00:00
Wow, Google knows EVERYTHING I am doing on my computer.....
Updated: 2024-01-01 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 , January 01, 2024 On shifting perspectives . I pass on clips from a piece in the 12 202 23 Wall Street Journal by Carlo Rovelli , the author , most recently , of White Holes : Inside the Horizon’ Somnium By Johannes Kepler 1634 1 Perhaps the greatest conceptual earthquake in the history of civilization was the Copernican Revolution . Prior to Copernicus , there were two realms : the celestial and the terrestrial . Celestial things orbit , terrestrial ones fall . The former are eternal , the latter perishable . Copernicus proposed a different organization of reality , in which the sun is in a
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 ,
