If you want to remember a landscape be sure to include a human....
Deric Bownds' MindBlog
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2d ago
Fascinating observations by Jimenez et al.  on our inherent human drive to understand our vastly social world...(and in the same issue of PNAS note this study on the importance of the social presence of either human or virtual instructors in multimedia instructional videos.) Significance Writer Kurt Vonnegut once said “if you describe a landscape or a seascape, or a cityscape, always be sure to include a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in other human beings.” Consistent with Vonnegut’s intuition, we found that the human br ..read more
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The magic of spurious correlations...
Deric Bownds' MindBlog
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6d ago
 I have to pass on this link, sent to me by my techie son, Jonathan:   ..read more
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Fundamentally changing the nature of war.
Deric Bownds' MindBlog
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1w ago
I generally try to keep a distance from 'the real world' and apocalyptic visions of what AI might do, but I decided to pass on some clips from this technology essay in The Wall Street Journal that makes some very plausible predictions about the future of armed conflicts between political entities: The future of warfare won’t be decided by weapons systems but by systems of weapons, and those systems will cost less. Many of them already exist, whether they’re the Shahed drones attacking shipping in the Gulf of Aden or the Switchblade drones destroying Russian tanks in the Donbas or smart seabor ..read more
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The Physics of Non-duality
Deric Bownds' MindBlog
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1w ago
 I want to pass on this lucid posting by "Sean L" of Boston to the community.wakingup.com site: The physics of nonduality In this context I mean “nonduality” as it refers to there being no real subject-object separation or duality. One of the implications of physics that originally led me to investigate notions of “awakening” and “no-self” is the idea that there aren’t really any separate objects. We can form very self-consistent and useful concepts of objects (a car, an atom, a self, a city), but from the perspective of the universe itself such objects don’t actually exist ..read more
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MindBlog becomes a G5 cellular hotspot in the the low-priced ‘People’s Cell Phone Network’ - Helium Mobile
Deric Bownds' MindBlog
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2w ago
I am writing this post, as is frequently the case, for myself to be able to look up in the future, as well as for MindBlog techie readers who might stumble across it. It describes my setup of a G5 hotspot in the new Helium G5 Mobile network. A post following this one will describe my becoming a user of this new cell phone network by putting the Helium Mobile App on my iPhone using an eSIM. This becomes my third post describing my involvement in the part of the crypto movement seeking to 'return power to the people.' It attempts to bypass the large corporations that are the current gate keepers ..read more
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How AI’s GPT engines work - Lanier’s forest and trees metaphor.
Deric Bownds' MindBlog
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2w ago
Jaron Lanier does a piece in The New Yorker titled "How to Picture A.I." (if you hit the paywall by clicking the link, try opening an 'empty tab" on your browser, then copy and paste in the URL that got you the paywall). I tried to do my usual sampling of small chunks of text to give the message, but found that very difficult, and so I pass several early paragraphs and urge you to read the whole article. Lanier's metaphors give me a better sense of what is going on in a GPT engine, but I'm still largely mystified. Anyway, here's some text: In this piece, I hope to explain how such A.I. works i ..read more
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Explaining the evolution of gossip
Deric Bownds' MindBlog
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2w ago
 A fascinating open source article from Pan et al.: Significance From Mesopotamian cities to industrialized nations, gossip has been at the center of bonding human groups. Yet the evolution of gossip remains a puzzle. The current article argues that gossip evolves because its dissemination of individuals’ reputations induces individuals to cooperate with those who gossip. As a result, gossipers proliferate as well as sustain the reputation system and cooperation. Abstract Gossip, the exchange of personal information about absent third parties, is ubiquitous in human societies. However, th ..read more
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Deep learning models reveal sex differences in human functional brain organization that are replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant
Deric Bownds' MindBlog
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3w ago
Ryali et al. do a massive analysis that argues strongly against the notion of a continuum in male-female brain organization, and underscore the crucial role of sex as a biological determinant in human brain organization and behavior.  I pass on the significance and abstract statements. Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me.   Significance Sex is an important biological factor that influences human behavior, impacting brain function and the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders. However, previous research on how brain organization differs bet ..read more
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Brains creating stories of selves: the neural basis of autobiographical reasoning
Deric Bownds' MindBlog
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3w ago
We all create our experienced selves from autobiographical reasoning based on remembered events in stories from our lives. In the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience  D'Argembeau et al.  (open source) do an interesting fMRI study observing brain areas that are active during this process that are not recruited by more simple factual recall of the events. ...A few days before the scanning session, participants selected a set of memories that have been important in developing and sustaining their sense of self and identity (self-defining memories). During scanning, we in ..read more
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The Hidden History of Debt
Deric Bownds' MindBlog
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3w ago
I pass on this link from the latest Human Bridges newsletter, and would encourage readers to subscribe to and support the Observatory's Human Bridges project, which is part of the Independent Media Institute: Recent scientific findings and research in the study of human origins and our biology, paleoanthropology, and primate research have reached a key threshold: we are increasingly able to trace the outlines and fill in the blanks of our evolutionary story that began 7 million years ago to the present, and understand the social and cultural processes that produced the world we live in now ..read more
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