Me too, though I guess it has something to do with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_symmetry_(string_theory...
3,017 karma · joined July 25, 2013
Charlie Brooker has come a long way since tvgohome[1]!
> Hayek said that it gave her opportunity to [...] have "permission" to do "the most disgusting, grotesque things", though one such thing in the script made her question, "Do I really want to do this?"
Maybe not that far, in some respects, then.
Again you omit the salient detail that "probable billions" referred to an entire industry and the (conservative) $33m (offered as a simple example in relation to your claim of "I could only find $10k!") is the contribution from only a single component of that industry. Classic goalpost shifting, which is why it's fruitless to engage.
Admittedly doing this on the instagram post leaves no content except a link telling me that an additional 520 comments are on the next page.
Economically set back, maybe. "Useless" (with its implication of permanence) is way OTT.
> In brief, our proposal is that psychedelics disrupt functioning at a level of the system (sensitivity of deep-layer pyramidal neurons, power of low-frequency rhythms, and integrity of large-scale networks) that encodes the precision of priors, beliefs, or assumptions.
As SSC point out, this idea isn't really new with this paper. SSC cite "Mad Science Blog" and the Qualia Research Institute as precursors, but perhaps a better example would be renegade computational neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore.
Gallimore has a 45 part course[2] up on Youtube which, after providing an overview of the neurobiology of the predictive coding[3] model of the brain for context, delves into the detail of psychedelics' action on pyramidal neurons giving a picture so consonant with the Relaxed beliefs paper's (less biologically detailed) proposal that it's somewhat surprising his name doesn't get a mention.
The main takeaway from the predictive coding model for this purpose is that most of the information flow in the cortex is top-down, from a world-model (analogous to an ANN model) implemented in the neural structure of the cortex, downwards towards lower-level neurons in "deeper" cortical layers. The world we experience flows from the model rather than directly bottom-up from sensory input, as we might naively expect.
Data flowing downwards from the higher-level model to deeper layers appears as a set of predictions to be compared to sensory data arriving at the same layers from the bottom upwards.
Divergences between sensory data and the model's predictions then serve as a corrective signal, fed upwards back to the model, in a constantly running training cycle.
When additional divergences are introduced by the neurobiological impact of psychedelics, Gallimore theorizes, the model reorganizes in an effort to restore predictive efficacy, experienced as the characteristic perceptual and cognitive distortions of the psychedelic experience. The longer term effects of the disruption seem analogous, perhaps, to pushing the an ANN model out of its local minima.
For an in-at-the-deep-end look at Gallimore's neurobiological overview of how psychedelic action on pyramidal cells disrupts the training cycle see[4] though it relies heavily on context established by the previous 35 episodes.
1: https://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/71/3/316
2: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqdD4EM-aEfmLvbWu8GQ...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L45A6XlPRM0&list=PLbqdD4EM-a...
For example, your argument that one incomplete list of a single company's "charitable activity" is "nowhere close to billions of dollars" when the claim was "probably billions" across the entire industry, where "probably billions" is pretty obviously no more than a vague gesture at "huge amounts of money".
That you find a climate-disinformation spend even in the $10s of millions acceptable is something you might ponder before you start lecturing people on what sites they should post on.
"ExxonMobil‘s $33 million campaign to sow doubt and denial about global warming"
> [...] We know this $33M figure is an underestimate of the total spending by Exxon to fund opposition work on climate policy. For example, the Chamber of Commerce appears for the first time on Exxon’s Worldwide Giving report in 2014 at $1 Million. We assume this is not the first (or the last) contribution Exxon has made to the US Chamber of Commerce.
> On this page, you’ll find the total amount of funding from ExxonMobil and its foundations to dozens of organizations that worked to spread climate denial. Hyperlinks will take you to further detail about each organization’s funding specifics and activities.
https://www.desmog.com/exxonmobil-funding-climate-science-de...
Not to mention the probable billions of dollars spent in an effort to increase public ignorance[1] around the issue. (See [2], for example.)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology
2: https://www.desmog.com/2014/10/31/oil-and-gas-industry-s-end...
Got it.
It seems an outlandish claim, but then again Muskified Twitter has previous form for this kind of thing with that time when they self-derailed by locking themselves out of their own api, right?[1]
> this new landscape demands more than just new laws. It also requires a new category for psychedelics. Are they recreational drugs? Are they medicines? Are they religious sacraments?
I'm asking why we can't just answer this question with "They are psychedelics".
I guess I'd come under Humanities as far as my interest in consciousness goes, but I'm more "We don't know what Consciousness is, but let's at least stop trying to pretend it's nothing but X (or Y, or Z)" (Aimed mostly at groups 1 & 3 by your schema, I guess).
> All other reproduction, whether by printing or electronically or by any other means, is expressly forbidden without the prior permission of the publishers. This file may only be used as part of the CD on which it was first issued.
CIA:
> Arr!
I wonder if the author is aware of AI Jesus on twitch?[1] AI representing a popular deity, open 24/7.
Why do you think her actions imply anything else?
> “We need to just look into whether there are rogue SAP programs that no one is providing oversight for,” says Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who led the Senate’s April UAP hearing. “The goal for me will be to have a hearing on that at some point so that we can assess if these SAP’s actually exist.”
This has quite a different thrust to the statements of Hawley and Rubio, IMO.
1: https://www.wired.com/story/ufo-whistleblower-us-congress-in...
Is UFO credence starting to split along party lines?
1: https://www.newsweek.com/josh-hawley-ufo-whistleblower-repor...
2: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/marco-rubio-christop...
> [...] decreased liability and litigation.
> [...] incomparable tax savings. There is no state income tax for Delaware corporations that conduct business out of state; no inheritance tax on stock held by non-Delaware residents; no state sales tax on intangible personal property (such as royalty payments); and shares of stock owned by non-resident aliens are not subject to Delaware taxes.
> In addition, Delaware corporations not operating in the state of Delaware do not need to acquire a business license in Delaware.
> [...] The State of Delaware allows you to file your company without listing the names of the owners
And other reasons detailed at the same link: https://www.delawareinc.com/before-forming-your-company/bene...
Seems like the closest US onshore location to actual offshore.
The authors agree with the connectionist critique of cognitivists like Fodor (correctly, and on good Wittgensteinian grounds, IMO) but then critique the positive views of the connectionists that "connectionist modelling will pave the way for a better understanding of brain-behaviour (or, more contentiously, brain-'mind') relationships" as "incoherent". I think that latter claim of incoherence is looking a bit tattered now in view of the undoubted practical linguistic interest of LMMs.
After locating the book at one of the popular public academic material utilities, my first instinct was to look for my my favorite anti-cognitivist anti-nativist quote from Philosophical Investigations about the operation of meaning (or intentionality, to use the technical term):
> "There must surely be a further, different connexion between my talk and N, for otherwise I should still not have meant HIM."
> Certainly such a connexion exists. Only not as you imagine it: namely by means of a mental mechanism.
(PI, §689)
This isn't directly quoted in the book, but they do say:
> one of the points that Wittgenstein is making with respect to rules and language is that there are no mechanisms of grammar, no calculus of determining rules, behind reasoning, behind language. Rules can be a guide to action, but they do not constrain it in the way in which the viewpoint nourished by computational linguists proposes.
As far as I know you can only get one of them under a microscope, which seems to support your view, but "mind-brain identity theory", positing that mind and brain are literally the same thing, is still a thing in philosophy though not quite the hot item it was 60 years ago.
If you're curious, see for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_physicalism or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_monism
But anyway, my bachelors degree was a "combined major" of comp. sci. / philosophy, several decades ago. I still have a strong interest in philosophy of mind but not in any professional capacity. Hope it helps.
The fact that something for which, unlike phlogiston or the Aether, we have direct incontrovertible evidence (denial of which evidence puts one on pain of having to justify one's own sanity and fitness for discourse), has yet so eluded definition in strict functional / scientific terms, points more to the likelihood we're suffering from some collective conceptual confusion, afaics.
Rather than consciousness being a primitive pre-scientific intellectual construct, perhaps our current scientific / functional ontology will later be regarded as pre-X, where X is the name for whatever resolution of the aforementioned conceptual confusion we achieve such that it allows us to integrate the fact of consciousness into a unified rational account of the universe.
Another way of putting it might be that there is simply no coherent scientific framework within which consciousness is well defined. It seems to have no place in any science-based ontological scheme. It seems outside any established scientific categorization of what exists.
Which is of course what makes consciousness so interesting!
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness