@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
@leftsidestory@mstdn.social2025-06-16 00:30:00
Urban Composition V
都市构图 V
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1995
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-05-15 17:02:17
The full formula for the probability of "success" is:
p = {
1/(2^(-n 1)) if n is negative, or
1 - (1/(2^(n 1))) if n is zero or positive
}
(Both branches have the same value when n is 0, so the behavior is smooth around the origin.)
How can we tweak this?
First, we can introduce fixed success and/or failure chances unaffected by level, with this formula only taking effect if those don't apply. For example, you could do 10% failure, 80% by formula, and 10% success to keep things from being too sure either way even when levels are very high or low. On the other hand, this flattening makes the benefit of extra advantage levels even less exciting.
Second, we could allow for gradations of success/failure, and treat the coin pools I used to explain that math like dice pools a bit. An in-between could require linearly more success flips to achieve the next higher grade of success at each grade. For example, simple success on a crit role might mean dealing 1.5x damage, but if you succeed on 2 of your flips, you get 9/4 damage, or on 4 flips 27/8, or on 7 flips 81/16. In this world, stacking crit levels might be a viable build, and just giving up on armor would be super dangerous. In the particular case I was using this for just now, I can't easily do gradations of success (that's the reason I turned to probabilities in the first place) but I think I'd favor this approach when feasible.
The main innovation here over simple dice pools is how to handle situations where the number of dice should be negative. I'm almost certain it's not a truly novel innovation though, and some RPG fan can point out which system already does this (please actually do this, I'm an RPG nerd too at heart).
I'll leave this with one more tweak we could do: what if the number 2 in the probability equation were 3, or 2/3? I think this has a similar effect to just scaling all the modifiers a bit, but the algebra escapes me in this moment and I'm a bit lazy. In any case, reducing the base of the probability exponent should let you get a few more gradations near 50%, which is probably a good thing, since the default goes from 25% straight to 50% and then to 75% with no integer stops in between.
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot2025-06-13 06:51:22
"the additional expenditure on the NHS is not about improving our living standards, but about correcting the physical consequences of the appalling food that the neoliberal food supply industry is delivering to us, which is grossly detrimental to our health. We are not, in other words, better off as a consequence of this additional expenditure" -- @…
@arXiv_hepex_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-06-13 08:58:00
Study of Stability and Consistency of EAS Thermal Neutron Detection at ENDA-64
Heng-Yu Zhang, Xin-Hua Ma, Tian-Lu Chen, Shu-Wang Cui, Danzengluobu, Wei Gao, Wen-Chao Gao, Xin-Rui Gao, Zi-Ao Gong, Hai-Bing Hu, Denis Kuleshov, Kirill Kurinov, Bing-Bing Li, Fan-Ping Li, Jia-Heng Li, Yang Li, Hu Liu, Mao-Yuan Liu, Ye Liu, Xi-An Pan, Da-Yu Peng, Yao-Hui Qi, Dong Qu, Oleg Shchegolev, Yuri Stenkin, Tian-Shuang Yang, Li-Qiao Yin, Hui-Qian Zhang, Liang-Wei Zhang, Shi-Yuan Zhang
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-06-12 05:16:18
London-based Definely, whose AI tools help law firms draft and review legal contracts, raised a $30M Series B led by Revaia, with Clio and others participating (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/06/09/uk-legaltech-de…
@leftsidestory@mstdn.social2025-06-15 00:30:03
Urban Composition IV
都市构图 IV
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1995
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography
@leftsidestory@mstdn.social2025-05-15 00:30:03
Urban Discoveries III 🏙️
都市发现 III 🏙️
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-06-02 23:30:43
Microsoft announces new Windows changes in response to the DMA for EEA users, including Edge not prompting users to set it as the default unless it is opened (Richard Lawler/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/678350/microsoft-dma-windows-10-11-bing…
@leftsidestory@mstdn.social2025-05-15 00:30:03
Urban Discoveries III 🏙️
都市发现 III 🏙️
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography