Patrick

Neuroscience, Meditation, ML

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

“An experience of control overcoming an aversive stimulus, in effect, suggests to the brain that perhaps these other negative outcomes can be overcome, too.… if an organism can perceive that its actions influence the likelihood of an outcome, it acts. If it cannot detect that contingency, it defaults toward passivity, fear, and anxiety" "'Hope’ consists largely in the habit of expecting that future bad events will not be permanent, global, and uncontrollable, rather they will be temporary, local and controllable.…The brain can learn helplessness, but it can also learn control.” I wrote a primer on what the neuroscience of learned helplessness can teach us about human agency, and how future neurotechnology could treat psychological dysfunction as directly as today’s implants treat paralysis. Read Part 1 of 2 below:
*reposted due to wrong link*

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@RubenLaukkonen @OortCloudAtlas Anathem. Extremely good and compelling, with some contemplative themese you may appreciate!

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

Every day for weeks i’ve been seeing people talking about “eldritch horrors beyond their imagination” like this is an actual fly, or even a simulation of one.

This brain scan represents some neurons and some neuronal connections. Many of the important cells in your brain are NOT neurons.
This represents the behavior of a fly in the same way a linear regression between square footage and housing prices represents the behavior of the economy.
it represents the fly: it is not the fly, and even with a spectral definition of consciousness, it is likely no more conscious than an LLM. Organoids, on the other hand, are probably actually experiencing some sort of hell realm in some cases

[David @dzhng]

Introducing Fly Escape Room - the world's first game with NPCs powered by a real fruit fly brain, all 166k neurons.

Leave food and other objects for the flies, run the simulation, watch what happens. Goal is to get all flies to escape.

Built w/ GPT-6 Astra over a 3 day loop

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@hturan Lmao random quartus sighting. Where did you get the screen?

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@ThatMrE Man discovers electrolytes from first principles 😂 jokes aside a lot of people are surprisingly unfamiliar with the positive mental effects of enough electrolytes!

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@bayeslord yeah honestly. especially when many of the learning mechanisms amount to electrocuting the tissue if it makes a mistake as a learning signal…

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@credenzaclear2 @vividvoid people really get mad at you for trying to figure important stuff out. many such cases

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@OshanJarow pure viral reporting. as if there aren’t literally dozens of accomplished meditators warning about the risks of intense meditation.

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@WikiPeatiaOrg Really a fascinating resource, thanks!

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@PhilipSabes Hoping to join you!

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@PresidentToguro Disagreeable aesthetes make it hard to defend them, but it’s still necessary

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@liquorloser @MortenBeirholm @tracewoodgrains please, join the mailing list!

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

yes, some people were callous about it. meanness invites meanness to be sure; people felt gaslit about official sources tiptoeing around the validity of his claims, some people were earnest skeptics of the attack on him, but when the facts came out a lot of people never updated their positions.
i will tell you, if you are capable of discussing these topics at a higher level (you clearly are), and you are not a misanthrope ( i don’t think you are), you must resist the urge to be snarky to people; even if you’re right (again in this case, against the callousness, you’re totally making a fair point), it just never expresses what you really mean.
i hate to tell you, but, since you are certain level of smart, you have somewhat of a moral obligation to not bludgeon retards with your intellect. i really mean this as a complement

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

you’re combining two positions that are in practice distinct. being happy someone killed themselves =\= being happy an unqualified person got fired.

i don’t know the extent of what Nature had to do w that story, and i’ve enjoyed their publication. But when you not only endorse fraudulent academics, but also refuse to let them experience the full weight of their mistake, your reputation will obviously be damaged. It sounds like the evidence he was a liar and plagiarist is pretty rock solid

(yes, if you are an intentionally dishonest scientist/researcher, you do indeed deserve commensurate reputational damage. you are lying and potentially harming people/taking away resources from earnest folk!)

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@anirbanbandyo Carpenter Brut!

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@meditationstuff it’s a colossal portion of your sensory processing

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@GeZhang86038849 this isn’t already somewhat done by RNN’s/Structured State Space Models?

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@BreatheLesss It's hard to let go of the idea that success needs to be painfully difficult. Sometimes life's toughest challenges are mundane

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

perhaps approach it from the perspective of compression.
Logic and causality are sort of the same thing as they both are elements of the overall structure of how things occur.

in order to represent the structure of the way things are, there’s inherently the need to compress all of the complexity of the world into a smaller, representative structure. This structure is logic, the dharma, etc.

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@joseph_fridman smart. the more letters they have after their name, the better they are at writing!

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@joseph_fridman no masters?

[Patrick @packsmarginalia]

@myhandle hence why so many people can develop a general aversiveness when trying to work on themselves or with difficult topics