One futurist story line is that we all will be seamlessly integrated with AI and the cloud, and bioengineered to live forever. This simplistic fantasy does not take into account the pervasive and fundamental relationships and fluxes between all living things. The cellular mass of individual humans, after all, is mainly composed of their diverse microbiotas (bacteria, fungi, protists), that influence how all organ systems interact with environmental input.  Humans dominate the planet because their brains first evolved a largely unconscious mirroring collective cooperative group intelligenc ..read more

I've now read several times through a daunting review article by Feldman et al.  in the July issue of Trends in Cognitive Science  titled "The Neurobiology of Interoception and Affect."  (motivated readers can obtain a copy of the whole article from me). The bottom line is that the subjective feelings of what is going on inside our bodies -  that taken together form our sense of well being -  rise from a an array of cortical and visceral neuroendocrine systems that are much more complex that the nerve pathways regulating our exteroception, the sensing of external signa ..read more

During REM sleep our brains make up and work though simulated scenarios, while putting our bodies into paralysis so we don't thrash about dangerously....  Senzai and Scanziani show what in going on in mouse brains. Here is the first paragraph (abstract) of their open source text: Vivid dreams mostly occur during a phase of sleep called REM1–5. During REM sleep, the brain’s internal representation of direction keeps shifting like that of an awake animal moving through its environment6–8. What causes these shifts, given the immobility of the sleeping animal? Here we show that the superior c ..read more

I want to pass on a clip from the epilogue of Jim Holt's  2012 book "Why Does the World Exist?  An Existential Detective Story" in which he describes his attending a small ninetieth birthday celebration for Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) the famous French anthropologist and ethnologist . The master made the following brief comments: “Montaigne,” he begins, “said that aging diminishes us each day in a way that, when death finally arrives, it takes away only a quarter or half the man. But Montaigne only lived to be fifty-nine, so he could have no idea of the extreme old age I find my ..read more

I pass on some random thoughts occasioned by the previous post. What is distinctive about humans? -There are millions of humans, there can be only a few LLMs, given the enormous amounts of material and energy required to make them. -Many humans are required to generate and mirror shared illusions about value,purpose, and meaning that bind together and distinguish different cultures. -For GPT engines to obtain such a capability would require that they be embodied, self sufficient, energy efficient, replicable, and interactive.... In other words, like current human bodies. -Mr. Musk's humanoid r ..read more

I want to pass on a clip of text from Samuel Arbesman's recent Substack email, on the path dependence of fundamental ideas about ourselves. I suggest checking out the links to his related writing on human distinctiveness: The “Orang-Outang” Awhile back I wrote about AI and human distinctiveness: basically my argument was that we should be less concerned by whether or not AI can do we what we can and care more about what we want to be doing. In other words, focus on what is quintessentially human, rather than what is uniquely human. But perhaps some of these concerns are si ..read more

Below are URLs of journal articles  I find interesting and think might be of interest to some MindBlog readers.  Most are open source. Email me if you hit a paywall and would like me to send you a PDF of the complete article.   The health risk of social disadvantage is transplantable into a new host. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2404108121   (relevant to transferring immune-reconstituting cells  from a healthy donor to a cancer patient recipient.) Can names shape facial appearances?  https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2405334121   (ind ..read more

Venkatesh Rao's most recent installment of his RibbonFarm Breaking Smart series has comments on the seminal ideas of James Scott, a writer who recently died.  I want to pass on clips from his piece that exactly mirrors my sentiments, expressed much more clearly that I could: James Scott is the reason I’m 40% anarchist. I’m also 40% statist, thanks to Francis Fukuyama, 40% mutualist thanks to Hannah Arendt, and 40% individualist thanks to Douglas Adams. I am large. I contain multitudes.   The great contribution of James Scott to our times was to characterize actually existing anarchis ..read more

From Siegel et al (open source).: A single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic that acutely causes distortions of space–time perception and ego dissolution, produces rapid and persistent therapeutic effects in human clinical trials1,2,3,4. In animal models, psilocybin induces neuroplasticity in cortex and hippocampus5,6,7,8. It remains unclear how human brain network changes relate to subjective and lasting effects of psychedelics. Here we tracked individual-specific brain changes with longitudinal precision functional mapping (roughly 18 magnetic resonance imaging visits per participant). Healt ..read more

In case you haven't seen enough pessimistic predictions about the next ~10-20 years, I pass on the following clips from a recent installment of my email subscription to Venkatesh Rao's "breaking Smart" news letter:  ...world affairs are effectively on autopilot now, running on what in the control engineering world are called bang-bang laws. Bang-bang laws drive a control mechanism from one extreme to another discontinuously, like steering a car with only hard right/hard left limit steers, and regulating speed only with hard braking and floored accelerators. Or electing two opposed sets o ..read more