We wake up each day with the same attention budget as everyone else. This is the one thing all humans equally share.

Spending that attention budget by doing this is what gives meaning to our lives.

It's is only through doing that we learn. It is only through learning that we find meaning.

Yet many of us waste attention budget exclusively on consumption. Seeking the random dopamine hits that tickle our curiosity. Yet we seek only the convenient things to do.

Activities that are convenient, that takes little effort don't consume a lot of attention. But enough of these small distractions will. But unfortunately, there's little learning taking place.

This is an insightful article about what's wrong with Google as compared to Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook.

Which actually reminds me of the difference between organic and engineered designs:

Organic or biological designs are reusable designs from the ground up. They accommodate the needs of the environment because of the generality of the architecture. They don't pretend to solve just a narrow problem.

Architectures like biology that lead to general intelligence (i.e. like you) are from the ground up built from reusable components that encourage combinatorial mixing opportunities. One can never correctly guess the needs of the environment (i.e. market).

The opposite of generalization is pre-mature optimization. A company that has is genesis as a one-product company has a bias toward optimizing the entire stack. As a consequence, it compromises reusability and thus shuts of future opportunities of evolution.

Conscious and conscience are two words that share the same origin but mean two different things. The bias against explanations of consciousness comes from the conflation of these two words.

In addition, the question of free will is also adjacent to the notion of both consciousness and conscience. The ideas of consciousness, conscience, and free will serve as the foundation of justice in our civilization. (care to add another?)

So when we see people fail to condemn an act that is morally repugnant, we wonder if they have a conscience. But we don't wonder if they are conscious. When we incarcerate a person, we ask if they had "free will" but we inquire if they were 'conscious' during the crime.

The presence of consciousness and free will imply sentience. Which is the same as conscious and sounds just like a conscience. Our biases have muddled all the words together to likely mean the same thing.

The words that we use today continue to evolve. The same word can have a different meaning in the past. The word empathy is a recent word invented in the early 1900s. Originally it meant to place oneself from the viewpoint of a thing. Today we don't use it in this way.

Those trained as physicists strive to see the world in terms of symmetries and processes that break symmetries. It's a meta-principle that guides their questioning.

This is very different from how many are taught physics (I guess in high school). We come to know of physics as consisting of laws that describe the behavior of inanimate (or is it indifferent) objects? These laws are described as expressions of equalities (i.e. equations).

But laws like Newton's f=ma or Einstein's e=mc^2 are derived from a higher meta principal. These principles are known as conservation laws. Energy, momentum, angular momentum are all conserved.

Conservation laws however are also derived from a higher principle. A conservation law implies that something remains the same as the situation of study change. Energy conservation implies that it is that something that does not change in time. In short, a symmetry.

This idea that laws are derived from conservation principles that is derived from symmetries is at the core of the study of physics. The laws of physics are only authoritative as long as they don't violate a higher principle. Ultimately, that principle is all about symmetry.

I woke up realizing that there is something very wrong with thinking in categories and classifications. Many people accept the idea that this kind of thinking is at the core of abstract thought.

Douglas Hofstadter argues otherwise in a very thick (not dumb in the Brit sense) book of his ('Surface and Essences') where he argues that analogy is at the core of thinking. You'll have to read his book, specifically the last chapter to understand what he means.

The problem with categories is that they create artificial boundaries that are too crisp. But we know that when we master any subject that there is a distinct fluidity between concepts. The master seems wrong from a by-the-book novice because he keeps on breaking definitions.

Analogy making employs the tacit knowledge gained through experience to adroitly navigate between similar and competing concepts. A master has an intuitive feel of the vocabulary he employs to create expressions that have previously never been heard.

Biological brains feel their way through their realities. Something feels like red because our interactions with that thing feels the same as if it was red. We do not see the color red, we feel the color red. There is no red in this picture:

I suspect that Emergentism and Enactivism have very little appeal in a world dominated by Reductionists.

To get funding one must present a reductionist idea. A perfect example of this is the European Blue Brain project.

I also suspect that pitches that show how one can get a competitive advantage over the rest of humanity has a much greater appeal than pitches that show how one can that has a unified view of humanity.

My book 'The Deep Learning Playbook' out sold my other book 'Artificial Intuition' by a metric mile. I am however more proud of the latter book.

That's because the word 'playbook' conveys a thing that once possessed gives one new power. In contrast, the word 'intuition' does not feel like a think but more of a process (a thought process). Processes don't appear like things that can be owned.