I’m often torn between the competing ideas that: Understanding the brain, with its repeating structures and distinct modules, will be relatively easy (i.e. within the short-term grasp of humanity) Understanding the brain, with its structures crafted through millions of years of random evolution, will be relatively hard (i.e. will not happen for multiple generations) For …
A Circuit-Level View of Evolutionary Interpretability Read More »
This post contains spoilers for “1984” by George Orwell George Orwell’s classic 1984 pressures readers to think deeply on numerous topics, including (but certainly not limited to) the definition of reality, the role of government, and human nature. I found his examinations of human nature to be especially interesting, as in the first half we …
Dedicated to Sam Rendall – you and your ideas are greatly missed. What is intelligence? What does it mean to be intelligent? A starting point for a very high level definition might be an ability of an agent to accomplish its goals in its environment. From this definition, we can see three pieces to assessing …
While the question of whether we live in a simulation is a relatively new one, it’s really just a modernized version of a more persistent question throughout humanity’s past – why are there things, and why are we part of those things? In the early days of humanity, there were few tools or methods available …