Tootfinder

At a topline glance, Trump's Big Budget Bill is an outrage:
large tax cuts for the rich and millions kicked off health insurance,
almost a parody of what an apparently fragile coalition of contemporary conservatives might abide
(if also a bill that raised the eyebrows of a few debt scolds, including Musk).
But because it is also a one-stop legislative omnibus,
rushed so quickly through the House that Republican representatives are now protesting they didn…

Opinion | Trump’s Budget Tells Three Unhappy Truths About America
Features of the budget: A supercharged ICE, school vouchers and no relief for a warming planet.

Da fährt eins nach Biskoupky (aktuelle Bevölkerung 185 nach cs-wikipedia) nur, um von dort aus die Jihlava hinauf zur Mohelenska hadcovš step zu wandern, und dann ist das erste Haus nach dem Ausstieg aus dem Bus gleich das Geburtshaus des Poetisten Vítězslav Nezval. Allerdings: Die Číslo popisné (40 laut OSM) ist darauf nicht angebracht, aber Nezval hat schließlich eines seiner berühmtesten (von Milča Mayerovš getanzten) Gedichte auch abeceda und nicht 1234 genannt.

Dhvani: A Weakly-supervised Phonemic Error Detection and Personalized Feedback System for Hindi
Arnav Rustagi, Satvik Bajpai, Nimrat Kaur, Siddharth Siddharth
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02166

Dhvani: A Weakly-supervised Phonemic Error Detection and Personalized Feedback System for Hindi
Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) has been extensively studied for English. However, there remains a critical gap in its application to Indian languages with a base of 1.5 billion speakers. Pronunciation tools tailored to Indian languages are strikingly lacking despite the fact that millions learn them every year. With over 600 million speakers and being the fourth most-spoken language worldwide, improving Hindi pronunciation is a vital first step toward addressing this gap. This …

Da fährt eins nach Biskoupky (aktuelle Bevölkerung 185 nach cs-wikipedia) nur, um von dort aus die Jihlava hinauf zur Mohelenska hadcovš step zu wandern, und dann ist das erste Haus nach dem Ausstieg aus dem Bus gleich das Geburtshaus des Poetisten Vítězslav Nezval. Allerdings: Die Číslo popisné (40 laut OSM) ist darauf nicht angebracht, aber Nezval hat schließlich eines seiner berühmtesten (von Milča Mayerovš getanzten) Gedichte auch abeceda und nicht 1234 genannt.

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