I was reading Wikipedia, as one does, and came across the article on hypnosis. The opening section contains this paragraph: During hypnosis, a person is said to have heightened focus and concentration and an increased response to suggestions. Hypnosis usually begins with a hypnotic induction involving a series of preliminary instructions and suggestions. The use…
Author: Kenneth
Cat owner, educator, learner
Beware the last word
I recently saw an edited clip on YouTube in which a person said something that was false but very funny in response to a question. In the comments, someone said that the person in the video didn’t respond to the question that way, and that the clip was just edited to make it seem that…
Most people can’t identify steam
Have you ever noticed that when you take a pot of boiling water off the heat, it stops bubbling but starts steaming profusely? The answer is technically no, because despite appearances that is not what is happening. Steam or water vapor, that is H2O in a gaseous state, is usually invisible. The visible white smoky…
Why it’s difficult to understand the brain
I’ve recently been working on a programming project, and one of my considerations during development has been coupling. Like many programming concepts, coupling is an analogy to real-world systems, although I’m not sure it’s supposed to reference any specific thing. The term is used in various science and engineering domains where it refers to two…
Let’s talk about the singularity
The concept of the technological singularity is a confused one. Here’s the thing about “general AI” or “self-aware AI”—it will be indistinguishable from really good mimicry of self-aware intelligence. When the singularity happens, we won’t notice. This is an excerpt of a YouTube comment on a video about AI technology. I thought about responding to…
I don’t think consciousness is a byproduct
I’m not an expert and you shouldn’t particularly care what I think, but I’ll tell you anyway. Physicalists aka materialists are often presented with the challenge of the so-called hard problem of consciousness. That is, essentially, how and why does subjective experience arise from physical brains? In general, I have the impression that most physicalists…
Humoring questions (4th in a series of sovereign citizens)
This post is part of a series beginning with The conspiracy theory that revolves around wordplay about the so-called “sovereign citizen” movement. As a reminder, they don’t usually call themselves sovereign citizens, but I will use that label because it is the one generally accepted among outsiders like myself. In the previous post in this…
Why we should be nice to (some) AI
While modern “chat bots” (large language models or LLMs) like ChatGPT are far from sentient, they are amazing in their capability and their development has prompted greater public discussion around the future of AI and humanity’s relationship with AI. Some, even some experts in the field, are fearful of making rapid progress without first resolving…
Possibility, necessity, and imagination
In philosophy, specifically in metaphysics, we often speak of what is “possible” or “contingent” and what is “necessary”. If something is necessarily true, then it cannot possibly to be false. An example of necessary truth might be mathematical theorems. If something is contingent, then it’s true but possibly could have been false. We often talk…
One man’s 25-year opus (3rd in a series on sovereign citizens)
Prologue In first my post on sovereign citizens, The conspiracy theory that revolves around wordplay, my goal was to illustrate what the sovereign citizen movement is and highlight the particularly strange language they use, which often stands out immediately. Having limited myself to that, I next set out to write a second post covering several…
thoughts on mind 