@Dragofix@veganism.social2025-05-31 01:43:14
Join the millions using their voices and everyday choices to tackle the climate crisis! #climate
@Dragofix@veganism.social2025-05-31 01:43:14
Join the millions using their voices and everyday choices to tackle the climate crisis! #climate
@n8foo@macaw.social2025-05-18 22:19:11
The high precision time nuts, a.k.a. the “Time Lords” had a pretty good demonstration at #Hamvention. They built an LLM that had ingested 10 years of papers and mailing lists and could answer questions reliably
@gwire@mastodon.social2025-05-26 19:35:35
The US is finally building its National Database of Ruin.
https://theintercept.com/2025/05/22/intel-agencies-buying-data-portal-privacy/
@blaise@mastodon.cloud2025-05-22 20:00:36
Whatever is left of our constitutional rights and liberties exists mostly in the gaps between what the government knows about us. This is the beginning of the end. Soon, when conservatives are in charge, they'll make us follow their stupid, puritanical rules whether we like it or not, and when liberals are in charge, well, they'll make us follow [i]their[/i] stupid, puritanical rules whether we like it or not.
1/2
@chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.ca2025-06-02 15:42:43
I am willing to be pleasantly surprised, but... when all I see from these "major projects" is oil and gas and other 20th century backwards nonsense, I can't help but be pessimistic.
Ironically, a real "nation building" project that would be a huge benefit to Canadians would be more akin to something from the 19th century: Standing up a true public railway corporation and rebuilding a high speed electrified rail network from sea to sea to sea that could reduce transportation costs and increase flexibility and convenience for millions of Canadians and businesses including in remote communities.
But our current leadership is too beholden to existing capitalist interests and status quo business to be that bold. And they're positively allergic to anything done purely in the public interest. How dare we not include some profiteering private corporation… /sarc
#CanPoli #CdnPoli #NaitonBuilding #Transportation #rail
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/premiers-meeting-prime-minister-carney-major-projects-1.7549577
@pre@boing.world2025-05-16 11:08:14
I read "Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It" by Christof Koch.
Interesting book which spends like 8 or 9 chapters detailing all the experiments which prove beyond much doubt that consciousness, and self awareness, is a thing done by a brain.
It describes how perception is a construction of a description, has a chapter called "computational mind"
And then spends the last two chapters describing why he thinks the mind can't be computed, because drugs have made him think experience is some kind of magic associated with highly interconnected causal structures.
Apparently, he thinks, once things become interconnected enough they become able to cause things independently of the physics running those connections.
Which is crazy, obviously. There's nothing causal in direct connections between neurons that isn't equally causal in modeled connections between virtual neurons.
All his evidence in the book from neural MRI scans to the effects of psychedelic drugs and symptoms of strokes and disease point to the brain simulating a virtual reality which is the basis of perception.
That simulated world in which we live is full of colour and shape and sounds and emotions and millions of mental constructs that are built to be correlated by the senses with the outside world, but are not equal to the world itself. We live in a dream constructed to correlate with reality.
But then instead of taking the next step: That consciousness itself is a property of a simulated being inside that mental model of the universe, a property which the brain simulates and applies to the virtual self that's doing the experiencing inside that model, he jumps towards some magic implying pan-psychism or that sufficiently interconnected networks become causally self-complete for some reason nobody can fathom.
Sure, colour and shape and emotions are all made up by the brain but experience can't be! For some reason.
You see in truth dualism is false, in that there is no spirit realm in which ghosts animate the matter of the body somehow.
Yet also, dualism is true, in that there is a simulated mental reality which we live in, computed by the brain in which all perception and experience are created, which is related-to but separate-from the unfolding complicated dance of energy that is the universe our bodies interact with.
People take some DMT trip, and the model of the universe emulated by their brain collapses and breaks. Their virtual simulated self inside their mind has these experiences of being one with the universe or the experience of feeling dead yet conscious or whatever, and these hippies think that the broken down simulated experience is real and reflects how consciousness is more fundamental than the atoms that make up the neurons in their brain.
Instead of realizing it shows them that their experienced universe is a simulacrum, they think they get a more direct experience of reality somehow. A consciousness more pure than any mere base atom.
"Then I am myself the world" is a great title. Everything you ever experience is created and simulated in your brain like a dream, the whole universe is inside your head. Even the fact of experience itself.
But that isn't the conclusion Koch reaches somehow, he just jumps from describing the evidence that this is so straight into ascribing super-causal magic consciousness to particular arrangements of atoms that integrated information theory suggest have high correlation, and thinks therefore conciousness is itself the entire universe.
Ah well, fun book. I like arguing in my head with authors that are wrong.
#reading #books #consciousness #thenIAmMyselfTheWorld
@moehre73@social.linux.pizza2025-04-14 18:14:15
Flug über dem Meer.
#Graugänse #Vogelflug #Meer #Frachtschiff
