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May 25, 2024
Consciousness and Brain States: Alex Rosenberg et al
Posted by Dan Breeden in category: neuroscience
Discussion at the Moving Naturalism Forward workshop, October 2012. Participants include Sean Carroll, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Terrence Deacon, Simon DeDeo, Daniel Dennett, Owen Flangan, Rebecca Goldstein, Janna Levin, David Poeppel, Massimo Pigliucci, Nicholas Pritzker, Alex Rosenberg, Don Ross, and Steven Weinberg.
Visit https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/.… for more information.
“Qualia” is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you —the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale; These various “properties of conscious experience” are prime examples of qualia. Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some mere figment of Descartes’ evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of (for you) will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences. Descartes claimed to doubt everything that could be doubted, but he never doubted that his conscious experiences had qualia, the properties by which he knew or apprehended them.
The verb “to quine” is even more esoteric. It comes from The Philosophical Lexicon (Dennett 1978c, 8th edn., 1987), a satirical dictionary of eponyms: “quine, v. To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant.” At first blush it would be hard to imagine a more quixotic quest than trying to convince people that there are no such properties as qualia; hence the ironic title of this chapter. But I am not kidding.
My goal is subversive. I am out to overthrow an idea that, in one form or another, is “obvious” to most people—to scientists, philosophers, lay people. My quarry is frustratingly elusive; no sooner does it retreat in the face of one argument than “it” reappears, apparently innocent of all charges, in a new guise.
May 25, 2024
Daniel C. Dennett: Qualia are virtual, and none the worse for it
Posted by Dan Breeden in category: futurism
This talk is part of a workshop on “To be or not to be… conscious. Phenomenal Realism and Illusionism”, held at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) on September 29–30, 2022, organized by François Kammerer and Tobias Schlicht.
May 25, 2024
Rita El Zaghloul — Director, High Ambition Coalition for Nature & People Secretariat
Posted by Ira S. Pastor in category: futurism
Championing a global deal for nature and people — rita maria el zaghloul — director, high ambition coalition for nature and people secretariat.
May 25, 2024
Dr. Masayuki Goto, MD, PhD — Director, Space Medical Accelerator — Keeping People Healthy In Space
Posted by Ira S. Pastor in category: biotech/medical
Keeping people healthy in space and developing novel therapies with space technologies — dr. masayuki goto, MD, phd — director, space medical accelerator.
Dr. Masayuki Goto, MD, PhD is Director and President of the Space Medical Accelerator (https://space-healthcare.jp/), an organization founded in 2022 in Japan with a mission to keep people healthy in space and to develop terrestrial medicine by utilizing space technology and research.
May 25, 2024
Elizabeth Reynolds, Managing Director, US, Starburst Aerospace; Championing An Aerospace Renaissance
Posted by Ira S. Pastor in categories: biotech/medical, business, drones, education, government, robotics/AI, satellites
Championing an aerospace renaissance — elizabeth reynolds, managing director, US, starburst aerospace.
Elizabeth Reynolds is Managing Director, US of Starburst Aerospace (https://starburst.aero/), a global Aerospace and Defense (A\&D) startup accelerator and strategic advisory practice championing today’s aerospace renaissance, aligning early-stage technology innovators with government and commercial stakeholders and investors to modernize infrastructure in space, transportation, communications, and intelligence.
May 25, 2024
Dr. Diane DiEuliis — NDU — Preparing National Security Leaders For The Next Generation Of Threats
Posted by Ira S. Pastor in categories: bioengineering, biological, biotech/medical, climatology, education, health, neuroscience, policy
Episode Disclaimer — The views presented in this episode are those of the speaker and do not necessarily represent the views of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) or its components.
Dr. Diane DiEuliis, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Research Fellow at National Defense University (NDU — https://www.ndu.edu/), an institution of higher education, funded by the United States Department of Defense, aimed at facilitating high-level education, training, and professional development of national security leaders. Her research areas focus on emerging biological technologies, biodefense, and preparedness for biothreats. Specific topic areas under this broad research portfolio include dual-use life sciences research, synthetic biology, the U.S. bioeconomy, disaster recovery, and behavioral, cognitive, and social science as it relates to important aspects of deterrence. Dr. DiEuliis currently has several research grants in progress, and teaches in foundational professional military education.
May 25, 2024
What If We Accessed The 10th Dimension?
Posted by Dan Breeden in categories: augmented reality, bioengineering, business, genetics, robotics/AI, time travel, transhumanism
This video explores the 4th to the 10th dimensions of time. Watch this next video about the 10 stages of AI: • The 10 Stages of Artificial Intelligence.
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May 25, 2024
These two scientists have mapped out the insides or “reachable space” of a language model using control theory, what they discovered was extremely surprising
Posted by Dan Breeden in categories: open access, robotics/AI
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Aman Bhargava from Caltech and Cameron Witkowski from the University of Toronto to discuss their groundbreaking paper, “What’s the Magic Word? A Control Theory of LLM Prompting.” They frame LLM systems as discrete stochastic dynamical systems. This means they look at LLMs in a structured way, similar to how we analyze control systems in engineering. They explore the “reachable set” of outputs for an LLM. Essentially, this is the range of possible outputs the model can generate from a given starting point when influenced by different prompts. The research highlights that prompt engineering, or optimizing the input tokens, can significantly influence LLM outputs. They show that even short prompts can drastically alter the likelihood of specific outputs. Aman and Cameron’s work might be a boon for understanding and improving LLMs. They suggest that a deeper exploration of control theory concepts could lead to more reliable and capable language models.