I want to pass on an essay by Sam Harris updating his 2011 book "The  Moral Landscape."   I'm doing this mainly so that I can look back to this post when I want to firm up recall of some of its points,  and I would recommend that readers interested in this area have a look.  I largely agree with his positions with respect to distinctively human minds and culture that:  Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds—and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and ..read more

Here is the abstract from a PNAS perspectives article by Slominski et al.  with the title "Photo-neuro-immuno-endocrinology: How the ultraviolet radiation regulates the body, brain, and immune system." MindBlog readers can request a PDF of the article from me.   Abstract  Ultraviolet radiation (UVR) is primarily recognized for its detrimental effects such as cancerogenesis, skin aging, eye damage, and autoimmune disorders. With exception of ultraviolet B (UVB) requirement in the production of vitamin D3, the positive role of UVR in modulation of homeostasis is underapprecia ..read more

I want to pass on this recent essay by Venkatesh Rao in its entirety, because it has changed my mind on agreeing with Daniel Dennett that the “Hard Problem” of consciousness is a fabrication that doesn’t actually exist. There are so many interesting ideas in this essay that I will be returning to it frequently in the future.   We Are All Dennettians Now An homage riff on AI+mind+evolution in honor of Daniel Dennett The philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942-2024) died last week. Dennett’s contributions to the 1981 book he co-edited with Douglas Hofstadter, The Mind’s I,¹ which I read in 1996 ..read more

Following up on my last post on the Summer of Protocols sessions, I want to pass on (again, to my future self, and possibly a few techie MindBlog readers) a few links to the world of decentralized grass roots everything - commerce, communications, finance, etc.  - trying to bypass the traditional powers and gate keepers in these areas by constructing distributed systems usually based on block chains and cryptocurrencies.  I am trying to learn more about this, taking things in small steps to avoid overload headaches... (One keeps stumbling on areas of world wide engagement of thousand ..read more

I want to point to a project launched by Venkatest Rao and others last year: “The Summer of Protocols.”  Some background for this project can be found in his essay “In Search of Hardness”.  Also,  “The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols”  essay by Rao et al. is an excellent presentation of what protocols are about.  I strongly recommend that you read it if nothing else.  Here is a description of the project:  Over 18 weeks in Summer 2023, 33 researchers from diverse fields including architecture, law, game design, technology, media, art, and workplace saf ..read more

 I want to point to an excellent New Yorker article by Patrick House titled  “The Lifelike Illusion of A.I.”  The article strikes home for me, for when a Chat Bot responds to one of my prompts using the pronoun “I”  I unconsciously attribute personhood to the machine, forgetting that this is a cheap trick used by programmers of large language model to increase the plausibility of responses. House starts off his article by describing the attachments people formed with the Furby, an animatronic toy resembling a small owl, and Pleo, an animatronic toy dinosaur. Both use a simp ..read more

More information (summarized here) on what is happening in our brains while we sleep is provided by Jiang-Xie et al.,, who show that active neurons can stimulate the clearance of their own metabolic waste by driving changes to ion gradients in the surrounding fluid and by promoting the pulsation of nearby blood vessels.  Here is the Jiang-Xie et al.abstract: The accumulation of metabolic waste is a leading cause of numerous neurological disorders, yet we still have only limited knowledge of how the brain performs self-cleansing. Here we demonstrate that neural networks synchronize individ ..read more

Here I point to a PNAS article by Lutz et al. and a commentary on the work by Schechtman. Here is the Lutz. et al. abstract: Significance Real-life events usually consist of multiple elements such as a location, people, and objects that become associated during the event. Such associations can differ in their strength, and some elements may be associated only indirectly (e.g., via a third element). Here, we show that sleep compared with nocturnal wakefulness selectively strengthens associations between elements of events that were only weakly encoded and of such that were not encoded together ..read more

I pass on two striking examples from today’s New York Times, with few clips of text from each: A.I.-Generated Garbage Is Polluting Our Culture: (You really should read the whole article...I've given up on trying to assemble clips of text that get across the whole message, and pass on these bits towards the end of the article:) ....we find ourselves enacting a tragedy of the commons: short-term economic self-interest encourages using cheap A.I. content to maximize clicks and views, which in turn pollutes our culture and even weakens our grasp on reality. And so far, major A.I. companies are ref ..read more

This video from The Economist is one of the best I have seen for a popular audience. Hopefully the basic facts presented are slowly seeping throughout our culture ..read more