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In his book Determined, the biologist Robert Sapolsky presents his case against free will, arguing that because our actions are ...

Let’s play a simple statistics game. I’m looking at a normal distribution with unit variance (which you can’t see) and ...

On the surface, Rocks, Paper, Scissors (RPS) is among the simplest games. Each player chooses from among only three options, ...

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

The other night, the championship game for my rec basketball league got fairly heated, and during a play late in ...

Since I started lifting weights, I’ve found curious the lack of any heuristics to calculate a one rep max based ...

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Mother Night ...

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

Large language models have been all over the news the last couple months, with the launch of chatGPT (and the ...

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

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

Recently, while walking through a cemetery, I came across the gravestone pictured below. Initially, I only glanced at it and ...

I recently submitted an entry for the Inverse Scaling Prize, and while it wasn’t selected, I think it still reveals ...

I remember marveling as a child at the fact that each word used in the dictionary was also defined in ...

I recently came across the unexpected hanging paradox, and it's been a surprisingly tricky one to work through. The paradox ...

Although GPT-3 was released ages ago (in AI time), it continues to generate interesting conversations, particularly with regard to the ...

“Learning” is another one of those abstract concepts which reveals significant complexity upon further examination. In the context of people, ...

With the recent passing in the Senate of the Sunshine Protection Act, which seeks to move the US to permanent ...

With the massive degree of progress in AI over the last decade or so, it’s natural to wonder about its ...

Mathematics is full of difficult problems, most of which correspondingly seem difficult to solve. However, within the domain of difficult ...

If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything. Daniel Dennett Dennett’s quote is a favorite of mine, ...

During a recent email exchange, a reader of the blog brought up the question of technology / AI timelines and ...

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

In the comments of https://mybrainsthoughts.com/?p=327, a discussion sprang up on goals and optimization that seems worth diving into further. That ...

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

A friend recently shared The Brain on Trial, an article by David Eagleman, and I found it to raise some ...

One important concept in data science is that of signal. Signal represents the ability of data to inform accurate predictions ...

I’m often torn between the competing ideas that: Understanding the brain, with its repeating structures and distinct modules, will be ...

In General Intelligence and Context Switching, we examined how the brain brings to bear different operational strategies depending on the ...

As previously discussed in this post, deep learning models designed to predict and create natural language have become quite powerful, ...

Throughout history, people have sought to identify accurate statements about the world, so as to better understand the state of ...

It’s interesting how difficult it can be to go on a diet. One can be fully set on the idea, ...

Intelligence is notoriously difficult to define, in part because of the variety of ways in which we see it manifested ...

General intelligence is a remarkable adaptation. We humans are able to learn a near infinite variety of things, from language ...

Consciousness is a difficult problem to grapple with, mainly due to its inherently subjective nature. We don’t yet understand the ...

The desire for control seems to be deeply rooted in the human psyche. We all seek control over our own ...

Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion has long been a focus area in the field of population ethics, as it seems to ...

The field of machine vision has progressed rapidly over the last decade, with many systems now achieving “better than human” ...

Merriam Webster: meaning \ˈmē-niŋ \ noun 1 a the thing one intends to convey especially by language b the thing ...

This post contains spoilers for “1984” by George Orwell George Orwell’s classic 1984 pressures readers to think deeply on numerous ...

Author's Note: For any French readers, this post has recently been translated by Azurisme! Metals are a unique form of ...

Playing Conway’s Game of Life is an easy way to spend an afternoon. The game is based on the concept ...

A couple hundred thousand years ago, our species reached a point where we could pass knowledge directly (through language and ...

In his book I am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter paints a powerful analogy involving the careenium, symms, and symmballs ...

2040: “Hm, that’s odd,” thought Dr. Newerton. He peered back over his notes, trying again to make sense of the ...

In the artificial intelligence literature, it’s common to see researchers examining the question of “what is the right final goal ...

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

Humans (and all other brain-having organisms) interact with the world in a hierarchical manner, starting from the top and working ...

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

A new natural language AI model launched by OpenAI, GPT-3, has been making waves in the artificial intelligence community. GPT-3 ...

In “The Absurdity of Free Will”, Hugo argues that we do not have free will, as conventionally understood. The basic ...

Free will sits among the most explored philosophical topics (among other giants like Ethics and Rationality), and for good reason, ...

As researchers and philosophers discuss the path towards human-equivalent / superhuman general artificial intelligence, they frequently examine the concept of ...

I recently shared my last post on the Chinese room to Reddit, which led to some productive discussions in the ...

The Chinese Room Argument is a thought experiment designed by John Searle to show why computers are not capable of ...

We’ve now touched on the idea of general artificial intelligence (i.e. above human level) in a couple posts, and so ...

A number of other posts so far have touched on what it is that brains do - and for the ...

This post, and all posts published on this site, will be constructed using words. I imagine this seems reasonable enough ...

It can be easy to take for granted all that our brains do when understanding the world, particularly in the ...

Consciousness is, and may always be, a slightly thorny subject to discuss. For many people, no physical explanation is suitable, ...

Dedicated to Sam Rendall - you and your ideas are greatly missed. What is intelligence? What does it mean to ...

“Open your eyes, Harry.” The noise wakes me up, and I open my eyes. The light from the room floods ...

Since the time of Socrates, there has existed a sentiment among certain people that the pursuit of philosophy (including the ...

While the question of whether we live in a simulation is a relatively new one, it’s really just a modernized ...