Yohan J John

As it turns out, it will also remove hyphens indiscriminately.

What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches...

I hope someone draws this wonderful story about Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and the power of the arts to help us see things differently, to the attention of our Education Secretary. Do read it, it will lift your spirits.

I completely agree: there really ought to be work on this, but I haven't come across anything.

I like some of Schwitzgebel's work, so I'll check it out! Thanks!

This from @davidbatherwoods.bsky.social's biography of Schopenhauer is sending me

YouTube video by Like Stories of Old Why Movies Just Don't Feel "Real" Anymore

Really like the concept of haptic visuality.

My favorite kinds of art criticism have much in common with phenomenology, broadly construed.

youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?...

To what extent is ChatGPT like Indecisive Dave from the Fast Show?

I sometimes ask for book recommendations & when I question it, it says, “Yeah, you’re right - rubbish book.”

I've tried googling new papers but nothing seems to confront the strangeness of the present moment.

Have there been any major new theoretical papers in cog sci and/or philosophy of mind about human conceptual structure inspired* by large language models?

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* the inspiration could well be 'adversarial'. 😛

#AI #philosophy #cogsci

"... the list of special sciences has become so long that
nobody is able any more to derive full advantage from all this
wealth, to survey and enjoy all these treasures of cognition."

- Edmund Husserl, 'Formal and Transcendental Logic' (1929)

"The world was filled with forgotten places that had been something else once, had contained something else once, renamed by whatever you did there now."

How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't kno...

I had no idea that reading was taught this way now in the US. Appalling.

www.apmreports.org/episode/2019...

Clear out toys now!

Love being reminded to do this every year. It's a win/win all round

How about a scale for weighing evidence? Or did you want a mathematical symbol?

Just finished a show called 'The Lowdown'. A comedy-noir tale set in present-day Tulsa. Has a slight touch of The Big Lebowski, but also a darker side, especially in the last few episodes. Pulp done right!

virtue signalling is good actually

"One organism might peer out from another organism, but not live there."

I'm in awe of VanDerMeer's ability to conjure the uncanny.

YouTube video by Tastemaker Design Why Wikipedia Can't Explain Math

This video is hilarious, and should be very relatable to anyone who's tried to make sense of a math concept purely through Wikipedia.

youtu.be/33y9FMIvcWY?...

Very nice.

Point #8 reminds me of how Hegel and Marx talk about "moments".

YouTube video by Astor Walk this my mayor #mamdani #zohranmamdani #newyorkmayor #gwenstefani #hollabackgirl #edit #foryou

His victory is brilliant for so many reasons. One of them being this video:
www.youtube.com/shorts/4gRey...

Oh hell yes.

Got it! Yes, free will has a lot to do with what the RL world files under exploration or "off policy" behavior.

This essay touches on some related matters.

3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily...

I used to generate spiral patterns using center-surround networks just for fun... Never really thought of a use for them.

Also: not sure I fully understand the free will point, but it sounds interesting. Could you elaborate?

Yes, teleology is taboo in some scientific discussions, but I think something like goal-seeking has to exist at the individual level. Any kind of civilizational teleology should be read as metaphorical, and best viewed restrospectively and historically, imho.

Oh yeah, there will definitely be processes internal to the cell that most people would file as proto intelligence or selectivity.

One of my favorite facts: neurons and skin cells are 'cousins'.

Intelligence is a phenomenon that lives at boundaries. The semipermeable cell membrane is where the ball got rolling.

I wrote an essay riffing on this idea.

yohanjohn.com/axispraxis/f...

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting

I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

Baudrillard’s “dead twin” in Cool Memories V poetically captures his later metaphysics of hyperreality. The “dead twin” represents the murdered alterity; the otherness humanity destroyed in order to establish its singular, self-enclosed reality.

One thing that I find very confusing about modern AI research is the lack of a clear conceptual separation between contingent empirical findings and necessary consequences of the model architecture or analytic framework.