breckinloggins

13 ms·

91.
by breckinloggins 6y ago
I wonder if in addition to the proofs this could also be used to provide generated "meta textbooks". The towers of theorems must be a graph, right? So shouldn't I be able to say "I want to understand Calabi–Yau manifolds
92.
by breckinloggins 6y ago
Yep. I was definitely cheating, and it’s more like “syntactical self hosting”. I’ve wanted to try my hand at a Forth like this but so far I haven’t started anything.
93.
by breckinloggins 6y ago
I tried to do something “interesting” with my own little lisp based on the “Maxwell’s Equations of Software” paper. I don’t know if I succeeded exactly (and like most such projects I left it in a somewhat unfinished state), but I did achiev
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by breckinloggins 6y ago
Probably not, but I mean the kind of informal physicalist commitment that says something like "if I can't imagine quantum fields feeling things, then feelings don't exist." I see a lot of that, though less and less these
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by breckinloggins 6y ago
Exactly. One of my more vivid memories is excitedly opening my copy of Jayne's "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and being dismayed as it slowly dawned on me that Jayne's entire book w
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by breckinloggins 9y ago
I was thinking the same thing. Those locust plagues are hugely devastating... Thinking beyond the snark for a bit, though, locusts might be an example of a species-level cancer cheating the “rules” of a habitat. Humans? We just throw the r
97.
by breckinloggins 9y ago
I had the opposite problem. My first machine was a TRS-80 Model III that my dad bought for me at a garage sale. It came with an aftermarket BASIC programming manual, but no programmer's manual for the machine. Without a real reference
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by breckinloggins 9y ago
It could be that this tracks with whether you believe you have an "internal locus of control". There's a spectrum of orientation between "just give me names for parts of who I am so I can understand myself and find a com
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by breckinloggins 9y ago
> Focus on a colour in your immediate environment and ask yourself whether that could really be only a figment of your mind. Yes, of course that could really be the case. It's a bit of a downer that this article ends with an argumen
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by breckinloggins 9y ago
I’ve recently tried to become more literate - in the “literature” sense. It’s a fascinating world and I hope the journey helps me become less psychologically lopsided. But this style of writing is really holding me back from what I’m sure i
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by breckinloggins 9y ago
This was a fantastic event and it was truly an honor to be there! If you haven't visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, I highly recommend it.
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by breckinloggins 9y ago
I've had this thought as well. I call it a "Guaranteed Basic Job". I think it should be the "next rung" on the income ladder. In my opinion, we should always have a GBI safety net and then a GBJ would give you a rai
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by breckinloggins 9y ago
You jest, but I think one day we'll discover something that looks a little like socialism, a little like "Star Trek-style" communism, and a little like free market capitalism. And it won't be ideologically driven, but ba
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by breckinloggins 9y ago
Many of the visualizations seem interpretable even though they are (essentially, I presume) projections of a very high dimensional space onto 2d position + 3d color space. Is there any research on projecting these visualizations into 6-dime
105.
by breckinloggins 9y ago
I look at it the other way around: the reason these were so important to Franklin was that he knew perfectly well how bad he was at them. Somewhere along the line we've conflated valuing virtue with already being virtuous. The hypocris
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by breckinloggins 9y ago
The joke is that "start small and keep expenses low; focus on making enough money to live" was known in the past (and outside of the tech bubble) as simply "starting a business". The title is a bit buzzword-laden, and GP
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by breckinloggins 9y ago
Does anyone know why this sounds like it was written as a hit piece on Maria Ayerdi-Kaplan? I'm interested in the back story there, because the tone is quite nasty (not that I should expect anything else from our media today).
108.
by breckinloggins 9y ago
This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining s
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by breckinloggins 9y ago
It looks to me like the equivalent of keeping telemarketers on the phone in an inane conversation instead of immediately hanging up on them. The latter just frees them up to call the next victim.
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by breckinloggins 10y ago
This is what services like urbit are after. If you don't understand urbit, think of it as a step towards what this post is advocating. Whether they can escape from the gravity well of their own obfuscation is, however, another matter.
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by breckinloggins 10y ago
> I can't make the leap from evolution selecting for consciousness for some utility to dualism. Can you make that more explicit for me? The philosophical objection to the idea that consciousness is functional is that, it this were s
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by breckinloggins 10y ago
I share your confusion with this part of an otherwise-excellent article. It was such a surprise to read it that I fear I'm missing something. It seems obvious that what we're experiencing isn't the world or any so-called &quo
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by breckinloggins 10y ago
That's one reason why I've started using the term "interiority" to describe the bedrock "existence of a feeling of what it is like" phenomenon. It's the smallest word I can think of that still conveys the
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by breckinloggins 10y ago
I suspect you're exactly right.
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by breckinloggins 10y ago
That's why I labelled the idea "heretical". I think your explanation is by far the most popular one in science. The idea is that consciousness is an "epiphenomenon" - the "steam of the locomotive". It has
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by breckinloggins 10y ago
True, but what is surprising is that there is something "it is like" to be that interior. As an example: CPUs can perform calculations on data we consider "representations". The outcome of those calculations, in turn, af
117.
by breckinloggins 10y ago
I promised myself I wouldn't follow the Chalmerian rabbit down the consciousness rabbit hole for a while (one eventually gets tired of being dizzy no matter how fascinating the reason). Every time I swear to myself that I'll give
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by breckinloggins 10y ago
That actually sounds right. For me, they took 80 or so to race what I subjectively thought of as "well", but they only took 10 or 20 - as you said - to roughly figure out what they were doing. And I figured out what the behavior d
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by breckinloggins 10y ago
I observed something interesting: when I changed the number of hidden layers from 100 to 1, almost nothing changed. It took slightly more generations to learn how to race, but not that many more (~80 generations vs ~90 generations). In addi
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by breckinloggins 11y ago
Safari as well.

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