Valence in overview Adam: What is emotional valence (as opposed to valence in chemistry)? Mike: Put simply, emotional valence is how pleasant or unpleasant something is. A somewhat weird fact about our universe is that some conscious experiences do seem to feel better than others. Adam: What makes things feel the way they do?…
I think our first ethical priority is to stop doing harm, and right now in our factory farms billions of non-human animals are being treated in ways that if our victims were human, we would get the perpetrators locked up for life. And the sentience (and what it’s worth the sapience) of a pig…
Christof Koch (Allen Institute for Brain Science) discusses Shannon information and it’s theoretical limitations in explaining consciousness – Christof argues that we don’t need observers to have conscious experiences (other poeple, god, etc), the underlying assumptions behind traditional information theory assumes Shannon information – and that a big misconception about the structure of consciousness stems…
Anders gives a short tutorial on the Singularity – clearing up confusion and highlighting important aspects of the Technological Singularity and related ideas, such as accelerating change, horizons of predictability, self-improving artificial intelligence, and the intelligence explosion. Tutorial Video: Points covered in the tutorial: The Mathematical Singularity The Technological Singularity: A Horizon of predictability Confusion…
In asking AI researcher Juergen Schmidhuber about his thoughts on progress at DeepMind and about the AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol Go tournament – provided some initial comments. I will be updating this post with further interview. Juergen Schmidhuber: First of all, I am happy about DeepMind’s success, also because the company is heavily influenced by…
You may have watched hundreds of episodes of The Simpsons (and its sister show Futurama) without ever realizing that cleverly embedded in many plots are subtle references to mathematics, ranging from well-known equations to cutting-edge theorems and conjectures. That they exist, Simon Singh reveals, underscores the brilliance of the shows’ writers, many of whom have…
If you increase the altruistic motivation of people, you decrease the risk that they will negligently fail to consider the possible harmful effects of their behaviour on their fellow-beings. Being concerned about avoiding such risks is part of what having altruistic concern for these beings consists in. Moreover, the advance of technology will in all…
The universe is made up of matter, energy and information, interacting with each other and producing new kinds of matter, energy, information and interaction. How? How did all this come out of a cloud of dust? In order to find explanations we first need much better descriptions of what needs to be explained. By Aaron…
Blockbuster Science! Its an awesome approach to incentivizing scientists – it’s great that people are applauding for stuff that really matters! People cheer at most ridiculous and inconsequential things – why not funnel this energy into science? Next step, create high production shorts for real world advances in science (with a tinge of flair) –…
Slides [here], See this post by John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts, the video is a talk John gave at the Philosophy of Science conference in Melbourne 2014. Every so often, somebody will attack the worth, role or relevance of philosophy on the internets, as I have discussed before. Occasionally it will be a scientist, who…
