Alexander De Biasio

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on the atlas — 25

highlights — 50

Neurons merely magnify the quantum behavior and allow interactions with physical systems like our muscles (Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, 1994).
An Introduction to Current Theories of Consciousness - LessWrong
we only experience what our brain predicts
An Introduction to Current Theories of Consciousness - LessWrong
But there are more layers to this prediction: moving our muscles is itself done via a prediction. I predict that I will see my arm in front of my face and this prediction is the signal to move the arm that way.
An Introduction to Current Theories of Consciousness - LessWrong
Indeed, his work might fulfill what he describes as its central goal — allowing us to determine, to a moral certainty, whether or not a person who appears to be in a coma or vegetative state is aware of changes in his environment.
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
I (as perhaps only one among many loci of consciousness to be found in my brain)
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
In fact, given the immensity of simultaneous neural activity taking place on either side of the corpus callosum, it seems likely that even a normal brain will be functionally split to one or another degree. Two hundred million nerve fibers seem unlikely to be able to integrate the activity of the ten billion neurons in each cerebral hemisphere, each of which makes hundreds or thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of connections to its neighbors. This would suggest that islands of dissociated consciousness might exist in normal brains as well.
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
To truly explain the emergence of consciousness, we need to be able to say why a group of neurons firing in a certain pattern will be conscious, while neurons firing in another way will not. Why would the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness be a matter of "long distance synchrony between many regions" of the brain? And why should the time-course of such integration be 300 milliseconds? If these facts don't strike you as intrinsically mysterious, consider: What if, distributed geological processes gave rise to consciousness over a time-course of 300 years? Let's just say, for t…
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
The P3 response is absent in coma patients. It is also gone in most vegetative state patients — but it remains present in most minimally conscious patients. It is always present in locked-in patients and in any other conscious subject.
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
Now, after adaptation, the trick consists in presenting five identical tones: dit-dit-dit-dit-dit. This banal sequence becomes the novel situation now — the rare and unexpected one. Our claim is that only a conscious brain can take into account the context of the preceding series of tones, and can understand that five identical tones are something novel and unexpected.
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
The first four tones are identical, but the fifth can be different. So you hear something like dit-dit-dit-dit-tat. When you do this, a very banal observation, dating back 25 years, is that the brain reacts to the different tone at the end. That reaction, which is called mismatch negativity, is completely automatic. You get it even in coma, in sleep, or when you do not attend to the stimulus.
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
if we now give you a task that involves two serial processing steps, you cannot do it
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
Imagine that I flash a digit at you, and this digit is subliminal because I have masked it. Now suppose that I ask you, "is it larger or smaller than five?" I give you two buttons, one for larger and one for smaller, and I force you to respond. When I run this experiment, although you claim that you have not seen anything, and you have to force yourself to respond, you find that you do much better than chance. You are typically around 60 percent correct, while pure chance would be 50 percent. So this is subliminal processing. Some information gets through, but not enough to trigger a global st…
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
There doesn't seem to be any intermediate state
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
Another important feature that I have briefly mentioned already is the all-or-none property. You either make it into the conscious workspace, or you don't. This is a system that discretizes the inputs. It creates a digital representation out of what is initially just a probability distribution.
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
What I propose is that "consciousness is global information in the brain" — information which is shared across different brain areas. I am putting it very strongly, as "consciousness is," because I literally think that's all there is. What we mean by being conscious of a certain piece of information is that it has reached a level of processing in the brain where it can be shared.
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
The first thing that we discovered is that, even when you cannot see a word or a picture, because it is presented in a subliminal condition, it does not mean that your cortex is not processing it. Some people initially thought that subliminal processing meant sub-cortical processing — processing that is not done in the cortex. It's of course completely false and we've known this for a while now.
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
If you flash words on a screen for a period of roughly 30 milliseconds, you see them perfectly. The short duration, in itself, is not a problem. What matters is that there is enough energy in the stimulus for you to see it. If, however, just after the word, you present another string of letters at the same location, you only see the string, not the word.
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
"access to consciousness." At all times the brain is constantly bombarded with stimulation— and yet, we are only conscious of a very small part of it.
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
the temperature at which the brain operates is incompatible with quantum computing.
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
when the information processed exceeds a threshold for large-scale communication across many brain areas, the network ignites into a large-scale synchronous state
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
consciousness disorders
Signatures of Consciousness | Edge.org
The Nebula winner, though – that’s a different story. That’s a risky gift. There might well be a good reason she doesn’t read sci-fi – maybe she tried several of the classics as a teenager and hated them all. There’s a much higher chance that your gift falls completely flat than if you bought her the Booker winner, or a fancy bottle of gin. But if it doesn’t fall flat, if she tries it and loves it against her own expectations, you might just unlock a whole new world of art and literature that had previously passed her by.
Gifts as free exploration - Apomorphic
you almost certainly know your friend far less well than you know yourself. As a result, for any given class of things you know she likes (wine, say, or cinema) you’ll very likely do a worse job of getting her something good than she would herself: some value will be lost in the gap between your mind and hers.
Gifts as free exploration - Apomorphic
Why? Why are you waiting to do all those things that you really want to do today? Why do we do that? “Ah, maybe one day I’ll do ________” <insert that thing you really want to do. But one day never comes.
If You Knew When You Were Going To Die What Would You Do Differently? | by Iva Ursano | Assemblage | Medium
this is not an argument against using the computer, but an argument for repharsing instead of copy-pasting/direct quoting/mere transcribing.
How to take smart notes (Ahrens, 2017) - LessWrong
Don't just learn. Make blog posts or something to share what you learned.
How to take smart notes (Ahrens, 2017) - LessWrong
I wrote in the past that, in my opinion, the main thing most math students struggle with in college isn't math, it's prose. Writing prose. This is because in college you start writing proofs, and proofs are stories. It's the same with teachers, only worse, since with teachers it's not limited to college: it starts when you teach at any level. How to get better at this? Read. Literature, not math. Figure out if you're a good storyteller, a good orator, and if not, forget the math and focus on that. If you wish to teach small groups or single students, work on storytelling. If you wish to teach …
I am pretty good at math, but I am bad at explaining it to others. How can I become better at helping people with math? - Quora
while I missed reading nonfiction for fun and with less effort, I didn’t feel any pull towards the old way after I discovered the new way.
Where to Start Research? - LessWrong
And then three months ago I shifted from my unit of inquiry being “a book”, to being “a question”. I’m sure you can guess where this is going- I read fewer words, but gained more understanding per word, and especially more core (as opposed to shell or test) understanding.
Where to Start Research? - LessWrong
My Calc I-III classes covered a total of about 14 chapters out of the Stewart textbook. Go ahead and try reading them all right straight through, without stopping to focus hard on the individual details along the way, and without doing problems to reinforce your learning. You're gonna have a bad time. That's because calculus is a Jenga Tower Topic. So what does the devoted autodidact do with Jenga Tower Topics? The solution is actually simple. Study several at the same time! Wait, what? You want me to make life easier on myself by, instead of studying calculus, studying calculus, linear algebr…
The Multi-Tower Study Strategy - LessWrong
When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they're nonsense generally keep quiet.
How to Do Philosophy
Overregulation will make you unhappy.
How to Beat Procrastination - LessWrong
Essentially, MCTS uses Monte Carlo simulation to accumulate value estimates to guide towards highly rewarding trajectories in the search tree. In other words, MCTS pays more attention to nodes that are more promising, so it avoids having to brute force all possibilities which is impractical to do.
Monte Carlo Tree Search: An Introduction | by Benjamin Wang | Towards Data Science
when I'm reading in support of some creative project, I ask much better Anki questions.
Augmenting Long-term Memory
By contrast, had I used conventional note-taking in my original reading of the AlphaGo paper, my understanding would have more rapidly evaporated, and it would have taken longer to read the later papers. And so using Anki in this way gives confidence you will retain understanding over the long term.
Augmenting Long-term Memory
Greenland has become symbolic. Possession of Greenland has become a symbol of Denmark’s status as a modern independent developed nation. The symbolism of sovereignty and the shared history is not threatened by US bases, nor home rule, nor economic failure, and apparently is sufficient repayment for all the money poured down that hole.
Reasons of State: Why Didn’t Denmark Sell Greenland? · Gwern.net
But the good news is that it’s easy to improve a lot without spending years recording predictions or trading on prediction markets⁠. It can be fixed quite easily by simply doing ⁠calibration training⁠. That is a fancy name for ‘answering a bunch of trivia questions quickly with your best probability guess, and seeing what you get wrong, until you know what “50% certainty” feels like or what “10% certainty” feels like, and then going back to real questions with those memories in mind’.
Fake Journal Club: Teaching Critical Reading · Gwern.net
Good reading of a paper requires an active reading, which is fundamentally predictive. The first step is to always ask “what do I predict I will read next?” If I can predict anything and no reported results would ever surprise me, that means I don’t understand anything about an area.
Fake Journal Club: Teaching Critical Reading · Gwern.net
Accepting research claims at face-value is the first and lowest level of reading a research paper.
Fake Journal Club: Teaching Critical Reading · Gwern.net
for the former area, you send a signal: “the better the song sounds, the higher the reward”. For the latter area, you send a signal: “the worse the song sounds, the more rewarding it feels to spend time practicing”.
Reward Is Not Enough - LessWrong
I'm not entirely sure how to start enjoying things at will, but there are at least three things that help: Permission: if your social circle considers a certain food to be a delicacy, it's much easier to enjoy it greatly. Context and framing: it's much easier to draw satisfaction from a clean room if your mother didn't make you clean it. Explicitly noticing the enjoyable parts: given the right context and framing, I quite enjoy cleaning the dishes, in part because I enjoy the feeling of warm water and soap on my hands.
Enjoying the feeling of agency
Sometimes when there seems to be a tension between building human capital and signaling quality to colleges, one can resolve the tension by being imaginative and resourceful. In the story, Kevin could have considered possibilities such as Auditing the molecular biology elective Studying molecular biology on his own Taking an online course or a course at a local community college Looking for a school year internship in a molecular biology lab so as to learn some molecular biology outside of the academic system. If Kevin had been able to do these things, he could have learned some molecular biol…
High School, Human Capital, Signaling and College Admissions - LessWrong
I recall a story about a professional golfer who, after being released from a year in prison, played an excellent round of golf. When his golfing buddies asked how this was possible given that he had no opportunity to practise, he replied, “But I did practise. I played eighteen holes every day up here, in my imagination.” Mentally, this man had attended to all the details as he usually would in a typical round of golf. His imaginary game took about the same time to play as a real game of golf.
Imagination: Practising Without Instrument, Without Notation. | Learning Strategies for Musical Success
The human desire for superstimuli can never be vanquished; it can merely be redirected. At best, we upright apes develop an immunity to the worst and most addictive of technologically-enabled superstimuli, and an attraction to the edifying, or at least neutral, substitutes.
Exit the supersensorium - by Erik Hoel
dreams are like the exercise of consciousness.
Exit the supersensorium - by Erik Hoel
Waking consciousness is a dream, but one that happens to correspond to reality, mainly because its sources are our sensory organs. Our eyes, ears, skin, noses, all save us from solipsism merely because they have been tuned by evolution so finely that the dream of our life correlates with the state of the world. Our waking life is merely an appropriately selected (in all senses of the word) hallucination.
Exit the supersensorium - by Erik Hoel
When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all.
Taboo Your Words - LessWrong
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in.
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
Mathematics as a lossy compression algorithm gone wild - LessWrong
It is like the time someone told the composer Morton Feldman he should write for “the man in the street”. Feldman went over and looked out the window, and who did he see? Jackson Pollock. Write for Jackson Pollock.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox - LessWrong