Category: #sense-making
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The unbearable slowness of being …
The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s? This article is about the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ∼109 bits/s. The stark contrast between these numbers remains unexplained and touches…
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Bayesian Models of Cognition
“Bayesian Models of Cognition Reverse Engineering the Mind” is a new MIT-press Open Access book available for online reading. The definitive introduction to Bayesian cognitive science, written by pioneers of the field. How does human intelligence work, in engineering terms? How do our minds get so much from so little? Bayesian models of cognition provide…
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The Universal Optimism of the Self-Evidencing Mind
“The Universal Optimism of the Self-Evidencing Mind“:Karl Friston’s free-energy principle casts agents as self-evidencing through active inference. This implies that decision-making, planning and information-seeking are, in a generic sense, ‘wishful’. We take an interdisciplinary perspective on this perplexing aspect of the free-energy principle and unpack the epistemological implications of wishful thinking under the free-energy principle.…
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Affect-centered account of motivated behavior
“The affective gradient hypothesis: an affect-centered account of motivated behavior“: everyone agrees that feelings and actions are intertwined, but cannot agree how. According to dominant models, actions are directed by estimates of value and these values shape or are shaped by affect. The article proposes instead that affect is the only form of value that…
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On principles of emergent organization
Adam Rupe, James P. Crutchfield published “On principles of emergent organization“: After more than a century of concerted effort, physics still lacks basic principles of spontaneous self-organization. To appreciate why, we first state the problem, outline historical approaches, and survey the present state of the physics of self-organization. This frames the particular challenges arising from mathematical intractability and…
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Andy Clark “How the brain shapes reality”
Philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark challenges our conventional understanding of the mind’s interaction with the world. A great and entertaining lecture. I like the reflection with the reference to the weather forecast and how the forecast impacts “reality” perception. At the very least, understanding all those prediction-driven, precision-inflected, looping influences should bring us a…
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42 and 5
Today, 42 years ago, we had the great pleasure of discovering the reality of 5-fold crystals. On the morning of 8 April 1982, an image counter to the laws of nature appeared in Dan Shechtman’s electron microscope. In all solid matter, atoms were believed to be packed inside crystals in symmetrical patterns that were repeated…
