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Searle on Consciousness

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He starts ( 4:03 ) talking about the difference between epistemically objective and subjective claims . I was thinking about human experience and the idea that we share certain common experience on account of our being human beings in common situations. This is ultimately what we mean when we make claims about the existence of qualia, which Searle calls ontologically subjective claims (the immediate subjective experience of seeing a colour, for example). We say the qualia "exist" because we have plenty of epistemic justification for believing there is some common shared experience to seeing colours. We usually get this justification through sharing linguistic representations of the experience. The so-called "hard problem of consciousness" is to try to explain the ontological foundation of these qualia ( 38:48 ). Some people think that an explanation of this needs to be given in terms of physics. I wrote in 2010 that this is not so, because physics as an empirical ...
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America is for Losers

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What a government! Subscribe to World Affairs in Context .  Who cares if the rich people can still make money on Wall St. by insider trading,... See  Moby and Hana and Jazz on Addiction and Recovery  and  Symbiosys TX and Brad Lancaster and Brandon on Land Restoration .  Subscribe to Glenn Diesen .
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Joe Manor Destructively Testing a Glider

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Thing got to over 500 miles per hour before it crashed. That is scary! The technique he is using is called dynamic soaring . His goal is to break the sound barrier. See these previous posts of mine . Subscribe to Manorcraft .
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Daniel Tubbenhauer on AI Assisted Mathematics

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He goes back to the 1956 work of Herbert Simon and Alan Newell on a program called  Logic Theorist . My comment : 16:58 Reinforcement learning is what lies at the core of academic research in some fields. Don't knock it!  See Brady Haran interview with Terence Tao  and Brady Haran Interview with Hugo Duminil-Copin . Whilst looking this up I accidentally discovered that Herbert Simon coined the term Bounded Rationality in his 1957 book Models of Man . See  Theories of Bounded Rationality  which was published in C.B. McGuire and Roy Radner (eds.), Decision and Organization © 1972 North-Holland Publishing Company.  See also Is Bounded Rationality Unboundedly Rational? Some Ruminations By Kenneth J. Arrow. Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/4709.003.0007 . Subscribe to  Visual Math .
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Daniel Tubbenhauer: Three colors suffice

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[Originally posted 27 January, 2024] A late 20th birthday-present for Lewis Carroll. This is a talk he gave a few days ago at USC. The Temperley-Lieb algebra gives an amazing constructive proof which actually counts 3-colorings. It's an evaluation/reduction process. They were doing this the same year John Reynolds gave his tutorial “the application of the lambda calculus to programming languages”. See  Definitional Interpreters Revisted . [Update: See also  Temperley-Lieb Algebra: From Knot Theory to Logic and Computation via Quantum Mechanics  (2009) by Samson Abramsky]. Subscribe to Daniel Tubbenhauer .
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David Corfield on Sweedler Theory for Systems

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So there was this guy called Moss Sweedler who, in the late sixties, was overthinking the whole algebra thing and invented half a dozen new verbs and adjectives to say what he thought, ...  See the talk description with a link to the slides  and Sweedler Theory of Monads by  Dylan McDermott, Exequiel Rivas and Tarmo Uustalu (2022) Sweedler theory for double categories by Vasileios Aravantinos-Sotiropoulos and Christina Vasilakopoulou (2023) It looks great. Now make it something the average free software programmer can understand and use to make the next version of the Gnome desktop and Firefox, because this stuff is rapidly becoming unmaintainable and unusable. See  The Story of Unix - Chapter Ω: The Captains All Jumped Ship and  Nir Lichtman's 12-minute Linux Distribution Video : This guy Corfield has had twenty years of funding in a top university and this is how far we've advanced since he wrote this in 2007 . See these papers by Samson Abramsky: What...
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Ally Berry on a Monster in Cayuga Lake

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See  Ally Berry on Atmospheric Rivers . Cayuga Lake is the longest of western New York's glacial Finger Lakes, and is the second largest in surface area (marginally smaller than Seneca Lake) and volume. It is just under 40 miles long. Its average width is 1.7 miles, and it is 3.5 miles wide at its widest point near Aurora. It is approximately 435 feet deep at its deepest point.  My  comment : Wow, that was great! I loved that potted history of fringe festivals. When she said "It's great that there's this thing out there and nobody knows how big it is" I thought she's was talking about fringe festivals. I was thinking that if human behaviour can destroy ecosystems then it can also create them. So, people behaving as if this creature exists, even though it may not, and this conservation messaging persisting could eventually create an ecological niche, and who knows what will show up! 🦕  See Symbiosys TX and Brad Lancaster and Brandon on Land Restoration .  Sub...
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Symbiosys TX and Brad Lancaster and Brandon on Land Restoration

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Here's the previous one on the solar panel farm and  Why Are People With Money So Fucking Stupid? Subscribe to Symbiosis TX .   Subscribe to Brad Lancaster . Subscribe to GrowTree Organics .  
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Moby and Hana and Jazz on Addiction and Recovery

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I thought this was going to be a bit cringe, but it's not. It's really good. Subscribe to Moby . See her Patreon:  https://patreon.com/HanaClio . Subscribe to Hana Clio . Subscribe to Innerverse with Jazz Maia . There's no shortage of good advice on YouTube! See Symbiosys TX and Brad Lancaster and Brandon on Land Restoration .
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Today's Adventures into Neurology

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  See  Assessing correspondence between subjective reports and visual targets during attempted out-of-body experiences by Marina Weiler, Damon Abraham, David J. P. Acunzo and Niffe Hermansson. My comment : That was really interesting, thank you. I had an out-of-body experience once. I was travelling in a taxi on a long dirt road and it was as if "I" had jumped out of my body into the body of the guy sitting in the front seat who was looking back at "me" and shouting at "me" except it was I who was desperately trying to say something but I couldn't and the "me" in the back seat was wearing a green t-shirt, whereas I was wearing a red one. It was a pretty complicated situation but it all sorted itself out and I apologised to everyone else in the taxi. They didn't seem too phased. But testing people with random images displayed on a laptop screen sounds incredibly unlikely to work because the whole setup is just meaningless representation. ...
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