Mynamelowercase

Here is my taxonomy, each item is a distinct and independent dimension where technological progress is possible: Transport matter Store, transport, and release energy Communicate Cooperate Process information Engineer materials Alter experiences Extend li

What does it mean to understand that something is a pattern? In a puzzle like this: A fairly reliable test is to ask someone to draw the shape that should replace the question mark. This implies that understanding a pattern has something to do with being

I am trying to understand what role images play in a Kantian account of cognition, with a particular focus on his examples concerning judgements about mathematics. This is a topic I am still quite confused about, so I thought I would write a blog post whi

The comedian Rob Paravonian's "Pachelbel rant" is one of the first YouTube videos I remember watching. He complains about how soul-numbingly boring it was to play the cello line in Canon in D: eight notes, over and over. He performs a whole comedy bit on

I spent some time recently reading about community building, and noticed that a lot of frameworks are unidimensional: they describe a single spectrum of "engagement" and rank people by where they are on this spectrum. The analogy that is often used is a f

These are the final weeks of my sabbatical - which means I will soon have less time to write. All the same, I am going to try to resume my habit of publishing a post every day, even when it feels like I have nothing to say . If you want to keep up to date

Imagine you press the following keys on an old-style calculator (the kind which only displays one input or output at a time on the display): 2 + 2 = You are using your calculator to compute the output of some function. Now imagine your calculator has a bu

I've been re-reading David Allen's book "Getting Things Done" . I've used it to organise my to-do lists and personal projects for the last two years, which makes it the longest I've stuck to any system for organising tasks. I've noticed three things from

When people ask me whether I think LLMs are phenomenally conscious I often prefer to start by answering a different question: "if they were phenomenally conscious, should we expect them to be phenomenally conscious in a way we could reliably conclude from