yasuhiro yoshida 吉田康浩 🇵🇸🇱🇧🇮🇷🇻🇪

Interestingly, I now see us as analogous to the universe — its genesis, evolution, and eventual fate, full of entropy in a distant future. We live in the universe, but each of us is a cosmos in our own right.

If I may put everything in one simple message, it would go like this:

we see what we are.

In other words, we each live in a different domain — AI taking over is unlikely to become our agreed-upon hallucination.

This book was really tough to follow. Having finished it, I’m not as confident as I usually am about what I read. For the first time, I felt like I needed a book club.

Before wrapping up, Seth discusses the possibility of AI taking over our lives. For now, he sees AI as nothing more than a “sophisticated pattern-recognition machine,” whose job is to be probabilistically accurate, not persistently useful.

Our number one goal is to live another day. Constant evaluation and prediction weren’t optional — they were the very engine of our survival.

Then how did we acquire this perpetual machine of prediction? “Survival,” Seth explains. At the end of the day, we’re all humans: our bodies are blobs of entropy, our lives are a tangled mesh of entropy.

Seth reminds us that the “self,” in the usual sense, can be divided into two parts: the narrative self, which is how we see ourselves, and the social self, which is how others see us. And, once again, both are what the brain predicts — a controlled hallucination.

Oscar Wilde once said, “Life imitates art.” If art is a form of expression, we can think of it as a reflection of the self. According to Seth, the self is the brain’s best guess at how life should unfold — we never write the script ourselves; the brain does, and we may simply be following along.

He also links this idea to time: our sense of time’s persistence depends on our capacity for change.

Seth expands his theory to explain changes are also something that is inferred by the brain—in other words, our past experiences must first allow for possible changes before they can be inferred and actually perceived. Changes are never external. It's all internal, and it begins with you.

Seth even playfully refers to reality as a shared hallucination. What that leads us to is the realization that how we interpret something and how we respond are never fully predictable. No single experience is ever the same as any previous one within ourselves, let alone between different people.

What we experience, then, is not reality itself but a kind of hallucination — or, as Seth puts it, a “controlled hallucination” — and this is the brain’s default state.

In that sense, we all have been operating like what we call today "AI" before the emergence of it in the recent years.

According to Seth, there isn’t some premeditated, fixed “self” inside us that already has the answers. We’re constantly taking in stimuli, and the brain decides what they are — or more accurately, it predicts what they’re likely to be, based on past experiences.

The book rests on a premise: nothing in the world comes with intrinsic meaning. Objects do not present themselves to us with fixed attributes, nor do they announce their own existence. Instead, it is the brain that determines what is there, what properties it has, and what it means to each of us.

What most distinguishes humans from other living organisms is consciousness. Through it, we perceive, process, and respond to an immense flow of information. Yet no two individuals ever share exactly the same experience. This book sheds light on that mystery.

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness Being You is not as simple as it sounds. Somehow, withi…

January read ✅

This might be the most difficult book I've ever read. (＠﹏＠;)

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth
www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...

Where were you? Where do you stand today? Are you proud of yourself? What are you afraid of losing?

The book—or at least its title—is believed to have grown out of an El Akkad tweet two weeks after October 7th:

"One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."

El Akkad distills this reality succinctly: “We are all governed by chance. We are all subjects of distance.”

Something must give—if we want to improve the human condition.

He later on asks, “What are you willing to give up to alleviate someone else’s suffering?”

We should also remember that selectively ignoring or downplaying those in destitution constitutes a form of artificial distance. Such acts are not always loud. Silence is dangerous and ominous. It allows those involved to revise the narrative at will and affords them plausible deniability.

On top of that, we are all relational in a finite space: one person’s shape inevitably shapes another’s. Some people need you to remain in a particular form. Distance is not always an accident; it can be actively produced, maintained, and defended.

Even if you yourself are liberated enough, others are not, and you are never free from the distances others impose upon you.

You might be born into a world widely perceived as less free and manage to migrate to another widely perceived as freer, hoping to live happily ever after. You may come to believe that a polite, rule-based, orderly world truly exists—and that it will resolve your suffering. It will not.

proximity to life events matters. Emotional proximity determines how close suffering feels; cultural proximity shapes whose lives we identify with; media proximity governs what we encounter directly versus abstractly; and political proximity defines who is framed as ‘us’ and who is cast as ‘them.’

Our lives are often dictated by birth, geography, timing, health, and opportunity—forces that are largely circumstantial and accidental. If luck were the primary differentiator among us, our task would be simple: to accept our lives as they are. But these assumptions get twisted, because

Promises may vary in form and scope, but they are typically understood to rest on civility, equality, and fairness, irrespective of race, religion, or country of origin. The lived reality often contradicts this assumption.

The author Omar El Akkad is an Egyptian-born, Canadian-raised journalist, and this book is his reckoning with the moral failures and contradictions of the Western world, examined through the lens of its unfulfilled promises.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akka…

December read ✅

I thought the title was brilliant. It was a good read.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

It’s a great read if building rapport doesn’t come naturally to you 😉

So the author's stance is that the more ownership you give to others, the clearer their stories becomes, and that this clarity increases their motivation and leads to better outcomes. However, she cautions against giving ownership to toxic people, whose “business model” is disrespecting boundaries.

We want to own our emotionally charged decisions and stories that back them up. So the author adds that the stories cannot be all fun and game; both failures and successes must be included for us to fully grasp their shape and meaning.