All Posts

Determined Freedom

In his book Determined, the biologist Robert Sapolsky presents his case against free will, arguing that because our actions are ...
Read More
/ Consciousness, Ways of Living

A Free Guess Through Dimensionality

Let’s play a simple statistics game. I’m looking at a normal distribution with unit variance (which you can’t see) and ...
Read More
/ Mathematics, Statistical Analysis

The Power of Opting Out

On the surface, Rocks, Paper, Scissors (RPS) is among the simplest games. Each player chooses from among only three options, ...
Read More
/ Ways of Living

Uncommon Common Knowledge

While all logic puzzles defy intuition to some degree (hence their being “puzzles”), the Green Eyes one is among the ...
Read More
/ Logic, Mathematics, Paradox

My Brain’s Free Will

The other night, the championship game for my rec basketball league got fairly heated, and during a play late in ...
Read More
/ Consciousness, Free Will, Ways of Living

Lifting Up the Edges of the Distribution

Since I started lifting weights, I’ve found curious the lack of any heuristics to calculate a one rep max based ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence, Learning, Mathematics, Neural Networks, Statistical Analysis, Words

Acting and Authenticity

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Mother Night ...
Read More
/ Ways of Living

Edges of the Distribution

After spending more time with GPT-4, I have to admit I’m surprised at the level of “understanding” possible via simple ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence

Thinking About GPT Zero

Large language models have been all over the news the last couple months, with the launch of chatGPT (and the ...
Read More
/ AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero, Artificial Intelligence, chatGPT, Language

More on Repugnant Intuitions

In Repugnant Intuitions, I took a look at Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion through the lens of behavioral science. The Repugnant ...
Read More
/ Ways of Living

AI Trends in 2022

With 2022 coming to a close, it seems a good time to reflect on the advances made in AI over ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence

The Years of a Life

Recently, while walking through a cemetery, I came across the gravestone pictured below. Initially, I only glanced at it and ...
Read More
/ Death, Thich Nhat Hanh, Ways of Living, Ways of Living

Exploring Inverse Scaling

I recently submitted an entry for the Inverse Scaling Prize, and while it wasn’t selected, I think it still reveals ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, GPT-3, Intelligence, Neural Networks

Puzzling Consistency

I remember marveling as a child at the fact that each word used in the dictionary was also defined in ...
Read More
/ The Brain, Ways of Living

Surprising Surprises

I recently came across the unexpected hanging paradox, and it's been a surprisingly tricky one to work through. The paradox ...
Read More
/ Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Logic, Mathematics, Paradox

In Search of a Free Lunch

Although GPT-3 was released ages ago (in AI time), it continues to generate interesting conversations, particularly with regard to the ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Brain, Brain Simulation, Intelligence, Neural Networks

Thinking About Learning

“Learning” is another one of those abstract concepts which reveals significant complexity upon further examination. In the context of people, ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Evolution, Intelligence, Learning, Neural Networks, Statistics, The Brain

Daylight Savings and Heart Attacks

With the recent passing in the Senate of the Sunshine Protection Act, which seeks to move the US to permanent ...
Read More
/ Daylight Savings, Heart Attacks, Statistical Analysis, Statistics

Examining Evolution as an Upper Bound for AGI Timelines

With the massive degree of progress in AI over the last decade or so, it’s natural to wonder about its ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Evolution, Intelligence, Learning, Neural Networks, Progress, The Brain

Examining 3x+1 in Relation to the Game of Life

Mathematics is full of difficult problems, most of which correspondingly seem difficult to solve. However, within the domain of difficult ...
Read More
/ 3x+1, Game of Life, Mathematics, Mathematics

The Bounds of Our Selves

If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything. Daniel Dennett Dennett’s quote is a favorite of mine, ...
Read More
/ Consciousness, Ways of Living, Words

Examining AGI Timelines

During a recent email exchange, a reader of the blog brought up the question of technology / AI timelines and ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Future Prediction, GPT-3, Innovation, Intelligence, Progress

Experimenting with GPT-3

About a year and a half ago, OpenAI rolled out GPT-3, a massive text-prediction transformer model which shattered many assumptions ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, GPT-3, Intelligence

Optimizations and Constraints

In the comments of https://mybrainsthoughts.com/?p=327, a discussion sprang up on goals and optimization that seems worth diving into further. That ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Constraints, Criminal Justice, Culture, Goals

What Would Non-Consciousness Have Looked Like?

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Tell me, why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went ...
Read More
/ Consciousness, Emergence, Wittgenstein

Agency on Trial

A friend recently shared The Brain on Trial, an article by David Eagleman, and I found it to raise some ...
Read More
/ Agency, Criminal Justice, Free Will, Ways of Living

Exploring the Limits of Intelligence

One important concept in data science is that of signal. Signal represents the ability of data to inform accurate predictions ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Brain, Constraints, Control, Goals, Intelligence, Signal

A Circuit-Level View of Evolutionary Interpretability

I’m often torn between the competing ideas that: Understanding the brain, with its repeating structures and distinct modules, will be ...
Read More
/ Brain, C. Elegans, Circuits, Evolution, Origin, The Brain

A Deeper Look at Context Switching

In General Intelligence and Context Switching, we examined how the brain brings to bear different operational strategies depending on the ...
Read More
/ Context Switching, Intelligence, Learning, The Brain

Deep Learning Language Models and Exact Procedures

As previously discussed in this post, deep learning models designed to predict and create natural language have become quite powerful, ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence, Mathematics, Neural Networks

Analyzing Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem

Throughout history, people have sought to identify accurate statements about the world, so as to better understand the state of ...
Read More
/ Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Logic, Mathematics, Mathematics

Am I My Brain’s Thoughts? An exploration of how we define ourselves and what it means for Free Will.

It’s interesting how difficult it can be to go on a diet. One can be fully set on the idea, ...
Read More
/ Free Will, Life Outlook, Ways of Living

Exploring Mindspace and General Intelligence

Intelligence is notoriously difficult to define, in part because of the variety of ways in which we see it manifested ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, C. Elegans, Culture, Intelligence, Learning

General Intelligence and Context Switching

General intelligence is a remarkable adaptation. We humans are able to learn a near infinite variety of things, from language ...
Read More
/ Context Switching, Intelligence, Lamprey, Learning, The Brain

A Different Perspective on Searle’s Chinese Room

Consciousness is a difficult problem to grapple with, mainly due to its inherently subjective nature. We don’t yet understand the ...
Read More
/ Brain Simulation, Chinese Room Argument, Consciousness, Searle

Intelligence and Control

The desire for control seems to be deeply rooted in the human psyche. We all seek control over our own ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Control, Goals, Intelligence

Repugnant Intuitions

Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion has long been a focus area in the field of population ethics, as it seems to ...
Read More
/ Behavioral Science, Ethics, Intuition, Kahneman, Ways of Living

The Power of Sparsity

The field of machine vision has progressed rapidly over the last decade, with many systems now achieving “better than human” ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks, Sparsity, Words

On Meaning and Machines

Merriam Webster: meaning \ˈmē-niŋ \ noun 1 a the thing one intends to convey especially by language b the thing ...
Read More
/ C. Elegans, Language, Learning, Meaning, Words

Infinitely Malleable

This post contains spoilers for “1984” by George Orwell George Orwell’s classic 1984 pressures readers to think deeply on numerous ...
Read More
/ Culture, Learning, Origin

The Power of Annealing

Author's Note: For any French readers, this post has recently been translated by Azurisme! Metals are a unique form of ...
Read More
/ Annealing, Intelligence, Learning, The Brain

The Constraints of Life

Playing Conway’s Game of Life is an easy way to spend an afternoon. The game is based on the concept ...
Read More
/ Constraints, Culture, Emergence, Game of Life, The Brain

On the Shoulders of Giants

A couple hundred thousand years ago, our species reached a point where we could pass knowledge directly (through language and ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Culture, Intelligence

GPT in the Careenium

In his book I am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter paints a powerful analogy involving the careenium, symms, and symmballs ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Hofstadter, Intelligence, Learning

An “I” is Born

2040: “Hm, that’s odd,” thought Dr. Newerton. He peered back over his notes, trying again to make sense of the ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Brain Simulation, Intelligence, Short Story, Words

GPT-X, Paperclip Maximizer? An Analysis of AGI and Final Goals

In the artificial intelligence literature, it’s common to see researchers examining the question of “what is the right final goal ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Emergence, Goals, Intelligence, Learning

The Kernel of Narrow vs. General Intelligence: A Short Thought Experiment

Imagine we have a man in a room, and we can ask him to perform any task (we’ll assume he’s ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence

Thinking Bottom-Up

Humans (and all other brain-having organisms) interact with the world in a hierarchical manner, starting from the top and working ...
Read More
/ Brain Simulation, Darwin, Emergence, Evolution, Intelligence, Learning, The Brain

Refuting Bostrom’s Orthogonality Thesis

From its inception, the field of artificial intelligence has separated program specification into two key concepts: “goals” and “intelligence”. The ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Goals, Intelligence

The Inherent Limits of GPT

A new natural language AI model launched by OpenAI, GPT-3, has been making waves in the artificial intelligence community. GPT-3 ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence, Neural Networks, Words

The Rationality of Free Will

In “The Absurdity of Free Will”, Hugo argues that we do not have free will, as conventionally understood. The basic ...
Read More
/ Ethics, Free Will, Life Outlook, Morality, Ways of Living

Defining Free Will

Free will sits among the most explored philosophical topics (among other giants like Ethics and Rationality), and for good reason, ...
Read More
/ Ethics, Free Will, Life Outlook, Morality, Ways of Living

Emergence and Control

As researchers and philosophers discuss the path towards human-equivalent / superhuman general artificial intelligence, they frequently examine the concept of ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Control, Emergence, Intelligence, Learning

The Chinese Room Re-imagined: Reddit Discussion

I recently shared my last post on the Chinese room to Reddit, which led to some productive discussions in the ...
Read More
/ Brain Simulation, Chinese Room Argument, Consciousness, Searle

The Chinese Room Re-imagined

The Chinese Room Argument is a thought experiment designed by John Searle to show why computers are not capable of ...
Read More
/ Brain Simulation, Chinese Room Argument, Consciousness, Searle

Thinking About Super-Human AI

We’ve now touched on the idea of general artificial intelligence (i.e. above human level) in a couple posts, and so ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Brain, Brain Simulation, Intelligence, Learning

Thinking About Thinking Machines

A number of other posts so far have touched on what it is that brains do - and for the ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Brain, Brain Simulation, C. Elegans, Evolution, Intelligence, Learning, Neural Networks, The Brain

Defining our Terms

This post, and all posts published on this site, will be constructed using words. I imagine this seems reasonable enough ...
Read More
/ Brain, C. Elegans, Language, Words

Basketball hoops were invented by James Naismith

It can be easy to take for granted all that our brains do when understanding the world, particularly in the ...
Read More
/ Brain, Language, Learning

Consciousness as a “Strange Loop”

Consciousness is, and may always be, a slightly thorny subject to discuss. For many people, no physical explanation is suitable, ...
Read More
/ Brain Simulation, C. Elegans, Consciousness, Hofstadter, Neuroscience, Strange Loops

Defining Intelligence

Dedicated to Sam Rendall - you and your ideas are greatly missed. What is intelligence? What does it mean to ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Evolution, Intelligence, Origin

The Wrong Mind

“Open your eyes, Harry.” The noise wakes me up, and I open my eyes. The light from the room floods ...
Read More
/ Artificial Intelligence, Brain Simulation, Ethics, Morality, Short Story

The Worth of an Unexamined Life

Since the time of Socrates, there has existed a sentiment among certain people that the pursuit of philosophy (including the ...
Read More
/ Ethics, Life Outlook, Mindset, Morality, Ways of Living

Exploring Simulation Theory

While the question of whether we live in a simulation is a relatively new one, it’s really just a modernized ...
Read More
/ Computers, Origin, Origin Theory, Simulation Theory