Lifeboat Foundation

According to the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, a conscious state is a brain state that is spread out in both space and time. It is spread out in the brain across multiple instances of what Dennett calls “content fixations.” These content fixations are the “multiple drafts” in the theory’s name. Each of these drafts compete for domination in the cognitive system. This domination is what Dennett calls “fame in the brain.” Read more about it here: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/M…

#philosophyofmind

Daniel Dennett thinks that the Mind-Body problem has a solution. And moreover it’s not a specific or \.

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The rate at which the universe is currently expanding is known as the Hubble Rate. In recent years, different measurements have given different results for the Hubble rate, a discrepancy between theory and observation that’s been called the “Hubble tension”. Now, a team of astrophysicists claims the Hubble tension is gone and it’s the fault of supernovae data. Let’s have a look.

Continue reading “A Huge Cosmology Problem Might Just Have Disappeared” »

Paper on the hubble tension.

Wendy L. Freedman and Barry F. Madore JCAP11(2023)050 DOI 10.1088÷1475−7516÷2023÷11÷050

One way to manage the unsustainable energy requirements of the computing sector is to fundamentally change the way we compute. Superconductors could let us do just that.

Superconductors offer the possibility of drastically lowering energy consumption because they do not dissipate energy when passing current. True, superconductors work only at cryogenic temperatures, requiring some cooling overhead. But in exchange, they offer virtually zero-resistance interconnects, digital logic built on ultrashort pulses that require minimal energy, and the capacity for incredible computing density due to easy 3D chip stacking.

Are the advantages enough to overcome the cost of cryogenic cooling? Our work suggests they most certainly are. As the scale of computing resources gets larger, the marginal cost of the cooling overhead gets smaller. Our research shows that starting at around 10 ¹⁶ floating-point operations per second (tens of petaflops) the superconducting computer handily becomes more power efficient than its classical cousin. This is exactly the scale of typical high-performance computers today, so the time for a superconducting supercomputer is now.

Predicted way back in the 1960s, the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 completed the Standard Model. Here’s why it remains fascinating.

System charts the evolution of complex quantum states.

The illusion of AI consciousness: why gpt-4o and other chatbots are not conscious.

• Shannon Vallor, an AI expert and contributor to DeepMind, discusses the latest developments in generative AI, particularly OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, and warns of the dangers of the illusion of artificial consciousness.

Continue reading “The dangerous illusion of AI consciousness” »

OpenAI’s “next frontier model” is expected to replace the GPT-4 model powering ChatGPT.