Tootfinder

Little more than a year ago,
Kristi Noem’s political prospects appeared to be in freefall.
The then South Dakota governor was criss-crossing the country on an ill-fated book tour,
widely seen, at least initially, as an audition to be Donald Trump’s running mate.
Instead, Noem found herself on the defensive – a position Trump never likes to be in – after revealing in her memoir that she had shot the family’s “untrainable” hunting dog,
a 14-month-old wirehair poi…

Marines are highly trained in combat and crisis response, with time in conflict zones like Syria and Afghanistan.
But that is starkly different from the role they will face now:
They could potentially be hit by L A hipsters carrying gas canisters and have to quickly decide how to respond
or face decisions about protecting an immigration enforcement agent from crowds.

Pentagon draws up rules for Marines deployed to LA protests
The Pentagon is scrambling to establish rules to guide U.S. Marines who could be faced with the rare and difficult prospect of using force against citizens on American soil, now that the Trump administration is deploying active duty troops to the immigration raid protests in Los Angeles. U.S. Northern Command said Monday that it's sending 700 Marines into the Los Angeles area to protect federal property and personnel. A U.S. official says troops will be armed with their normal service weapons b…

Check out my latest CSO piece, which examines how Trump’s nominees for national cyber director and CISA director will face shared challenges but different prospects in coping with unprecedented reductions in cyber personnel across the federal government.
Many thanks to Michael Daniel of the Cyber Threat Alliance and Mark Montgomery of FDD for their help and insight.
Daniel made a point about Trump's cutbacks on cyber spending, a situation that most cyber folks haven't see…

Top US cyber officials face divergent paths after Senate confirmation
Following their Senate confirmations, Sean Cairncross and Sean Plankey — Trump’s nominees for national cyber director and CISA director — will face shared challenges but different prospects in coping with unprecedented reductions in cyber personnel across the federal government.

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