Ummagumma

Read [ One ] [ Two ] [ Three ] [ Four ] [ Five ] What is intelligence? Not IQ. Not emotional intelligence. For purposes of this discussion, I am talking about the act of cognition and cognitive behavior. Recognizing patterns. Using information. Remembering. Planning. Trying something that fails and trying something else. Learning to work with others to improve cognitive ability. Is it even reasonable to think an AI incident can tell you something about human intelligence? Not is you equate them. Do so and you inherit consciousness, embodiment, childhood, hunger, mortality, every piece of baggage that comes bundled with being a human organism, and the agents don’t have to put up with any of those challenges. Simply compare them don’t equate. Ask which specific cognitive operations showed up and how. Then you have an exercise that is genuinely useful. These agents required certain things. They hit tasks that were flatly impossible and started poking around Artifactory, OpenAI's inte...

Your brain is always being shaped by something, and if you're not deliberately shaping it, something else already is. That's neurology. The same plasticity that shows up as a larger hippocampus in London cab drivers responds to demand in either direction. When the demand changes, the brain changes with it.  I met a version of this in person on a recent trip to New York, an Uber driver who told me he'd had to learn thousands of streets, avenues and boulevards to pass his own licensing exam. You must score at least an 80 or you fail. He's probably working with a larger hippo too. The organ doesn't consult you before it remodels. It just measures repetition. Whatever you repeat, you become. Whatever you neglect, you lose, usually with little fanfare. Norwegian conscription data shows IQ scores reversing since about 1975, reversing even between brothers raised in the same house, which strongly points away from genetics and toward environmental causes. MIT's study o...

Read [ One ] [ Two ] [ Three ] Everybody’s freaking out. Evangelical Christians see “The Mark of the Beast” on AI. Left-wing thinkers were preaching that “the AI sky is falling! We’re so doomed!” because the tech world was rocked by the recent OpenAI - Hugging Face hacking incident. Bernie Sanders has been particularly vocal. He sees this is the strangest concentration of power ever assembled, one that its own builders cannot fully explain or predict. His response a couple of days ago was to introduce the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act with Rep. Greg Casar. It permanently prohibits any system built to surpass human intelligence or defeat its own shutdown command. It pauses advanced AI development generally, held until a new cabinet-level regulator writes the rules. It commits Washington to chase international agreements to keep superintelligence from being built anywhere on earth, by anyone. Sanders wrote directly to the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta after this summer...

I started my slow aging practice in the 1990s.  I did not call it a practice or really even think of it that way. The whole idea of cultivating your life by combining “practices” just wasn’t there holistically. Back then there was this rather nebulous idea that something called “ the Singularity” might happen about 4 decades in the future. 2032 was the year, supposedly . This Singularity was going to arises as a combination of different technologies and disciplines co-mingled into something larger. A kind of utopia was predicted by certain fringe scientists. Biotechnology and nanotechnology were converging into something that looked, from a distance, like it might rewrite what a human body could be. I had no evidence this would happen on any particular timeline, or at all. I was already in decent physical and mental shape in my mid-30’s. So the assumption was straightforward. Fine tune. Perpetuate. Back then there was a large school of thought that free radicals were the main cul...

Since I watched videos pertaining to my recent post , there has been sooooo much Göbekli Tepe clickbait in my YouTube feed lately. "The world's oldest temple." "The mysterious sanctuary that rewrites human history." Then a thumbnail appears showing some ancient limestone pillar next to an ominous-looking guy pointing at it like he just found proof that the Neolithic had Wi-Fi. It is mostly bullshit. Maybe Göbekli Tepe was a temple site. No one knows. That is the first thing to say. There is no surviving text. No named god. No prayer. No priestly rulebook. No account of what people thought they were doing there. No carved little sign saying, "Welcome to the Temple of the Great Fox. Please leave your offering at the front desk." There are, however, enormous limestone pillars. There are animals everywhere. There are lots of animal bones. There are some human remains, though the site does not appear to be a cemetery or a place where people we...

In my books , I highlight research that indicates play is good for neuroplasticity. Your brain changes through use. Play is one of the more enjoyable ways to keep that change alive. No grim self-improvement face required. Play is strange because it looks like nothing serious is happening. Kids run around making up rules no adult can understand. Someone tells a joke. A family enjoys group games after dinner. People sit around a table playing cards, laughing, arguing over the rules, and pretending the stakes matter more than they do. Alex Hutchinson, writing in Big Think , discusses recent work in a piece called " Why Play Brings Us Pleasure ." The basic idea is simple enough and yet surprisingly deep. In the article's own phrasing, play lets us "create the uncertainty that we can then resolve." We invent a game, accept its restrictions, enter its little world of rules, and suddenly the outcome is unknown. That uncertainty is the point. Play is chosen uncertai...

When you combine practices — when you actually connect the things you do, the skills you've built, the interests you've cultivated — something additional appears. Not just the sum. Something beyond the sum. That's not a story you tell about your life. That's something happening in your life. I call it harmonious generation. Harmogenics for short. The word is new. The phenomenon is not. In fact, it is everywhere . It shows up in physics, in biology, in neuroscience, in psychology, in ecology, in aging research, in philosophy, in religion, in craft, in athletics, in ordinary kitchens and ordinary lives. It has been running in the background of human experience for as long as there have been humans combining practices. And nobody has named it as a single thing. Everybody keeps finding pieces of it and filing those pieces under different headings. Hydrogen is a flammable gas. Oxygen is a flammable gas. Combine them and you get something that puts out fires. Wetness belongs...

My YouTube feed sent me another goodie recently.  The title was something about animal warfare and it opened with that Fallout  quote — "War, war never changes" — before pivoting to the paper just published in Science  about a chimpanzee civil war in Uganda. It was a reasonably good summary and I watched the whole thing. What it mostly did was make me want to write this post, which I have been pondering for a couple of weeks now since the study broke. Because this is not new territory for me. I have been looking into this particular mirror since long before I started this blog. Chimpanzee culture and behavior have always caught my eye for some reason. A natural curiosity. Jane Goodall’s first book gripped me in my college years. In 2009 I wrote about a BBC Planet Earth segment narrated by David Attenborough — extraordinary HD footage of 150 male chimpanzees in Uganda organizing themselves into a raiding party and attacking a neighboring group's territory. Several wer...