Mastodawn

Good Will Hunting in reverse: the real-life story of Peter Putnam, promising physicist turned janitor.

https://nautil.us/finding-peter-putnam-1218035/

#PeterPutnam #GoodWillHunting #NautilusMagazine #AmandaGefter #TheoreticalNeuroscience #ScienceMastodon #ScienceStories #JohnArchibaldWheeler #GayHistory #NeuralModels #LongReads #PrincetonUniversity #RobertFuller #HistoryOfPhysics #HistoryOfScience

Finding Peter Putnam

The forgotten janitor who discovered the logic of the mind

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D C Fitzgerald Jul 9, 2024

If you didn't help build the pyramids in the original timeline, but then travel back to do so, you create two conflicting realities:

1. The original timeline where you didn't participate.
2. The new timeline where you did participate.
Time travel would require either too much coffee or too much Xanax. #physics #science #time #sciencefiction #puzzle #humor #nautilusmagazine

George Musser Nov 4, 2023

“People can have two different inner speeches going on at the same time; one ‘in the back of their mind’ and one in the ‘front’ of their mind, about two different topics at the same time and somehow keep those things straight.... And inner voices don’t have to be in your head. They can be in your chest or outside of your body.” -- #RussHurlburt to Phil Jaekl in #NautilusMagazine https://nautil.us/i-didnt-know-my-mind-was-so-strange-until-i-started-listening-to-it-241144/

I Didn’t Know My Mind Was So Strange Until I Started Listening to It

I took part in an experiment to decipher my inner thoughts.

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George Musser Jun 29, 2023

"Your keyboard’s never going to wander off and try to have its own life as a keyboard. Whereas in #biology, it’s a multi-scale architecture where every level has goals, and there’s pros and cons to this. The pros are you get these amazing things we’re talking about now. The con is that sometimes you get defections as a failure mode, and you get #cancer." From my interview with @drmichaellevin in #NautilusMagazine. https://nautil.us/the-biologist-blowing-our-minds-323905/

The Biologist Blowing Our Minds

Michael Levin is uncovering the incredible, latent abilities of living things.

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George Musser Jun 20, 2023

“The Dress was a really interesting case. Suddenly people realized there’s a lot of hidden variety in perceptual experience.… I think #PredictiveProcessing is going to ultimately give us something like a periodic table of experiential variation: all the neurotypical and the atypical cases and everything that lies in between, and all the variety within typical and atypical.”—from my #NautilusMagazine interview with #AndyClark https://nautil.us/reality-is-your-brains-best-guess-312269/

Reality Is Your Brain’s Best Guess

Your expectations form the way you experience the world.

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George Musser May 18, 2023

“If he were genuinely interested in the dissemination of truth, instead of pitching a ‘#truthbot,’ #ElonMusk should have instead asked: What does it even mean for us to know that something is true…? [To] provide a solid justification for a belief, there needs to be a transparent process for arriving there in the first place. Unfortunately, AI #chatbots present the antithesis of transparency.” https://nautil.us/ai-shouldnt-decide-whats-true-304534/ #NautilusMagazine #TruthGPT

AI Shouldn't Decide What's True

Experts on why trusting artificial intelligence to give us the truth is a foolish bargain.

Nautilus

George Musser May 9, 2023

“Without a principled and experimentally verified understanding of consciousness, we’ll be unable to say for sure when a machine has—or doesn’t have—it. In this foggy situation, artificial consciousness may even arise accidentally.” @anilkseth in #NautilusMagazine https://nautil.us/why-conscious-ai-is-a-bad-bad-idea-302937/

Why Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea

Our minds haven’t evolved to deal with machines we believe have consciousness.

Nautilus