Just about any animal on Earth larger than a flea has some way of experiencing and navigating space. We are hard-wired for it. We are not quite equipped for "space" that goes out 13 billion light-years or possibly forever. This is why "Science" Fiction needs to do away with real space and make the Universe a more comfortable size. Of course, it helps if all the "aliens" speak good English and differ only by the shape of their ears. Nothing out there is even as weird as an Octopus. This is another thing that is hard-wired in humans: face recognition. Star Trek now seems ancient. These days we want to turn it into a "game" - an immersive experience where we can feel a bit "immersed."  It feels even more "real" if people can talk to us ( massive multi player games). This tweaks another hard-wired function of the human brain: to have our existence recognized. Without this, we are not a "person." Modern "VR" pla...

  The "evolution" we taught in school presented confident progress all way from the mysterious beginnings of microorganisms to the triumph of the human form. If we remembered any of this, we walked away with an image of "evolution" that would conveniently fit into the idea of "God" secretly working behind the scenes to create a "Scientific" worldview that was satisfyingly also "religious" - depending on your comfort level. If, for some reason, we dug deeper into this concept, we quickly ran into the idea of " punctuated equilibrium ." There is no long, steady progress. It proceeds in fits and starts. Worse yet, almost all species seem to vanish at some point along the line. There is scant evidence that "better" versions replace the ones that die out. We do see trends toward bigger versions, but here too, evidence is thin. When I first ran across the idea that evolution proceeded in this way, I imagined populations b...

 Are we the DNA of evolving machines?  This thought has been the seed of some exciting insights. Machines evolve, but we downplay this by saying humans drive evolution.  It is not the machines themselves that "evolve." But perhaps we have missed the "essential analogy." For animals, DNA is the evolving blueprint for organisms such as us.  For machines, we have literal blueprints, and humans are the ones that create them, change them and share them with an underlying human goal in mind.  x made a stir by turning our idea of evolution inside out in his "Selfish Gene." According to this story, genes, not animals, compete and evolve.  The analogy I am proposing here is the same: the machine "evolves due to the evolution of designs created and maintained by humans. Elon Musk  (36:00) talks about self-driving cars this way.  He talks about autopilot "evolving" when of course, evolution is being driven by human creativity.  Is this "real...

I discovered this guy on Lex Fridman's podcast . Here are some links. Lex himself is pretty impressive here too. He's "unborabe." JV's scope of interests is broad and overlaps my own in many ways.  Responses... Our human organizations are not conscious, but they are intelligent and purposeful. The point raised in my blog is that this "larger" entity is stupid, like a computer application. "Wisdom" is avoiding foolishness. Self-deception. Bullshit. Lex pushes various ideas related to meaning as a process, a search. The meaning of life is to be found in the search. This is an aspect of Tao. One aspect of "knowing" is VR-type immersiveness. Attacking the "meaning crisis" with our "group mind" creates institutions that can replace or augment religion. Great discussion of what "Theism" and "Atheism" are all about. Personal being. Doctrine. "Being" is the ability of things to be ... there is...

The mother of all analogies is the analogy between what we experience and what is happening. For example, it refers to our idea that a system is doing computation and what it is "actually" doing (Searle). It refers to our idea that what is "really" happening in the world is the intention of God versus what is "really" happening in the world. It is the difference between Tao and the Tao that is named. The brain (and, by extension, the "mind" it creates) builds an electro-chemical analog computer based on this - to map sensations from the real world into analogous mental phenomena. This mapping is called "intentionality." So far, most of our discussion of the mind has concentrated on consciousness. This concentration might give the impression that the mind is essentially a self-enclosed arena of subjectivity. But, on the contrary, the primary evolutionary role of the mind is to relate us in certain ways to the environment and especially t...

Christina Desan gives a calm and civilized talk about the nature of money. It really looks back at the orgins of our current stories from the point of view of current stories. This leaves out "irrelevant" issues such as slavery, colonization, debt, etc. Still lots of interesting perspectives. "Money" is worth something because, by law, it can be exchanged for goods and services for sale in that currency. That means the coin carries the value of what it can buy. Private credit creation = "replication" of the basic unit of account decreed by the State. She puts forward the idea that credit = debt but also the concept that all of this works in the "eye of the beholder." She does note the rise in the power of creditors that parallels the rise of money itself. Generally, the conversation ignores the history of debt.  Did medieval banks morph into modern banks? She claims that the Bank of England was the first actual bank, which was fundamental to the...

  This is a fantastic book. Highly recommended. What follows is just a home for my notes on the book. Also, see Christine Desan , a commentator on money and the institutional structures that support it. There is a connection with my AI deliberations. "Money" is in the eye of the beholder. Piketty points out that the social structures behind it are also in the eye of the beholder, such as class, property, and borders. This leads to the observation that many see elements of capitalism, such as inequality, are real and not "subjective." Economic inequality tangibles to actual results. The human "economy" is built on top of a real environment. Money is imaginary until you have none. Wealth is in the eye of the beholder until you look at the physical destruction involved in our economic history (war, depression, climate change). Since all aspects of the "economy" and the structures of society are subjective, it is not surprising to see wildly differen...