Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

A social media acquaintance on scuttlebutt recently posted: “I have a friend that has gone full #QAnon on #facebook. I haven’t visited my account in over a year but now find myself visiting daily for about a week to see what they have posted. I guess this is why Facebook doesn’t want to limit stuff…

Before neurotransmitters, there was bacterial signalling, for example, quorum sensing in bacteria. Signalling with small polypeptides can solve certain kinds of decision problems, for example, the exploit vs explore problem in slime molds (basically, the trade-off of effort searching for new food sources, vs. “exploiting” (eating) the current food source). It can be shown that…

A younger student, Ben Schultzer,  emailed me yesterday, to ask about AGI.  Since I like writing, I wrote a long answer. I’m reproducing some of it below. 1. Evidently (because of OpenCog), you have at least some belief that symbolic/classic techniques are valuable towards the development of AGI. Yes. Do you think that a hybrid…

So I recently implemented the Zipfian random distribution for the scheme request-for-implementation 194. The code is available on git.  Discussions turned to the merits of using git and github, and so I had the opportunity to opine about the meaning of life in a long email.  Without further ado, the meaning of life: Both bitcoin…

Welcome to WordPress. This is your my first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing! Let’s go for edit. But first, a legal disclaimer: By reading or using this site, you agree that I (the author and writer, Linas Vepstas) is not very likeable, and is prone to saying things that you will incorrectly …