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The Bullshit at the Heart of Humanity
I explained, in a recent blog post, Why Humans Are So Screwy. But I didn't quite finish the story there. Here I'll explain an additional aspect of Screwy Human Nature -- the nature of the...
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Semihard Takeoff
Whenever I talk about the future of AGI, someone starts talking about the possibility that AGI will "take over the world."One question is whether this would be a good or bad thing -- and the answer to...
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Speculations Toward a Precise Model of Morphic Fields
Gentle Reader Beware: This post presents some fairly out-there ideas about the nature of memory and the relationship between the mind and the universe! If you're a hard-core psi skeptic or a die-hard...
View ArticleIs Physics Information Geometry on Causal Webs? (Speculations Toward Grand...
I mentioned recently to my dad that I was fiddling around in my (egregiously nonexistent) "spare time" with some ideas regarding quantum gravity and he said "I would question the sanity of someone as...
View ArticleThe Neural Foundations of Complex Symbolic Thought
How can the brain, with its messy mix of neurons and glia spreading activation all over the place, give rise to the precise mathematical structures of symbolic reasoning?This "symbolic / subsymbolic...
View ArticleGrounding Representation and Pattern in Consciousness
A little piece of patternist analytical philosophy to brighten up your weekend.... I was thinking this stuff through today while going about in Tai Po running errands. Most notably, the back...
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The SpaceshipTwo Crash and the Pluses and Minuses of Prize-Driven and...
SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic's ambitious new plane/spaceship, crashed Friday (two days ago), killing one pilot and seriously injuring another.This is a human tragedy like every single death; and it's...
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Is the Technological Singularity a "Final Cause" of Human History?
Intuitively, it is tempting (to some people anyway!) to think of the potential future Technological Singularity as somehow "sucking us in" -- as a future force that reaches back in time and guides...
View ArticleWhat is Life?
I was trolling the Google+ discussion forum related to the Developmental AI MOOC, which my son Zar recently completed, and noticed a discussion thread on the old question of “What is Life?” — prompted...
View ArticleWhy I Signed Tegmark's Open Letter on AI Safety
A bunch of folks have messaged me recently asking me why the heck I signed the Open Letter on AI safety recently proposed by Max Tegmark and his chums at the newly formed Future of Life Institute (in...
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Paranormal Phenomena, Nonlocal Mind and Reincarnation Machines
How I Came to Accept the ParanormalWhile I’m generally an extremely stubborn person, my opinion has radically changed on some topics over the years. I don't view this as a bad thing. I don't...
View ArticleKermit the Frog, Maximum Entropy Production, Etc.
While in Shanghai on a business trip recently, in a restaurant eating some terrifyingly spicy fish hot-pot with a couple of my Aidyia colleagues, I noticed the radio was playing a cover version of a...
View ArticleEasy as 1-2-3: Obsoleting the Hard Problem of Consciousness via...
NOTE ADDED A FEW DAYS AFTER INITIAL POSTING: The subtitle of this post used to be "Solving the Hard Problem of Consciousness via Brain-Computer Interfacing and Second-Person Science" -- but after...
View ArticleAI-Based Trading is More Likely to Decrease than Increase Problems in the...
Futurist Thomas Frey has written an article suggesting that AI-based financial trading is a threat and is likely to cause a series of horrible market crashes....This is a topic I've thought about a bit...
View ArticleWhy Occam’s Razor Works
(Sketch of a Possible Explanation Why Occam’s Razor Works...)(Though motivated by deep questions in philosophy, this is a speculative math-y blog post; non-technically oriented readers beware…)How can,...
View ArticleLife Is Complexicated
I grew up, intellectually, drinking the Complexity Kool-Aid from a big fat self-organizing firehose.Back in the 1980s, I ate up the rhetoric, and the fascinating research papers, emanating from the...
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Growing Psychic Mini-Brains
I was mildly distressed recently to find that our Ethiopian company iCog Labs -- recently written up nicely in Techonomy -- may not be the weirdest tech company in Addis Ababa. Scientific Revolution...
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Is a Human Borg-Mind Inevitable?
There's a well-known rule that if an article has a headline in the form of a question, the answer is NO.This article isn't really an exception ;-) Is a human borg-mind inevitable? The answer, I...
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The First Earthly Superintelligence Will Be an Incremental Mind-Upload of the...
In which Dr. Goertzel briefly outlines a new way of thinking about the Global Brain , in terms of the concept of "glocal memory" ... leading up to, at the end, a new suggestion about what the first...
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Langan’s “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe”
From http://superscholar.org/interviews/christopher-michael-langan/Someone pointed me recently to Christopher Michael Langan’s long paper on his CTMU -- Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe. I...
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