“To believe in progress does not mean believing that progress has already taken place. This would not be belief.” — Franz Kafka, Reflections on Sin, Suffering & Hope

The groovi and gyri of your cerebral cortex identify you like your fingerprint.

“If — as some physical theories speculate — there is only one possible initial state of the universe and only one self-consistent set of physical laws, then the initial state required no bits of information to describe.” — Seth Lloyd

Goldbach’s conjecture: Every even number greater or equal to 4 is the sum of two prime numbers.

Doogie mice are mice that have been genetically altered to be smarter. Enrichment of the environment improves the cognitive performance of control animals but not of Doogie mice.

A state of a multiplayer game is Pareto optimal if there is no solution which is better for ALL participants. A state is a Nash equilibrium if NO player can improve his situation by changing only his own strategy.

Subliminal (16ms) unconscious stimuli have a measurable influence on your consumption behavior IF you are thirsty. And you will not be aware of the fact that such stimuli were shown to you.

Thermodynamic depth, a complexity measure for physical systems, relates the entropy of a system to the number of possible historical paths that led to their state.

If the same odor is present during slow-wave sleep that is present during learning new things, this improves performance. Induced slow oscillations by electric stimulation also improve declarative learning.

Distinguish horizontal from vertical explanations. Horizontal explanations correlate events on the same level of detail, they tell us why a certain event happened. Vertical explanations are explanations in terms of the level(s) below. They tell us why a certain generalization holds. If you get a horizontal explanation and still feel the need to ask “why?”, look for vertical explanations.

“We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time.” — discovermagazine.com

Epistemic actions are actions that are intended not to change the world but to minimize the computational load on your brain. For example, walking around a chessboard, reshuffling your cards. Actions that could have taken place in your mind, were your mind not extended into the world.

The majority of the connections from the prefrontal cortex to other brain areas is inhibitory. Is what we perceive as conscious control not so much involved in the creation and execution of plans but mostly in their inhibition?

Is the distinction between autopilot and deep thought not a distinction between planning vs. not planning, but a distinction between attention vs. no attention?

Duality: Map your problem to another space, find a solution there and map it back to get the solution you need. Think Category theory.

Patients with brain damage that prevents REM sleep do not appear to have a memory deficit.

Children below the age of four do not have a concept of what other people know. They believe that their knowledge is equal to other people’s knowledge. As soon as they learn something, they suppose that others know it, too.

Apes seem to understand basic intentions, but not cooperative intentions.

A brain area could respond to a stimulus by not responding while most other areas are active.

Use machine learning to create thousands hypotheses for lots of small patches of a brain in parallel, test the predictive value of each of them and discard all but those that work.

Four challenges to mind reading based on machine learning: The temporal and spatial resolution of current scanners; the potentially “unlimited” number of thoughts vs training on specific patterns; some types of brain activity have stereotypical patterns across people (e.g. lying), others seem not to; individuals change over time.

1 is not a prime number because factorization needs to be unique.

Perfect numbers are numbers that are equal to the sum of their proper divisors. 6 = 3 + 2 +1. Are there any odd perfect numbers?

Goal-directedness means equifinality: Different initial states lead to the same final state. Goal-directedness implies a reduction in entropy.

We know no good reasons why neurons have dendritic trees beyond increasing the surface area for synapses from other neurons.

Four different types of answers to the question why a certain animal behaves in a certain way: Proximate cause; current survival value; ontogeny (development of the individual); phylogeny (development of the species).

Humans were linguistic 100.000 years ago.

All of your mitochondrial DNA is from your mother.

Acheulean hand axes have been produced practically unchanged for over a million years. Many have been found in a state of not having been used at all. Social artefacts?

We are the only species vulnerable to ideas. Think religion. Freedom. Democracy. Justice.

Language digitizes.

In an experiment, children and chimpanzees try to get food out of a box after being shown a technique with an unnecessary additional step. Chimpanzees leave out the unnecessary step. Children copy the whole procedure.

Be precise.

Jupiter, Vesta, and the Milky Way (1, 2, 3)

Etwa 100 Milliarden Sonnen bilden unser Milchstraßensystem, eine der größeren Galaxien. In unserem Universum gibt es ungefähr 100 Milliarden Galaxien. Die Gesamtzahl der Sterne wird auf 10²¹ geschätzt. 1.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 Sonnen. Entweder wir sind die ersten oder nicht, das eine so bestechend wie das andere.

“Gramma was 77-years old, which is still young in my opinion. I think it’s wonderful that she lived a reasonably long and full life, but her death still seems like such a waste. A lot of rationalizing goes on during times like these; we are socialized to feel less saddened by the death of an elderly person than, say, the death of a child. This kind of thinking disguises the fact that every death is a terrible tragedy.

And then there’s that whole aging process. Aging doesn’t just kill us, it kills us horribly. Sitting next to my mother-in-law in the hospital I was outraged — outraged at all those who feel we shouldn’t interfere with the aging process; outraged at all those who obstruct research into life extending medical technologies; outraged at all those who are blind to horrors of aging.” — George Dvorsky

“Often I have witnessed people encountering new information, apparently accepting it, and then carefully explaining why they are going to do exactly the same thing they planned to do previously, but with a different justification. The point of thinking is to shape our plans; if you’re going to keep the same plans, why bother?” — Eliezer Yudkowsky

“And people really grow up thinking things work this way: evil people intentionally do evil things. But this just doesn’t happen. Nobody thinks they’re doing evil — maybe because it’s just impossible to be intentionally evil, maybe because it’s easier and more effective to convince yourself you’re good — but every major villain had some justification to explain why what they were doing was good. Everybody thinks they’re good.” — Aaron Swartz

“It seems quite natural that at every point we pay most attention to the parameters that are just about to peak, as they represent the hottest current trends. When we look back in the excitement of the moment, the whole history of the world looks like a preparation to the explosion of this particular parameter. And we completely forget that yesterday we were looking at something else with the same excitement …” — Alexander Chislenko

“Vielleicht sind wir die erste Generation, der dämmert, dass Tod nicht sein müsste und dass damit das einmalige Potential eines Menschen nicht vor seiner Entfaltung erlöschen muss. Wenn, ja wenn nicht der Mahlstrom der Mittelmäßigkeit seit je jeden Versuch aus dem Gefängnis der Konsenshypnose auszubrechen mit sagen wir Unverständnis in allen seinen kreativen Spielarten belohnen würde.” — Siggi Becker

“The problem is that we’re indoctrinated into believing that you can make a big difference by helping out just a little. But the sad truth is that you can’t do AI on two hours a month.” — Zitat eines nicht namentlich bekannten Unterstützers des Singularity Institute, gefunden in einer E-Mail von Eliezer Yudkowsky.

“How many times have I heard students about to start work for a corporation claim that they will spend just two or three years earning the money they need, then leave and pursue the career of their choice? How many times have I caught up with those people several years later, to discover that they have acquired a lifestyle, a car and a mortgage to match their salary, and that their initial ideals have faded to the haziest of memories, which they now dismiss as a post-adolescent fantasy?” — George Monbiot