Let's Read: some mind-bending papers from Anil Seth

Anil Seth studies the neuroscience of consciousness. Here's a presentation where he talked about it for 50 minutes. 

Basic points from the talk:

Let's Read: Mind Children (1988) by Hans Moravec

This book is half outdated and half amazing. The outdated parts are where he talked about the "latest" advances in AI and robotics, such as the amazing robots that could move across a cluttered room in just 5 hours! (and fails 1/4 of the times). This is why I skipped most of the first 3 chapters.

One great thing I found in the book is a very poetic description of a "Bush Robot" which can be best explained by ponies:

Bush Robot Scootaloo

Fermi or DIE! More studies on Fermi paradox.

In this post we review some new (after 2010 at least) solutions to the Fermi paradox, or "the Great Silence".

Aestivation hypothesis

Proposed in That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi’s paradox (2017), by Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong, Milan Ćirković. 

[Aestivate: to sleep through the summer, or a period too hot for living. The opposite of "hibernate".]

Idea: Aliens are sleeping until the far future, when the universe is cold enough, to maximize computation. The reason is that cold = more efficient use of energy for computation, according to the Landaur limit: $E\ge kT\ln(2) \text{Joule}$ need to be dissipated for an irreversible change of one bit of information.

... this can produce a $10^{30}$ multiplier of achievable computation. We hence suggest the “aestivation hypothesis”: the reason we are not observing manifestations of alien civilizations is that they are currently aestivating...

The phrase "That is not dead which can eternal lie" comes from a poem by H. P. Lovecraft, a philosopher ahead of his time who really understood how human thoughts matter little in a cosmic viewpoint.

A civilization would aestivate if:

News Aggregate: Moonshots!

So in the last post I mentioned that the BioGenome Project was called a "moonshot", turns out there's more moonshots. Quite a few! Makes me wonder how many moons do we have... Am I on Jupiter??

Chemistry

Martin Burke is moonshooting for automated chemistry synthesis. Most chemicals are made very inflexibly. Basically, chemists start with a chemical to synthesize, then do a bunch of trials and errors until they get a synthesis receipe that is just cheap and with a high enough yield to be useful.

Human chemists planning a synthesis tend to use a technique called retrosynthetic analysis. They draw the finished molecule and then pick it apart, erasing bonds that would be easy to form and leaving fragments of molecule that are stable or readily available. 

Example: synthesis of Ibuprofen

Current state of the art on genomics projects and technology - Dec 2018

Gene sequencing has its own kind of Moore's Law, but with more cliffs and plateaus.

Technology: The $1,000 genome (2014), Nature News

This was plotted in 2014, back then a human genome costed \$5000. In 2015 it dropped suddenly to $1000 and that's where it's at now, according to NIH.

Conjoined twins, how boundless is nature's depravity!

This post is about all kinds of ways humans are born wrong. It's very disgusting and scary. Personally I powered through the study by listening Depressive Suicidal Death Metal. Here's the playlist I used. I won't show gory pictures but I would link them. Please don't click them unless you eat Cupcakes for breakfast at the Rainbow Factory. They really put the "gross" in "gross pathology".

But first, why do I bother with this? There's a philosophical point to be had here. Usual humans move about fully formed and independent, it's easy to imagine them to be naturally individuals. They aren't and looking at how grotesquely their individuality can fail is a great way to shock one into realizing the mess of reality.

And there's an even higher way to look at this. The body is not a sacred ONE thing, it's just a sack of meat... Similarly, the mind is not a sacred ONE thing either, it's just... a messy collection of things that a brain does, like in Inside Out (2015). Once this is appreciated, one might see that an indivisible individual "self" is an illusion.

Fun Stuffs: Dog metacognition, Tarski used drugs, Soul Machine babies, FarmBots

Dogs know when they don't know

DogStudies lab... have shown that dogs possess some "metacognitive" abilities -- specifically, they are aware of when they do not have enough information to solve a problem and will actively seek more information... a test in which a reward (food/toy) is placed by one researcher behind one of the two fences while another researcher held the dog. They found that the dogs looked through gaps in the fences significantly more often when they had not seen where the reward was hidden.

 Amusingly, looking through the gaps didn't help sometimes.

The researchers theorize that... the dogs get so excited about finding the reward, that they cannot stop themselves from approaching the closest fence even when they have seen that the reward is probably not there.