Nehaveigur

Category: Minds

  • The Malleability of Intuition

    Something within me takes control of my right hand and writes down the solution to the problem I have been thinking about. I don’t understand the solution as I’m writing it down, and only later, after having thought about it for some time, do I understand it in some nebulous…

  • Unedited

    Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.” Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek

  • Personality Transplants

    A spooky phenomenon: People who receive heart transplants sometimes change in a way that makes them resemble the donor. In some cases, they seem to acquire memories of events that happened to the donor. I’m skeptical, but it’s interesting to think about ways in which this could happen if it…

  • Terminal Lucidity

    People experiencing terminal lucidity have typically suffered from dementia for a long time. Often they are gone so far they can’t talk or recognize their family any more. Yet a few hours before their death, they regain the ability to speak for a few hours and may even be able…

  • Bigger Brains

    To a first approximation, bigger brains = more neurons = smarter. Dig deeper, and it turns out to be more complicated than that. Honeybees have ten times fewer neurons than zebrasfish, yet by some measures are just as smart. Even discounting species-specific differences, the relationship between neuron count and intelligence…

  • Bees and Fish

    Insects, for all their evolutionary success, aren’t smart. Take dragonflies for example. There are 3,000 extant species, so they’re doing alright, but they’re not geniuses: [Insects’] failure to adapt, however, are dazzling. Howard Ensign Evans tells of dragonflies trying to lay eggs on the shining hoods of cars. Other dragonflies…

  • AI Rationalizations

    AIs like ChatGPT’s o3 take time to think before they answer. While doing so, o3 provides some commentary on its thinking process. For example, it mentions the websites it consults to find an answer. The strange thing is that much of the commentary may not at all be related to…

  • Questions about Intelligence

    Do we understand intelligence enough to formalize it in mathematical or computer science terms? We don’t, because otherwise there’d be no need for AI benchmarking. In fact, the concept of intelligence is remarkably fuzzy. More questions about: Cave art | Domestication | Appearance

  • Questions about Appearance

    Observing someone, watching them smile or frown or hesitate or eat or walk, we can’t help form an opinion about them. Doing so may be an indispensable part of interacting with others. Even so, I’d love to know how accurate those opinions tend to be.

  • When Being Smart is Not Enough

    What kinds of problems can be solved with more intelligence, and for which is intelligence not sufficient? Dynomight speculates that a superintelligent AI could solve most problems in philosophy and maths, only improve on forecasting a little, and not solve physics or cure cancer. This is in line with my…

  • Why are More Neurons Better?

    This is an excellent question whose answer is only obvious at first glance, asked by Scott Alexander on Astral Codex Ten. The correlation between the number of neurons and intelligence holds for biological brains and for AI, if we take the number of parameters to be equivalent to the number…

  • Optical Illusions

    Akiyoshi Kitaoka‘s collection of optical Illusions. He’s added to the site since 2002, so there’s a lot.

  • Recurring Dreams

    Did you ever have this dream: You have to take an exam that you forgot to prepare for. How about this one: You’re late for a flight because you didn’t arrange transport to the airport. These fear-filled dreams are quite common, and on Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander offers a…

  • The Major System

    Anyone with sufficient motivation can remember almost anything. There is an ancient technique to remember hundreds of random numbers in a short amount of time by breaking down the number, then linking each component to an image and forming an easy to remember story from those images. For example, the…

  • Stigma

    Common sense dictates that there’s an optimum level of introspection, and it’s possible that many of us do too much soul-searching. A related idea is that increasing awareness of mental health struggles may be counterproductive. This hypothesis is further explored in this article: We propose that awareness efforts are leading…

  • Optimum Introspection

    I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul;…

  • The Mind is Flat

    Our subconscious minds analyze vast amounts of information, and once they reach a conclusion, the conscious part of our mind is notified. At least that’s what I used to think before reading Nick Chater’s The mind is flat, which proposes a radical and well-argued departure from the way most people assume…

  • Where Is It Like to Be an Octopus?

    Octopuses are the only smart invertebrate animals. Their brains are quite different from that of vertebrates like us: Rather than being centralised and profoundly integrated, the octopus nervous system is distributed into components with considerable functional autonomy from each other. Of particular note is the arm nervous system: when severed,…

  • Other Minds

    My five-year-old daughter said that spiders are insects and I was almost sure that they weren’t until she showed me a worksheet her kindergarten teacher had given her that claims not only spiders but also centipedes, scorpions and snails for the insect class. Anyway, this is about a science book…

  • Coherence Tradeoffs

    There is an optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation, that a too-unified society is a disadvantage, and a too-fragmented society is also a disadvantage Jared Diamond Previously, I have written about the idea that singletons are hard to achieve. Singletons are agents that can enact their goals and maintain a high…

  • Why Do We Like Music?

    Why do we like the things we like? For some, such as food or sex, the answer is obvious. Without them, we wouldn’t survive or reproduce. In order to make sure we comply with its wishes; our body uses a carrot and stick management approach consisting of rewards (e.g. sweet taste) and punishments…

  • AI Tutoring

    I’m increasingly encountering the belief that capable leaders have become rarer or have even disappeared. While most often observed in the political realm, some argue that there are also fewer scientific leaders. Erik Hoel makes the point that today there are fewer geniuses of any description. I don’t think it’s…

  • Animals in Translation

    Our senses continuously collect data including sounds, smells and visual input, but at any given time we’re consciously aware of only a tiny and heavily filtered fraction. Why is that? Why can’t our consciousness deal with a larger proportion of the input data? Why can’t we pay attention to many…

  • The Righteous Mind

    I know I’m late to the party, but Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, published in 2012, contains some important ideas. Haidt’s assertion that “anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason” (page 104) neatly summarizes the book’s first part. What he means is that we don’t make judgements based on reason.…