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“Consciousness signal has been identified” sounds like some new dimension of space just opened up. But you could say the same for example about literally any study with binocular rivalry.

New Yorkers treat strangers as “us”. This guy treats strangers as “them”. I’ve seen this in many visitors to NYC: simply riding in a subway is stressful for them because they are surrounded by a crowd of “them”. We may not love everyone, but to us, strangers are family.

This is incredible. But I think we are talking too much about the drugs (which simply mimic satiety) and not enough about the obvious conclusion: WE ARE EATING TOO MUCH FOOD

Memory is a form of pattern recognition.

We look at a giant mammal and see strength and resilience—but really, we should be seeing fragility and sensitivity. The most dangerous animal in the world is the mosquito. Pair that with a parasitic roundworm, and there goes the lion. Invertebrates always win in the long run.

Let’s brainstorm what these vaults could be doing and how. Wild speculations welcome but give us a mechanism. Feel free to argue against. My speculation: it’s a generalized enzyme. It brings molecules close together and traps them inside to give them time to react.

I’m not sure about this “bit of reasoning on top” that allows us to do math. We don’t REASON that 5+4=9, we just remember the folder “9” in which 5 and 4 sit together, the same way we remember that lizards and snakes are in the same folder “reptiles”.

People joke that they are polite to chatbots “in case they take over”, but I think it’s deeper than that. Humans are fundamentally polite, even when they know it is pointless. It’s a beautiful thing that something so small matters so much. It’s the purest expression of humanity.

Nothing calms me down like watching BBC news. Doesn’t matter if it’s elections in Singapore or updates on Australian rugby—it just makes you feel like the world is huge, everything is under control, and smart, classy people with pleasant accents are in charge.

So all colors we see are mixes, which can be unmixed if you only activate 1 photoreceptor at a time. What do the “no theory explains the redness of red” indivisible-qualia people think of this? I think the concept of qualia as inexplicable atoms of consciousness is dead.

We may not sense the progress bar, but the symptoms are there: we are running out of memory, and all new information turns into formless soup. Read my take on what to do. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/small-…

My conclusion is Karl Friston wins. What’s being “integrated” is not content but content prediction error. And intentionality does not arise from some special “intentionality module” (PFC) but from the very gravitation of the network towards the energy minimum.

Don’t forget that Dostoyevsky lived in St Petersburg, the northernmost big city in the world, roughly the latitude of Anchorage. We are OBSESSED with sunshine.

Whenever people say that New York is unlivable, that the grind is dehumanizing, that the subway sucks etc, I show them this map of depression. (There’s an equivalent one for obesity and “all teeth lost”, meaning meth.) Whatever they say on the news, we are happy here.

Back in uni, we spent countless hours drawing various plants and animals by hand (and you had to be really good at it to pass). As a student I sneered at how obsolete this skill was for a biologist. Now I understand. They weren’t teaching us to draw—they were teaching us to see.

Reminds me of Jaak Panksepp’s studies of laughter in rats. If you think about it, it’s really odd that we have the same reaction to jokes and to tickling. Common denominator? Non-threatening social incongruity. That’s why you can’t tickle yourself, unless you have schizophrenia.

There is a red way and a green way to energy harvesting. The green way relies on a “big lift” provided by the sun—initial infusion of energy. The red way relies on a “big sink” provided by oxygen—sucking the energy out of every nutrient atom. Plants use both. We only use red.

It’s not coincidence that everyone is constantly bored and that fantasy and reality are indistinguishable. Recognizing that memory has a limit is the first step in freeing yourself from information overload.