"Absurd" is fine poetry - yes, it certainly seems absurd given how baked in the parochial views of other minds are. Like a lot of art, it calls for us to examine ourselves to see why it seems so absurd. But what that statement isn't, is science, engineering, or even philosophy. In order to be any of that, someone would have to not just *claim* it's absurd (as the implications of relativity, quantum mechanics, and a lot of math seem, to our classical intuitions), but actually do the hard work and clarify *why* networks of other kinds of cells (with their ion channels, electrical synapses, neurotransmitters, microtubules, etc. etc.) can't possibly do some degree of what the neurons in your brain do. Good luck. "Absurd" makes it seem like, of course there's a convincing consensus story explaining it. But there isn't. And more importantly, they'd have to show what *practical benefit* comes from their view - produce something useful, interesting, etc. - show the fertility of this binary way of thinking. I've yet to see either. In contrast, I've summarized many times the empirical benefits of investigating the continuum view. So do poetry if you want, but let no one confuse it for a scientific comment on a scientific claim, or a useful engineering pointer. Anyway, my position isn't that we know our organs to be conscious (any more than we *know* each other to be conscious). My position is that for the exact same reasons people currently attribute consciousness to brainy animals (and I list those reasons in that talk; another one focused on this is going online tomorrow), we should take seriously (i.e., try to shoot down in a principled way - not by fiat) the possibility that other kinds of meat can be a conduit for consciousness too. > any "goals" it may have are limited to that body um yeah obviously. I didn't claim you'd be having discussions with your liver about the financial markets or the latest film you saw. It cares about things happening in physiological state space, and with new tools (under development now!) we will, hopefully, get a glimpse of its world and communicate with it about the things *it* cares about. Btw if it didn't have both care/intent and a degree of intelligence to meet its goals under challenging circumstances, we'd be dead in short order. (for anyone wondering why I respond to such things, it's not to argue with any particular OP; it's to clarify my position on things that others may be thinking as well)

In this piece of brain tissue the size of sand grain are 200,000 neurons and nearly 2.5 miles of axons. While it may seem small in size, it was previously thought impossible to map. The road to this beautiful image is both a scientific and human triumph: alleninstitute.org/news/scie…

via @krikke_jan jankrikke2020.medium.com/the…

"complex systems evolve from simple systems much more rapidly when there are stable intermediate forms present in the evolutionary process compared to when they are not present"

drone scanned 3 gaussian splats in the South Tyrol in Italy uploaded on #supersplat (link below)

A single contrarian fish follows his curiosity and all hell breaks loose:

A fun read: "why it is (nearly) impossible that we live in a simulation" frontiersin.org/journals/phy…

Smart toilet! A lot of valuable scientific/health data flushed everyday.

Better languages help us get along with nature and get along with each other.

I am researching how many balls humans can visualize at once and came across a paper by this guy.

Sure, I’ll give it a go… Consider a rotating disk. What does it mean to say that the disk has angular momentum? Well, imagine assigning a momentum vector to every point on the surface of the disk, and then slicing through the middle of the disk with a flat surface. (1/14)

Trying to encode the patterns of the universe in linear languages like English is inevitably going to distort the truth in the same way that a Mercator projection distorts a globe. If truth is what we're after, we need a 3D/4D language. True or false?

New idea: The Spherical Object Model

When I was a kid lots of us had podcasts:

In the age of AI it is not enough to write the truest sentence you know, you must also write a sentence only you can write.

Excited to see whatever this is in 10 minutes