recent posts
- [Archived] Modelling Human Cognition with Five Attributes
- Deception as Information Appreciation and Focus: why society, organizations, and our minds (and human-made intelligence agents) suffer from self-deception
- AI Hype post: how LLM chatbots helped me get a research paper accepted at a very competitive conference over a couple weekends
- Zomboid Brains: Necromancing a Frankenstein Intelligence
- [Book Chapter] Conclusion
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“Indeed, the quantum theory implies that consciousness must exist, and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality.” Your intuition can fail you on what is genius and what is asinine. Good thinking strives, almost as its prime directive, to clarify. It doesn’t mean a discussion you have with someone else on a…
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I distrust wonder implicitly. It is not meant to survive or have permanence. It is held up as a virtue in modern society. It shouldn’t be. Wonder has a purpose in your brain but it isn’t to be sought for its own sake. To do so speaks to intellectually low-level addictive behavior. Like the mind…
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Often lay people and philosophers talk about affecting change as a proof of free agency or the will to act. It’s a mess of interacting parts. Our brains. Our society. The atoms bashing around in our sun. Its unpredictable and none of us, even sitting right in the middle of it, know for sure what…
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Is everything pointless? Of course it is. There is no point. The more we probe, the more we confirm that. There are grandiose debates going on about the ultimate sources of purpose. Science versus humanities versus religion, with each of them arguing that they can provide purpose. All of them jostling to tell us what…
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‘If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.’ There are literally hundreds of these seemingly benign, brain-teasing quotes I could have picked. Thousands of pithy sounding wisdoms taking stabs at poorly unpacked concepts that are given transcendent reverence because of their ethereal nature. Quotes on the…
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Explaining cognitive science, computational intelligence, and human language, from a psychological viewpoint. Also, an argument against bad ideas from modern scientists and philosophers, new-age mystics and religion, and as a potentially useful explanation to those who spent less time reading and thinking about why the human brain is the way it is. [Preface below] Table…
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[Published 11-09-2014 — https://www.psychologyinaction.org/2014-11-09-obscurantism-lame-explanations-to-the-lame-questions/] “Indeed, the quantum theory implies that consciousness must exist, and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality.” Your intuition can fail you on what is genius and what is asinine. Good thinking strives, almost as its prime directive, to clarify. It doesn’t mean a discussion you have with…
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[2015-09-03; Published in https://www.psychologyinaction.org/2015-09-03-bewonderment-awe-and-other-stupefying-things/] “The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth.…
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[4/4/2016; https://www.psychologyinaction.org/2016-04-04-batman-vs-superman-the-one-where-i-tie-in-trump-and-sanders-for-maximum-clickbait/] Many saw Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice this last week (420+ million box office), a story about Bruce Wayne, a single man backed by wealth, angry determination and personal fortitude, taking on Superman, a very non-figurative manifestation of limitless power. It’s a story about a man so brilliantly competent, so grimly prepared, so unrelentingly…
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[April 20, 2020] Bread lines. Mandated curfews. The lack of services due to the deliberate shutdown of the efficiencies of capitalism. And, my favorite, the socially-enforced spurious practices of wearing cloth masks. You know what? I’m going to reverse the order of that list. Medical masks, particularly high quality ones, work by two principles. (1)…
Omar Claflin 