Where in the world is elephant's room?

  Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky once posed a question to the audience, in the opening lecture of "Human Behavioral Biology" class, asking: what comes next in this sequence: 4, 14, 23, 34, ? Class seemed puzzled at first, a couple students gave it a fair shot although to none avail. Then suddenly, a hand was raised, followed up a confident answer "42".. He then was asked how the one arrived at this number and he said - "it's the stops on the New York City subway A line". Indeed it is. How anyone else that has never lived or even visited NY is supposed to know this?! This question seems unfair, as it rewards those with contextual experience of living in that area, and those who had experience interacting with the beautiful and chaotic mess of what we call NY public transport system. If one poses this same question to an AIG (super intelligent AI), what would it determine this answer to be? Would it guess and get it wrong? Would it be confident of ...

L'Inconnue de la Seine (The Unknown Woman of the Seine) Anthropocentric view, Might not be all so. If human condition Taught us anything at all Is that we're not here to create Nor we're here to destroy, We're not here to explore, We're not here with a meaning Rather we're just here, Left purposeless, and all alone. If star dust is where we come from, And ashes is where we go to, Then everything in between is just,  life, And we have a single raison d'être, To die.

  Humans are one of the few animals that are capable of passing the so called "self-awareness" test, along with some species of monkeys, magpies, crows and dolphins and perhaps killer whales. It's an intriguing concept, that of that most animals seem to survive without the need for recognizing itself as a single entity, controlling it's own body, while continuously traversing in time, as a single personality. This raises a question, is our self-perception actually beneficial to our own survival? Studies have linked depression with higher cognitive abilities, after all, understanding self and your own short and insignificant life and it's ultimate fate, in the grand scheme of things, can be a mortifying thought. But being where we are as a race, in terms of our place in the food chain and in terms of our grasp on the control of the entire planet, intelligence doesn't seem to be an undesirable trait. So perhaps, a personality and self-awareness, sense of continu...

Between the now unstoppable climate crisis, never ending power struggle of nations, and our technological immaturity (that I've outlined in the post  "Is humanity a self-terminating system?' ), it is hard to argue for a non-zero chance of survival of human civilization, along with 50-95% of the rest of the species on planet Earth. So perhaps, it's worth to take a look back, and do a little retrospective, see how did it all end up the way it did, perform an autopsy on another body that fell victim to the Fermi Paradox.  Our earliest traceable human-like ancestors is said to be Ardipithicines Ardipithecus, who appeared around 5 million years ago, or around 99,9% into Earth's existence. In a group of 15 difference human-like species, perhaps most notable ones were Homo Habilis, who appeared 2 Million years ago, they were the first ones to start making tools, then Homo Heidelbergensis, who appeared 700 thousands years ago, and were making various structures, like shelt...

    1 plus 1, it sounds like the most basic question there can ever be, a kindergartener could answer it without hesitation, but hold your answers just yet, this is a trick question, I warned you. Most will fail to answer this question correctly, at at least in a manner that is the least wrong, probably due to no fault of their own, in this post I will try to delve into the "why" people can't answer this question, and what's going on with the self-conscious and brilliant yet still primitive mind of modern homo sapiens.  Modern education system is supposed to teach us to solve problems, to equip us with knowledge to explore, however, more often than not, the pursuit of problem solving devolves into simplified techniques designed to look for answers, and obtaining knowledge too often just turns into a series of memorizations. In real life, however, this is as far from actual problem solving as it can get. You see, the "1+1" problem is so ill defined, that is h...

  Sometimes it seems, the human nature, our deepest desires and wishes are at odds with our own long term survival , in other words, what would make us the most happy individually would also cause us to go extinct as a civilization. I’ll try to explore this topic in this post, which has been on my mind for a long time now, predating the Lex Fridman's podcast with Daniel Schmachtenberger and many others. Perhaps the earliest thoughts on this are laid by notoriously infamous Ted Kaczynski in his “unabomber manifesto” – he was a brilliant mathematician but also one of the most wanted criminals. I do not condone his actions, which are, in short, that of upon realization of this harsh reality he spent his life in the woods, occasionally sending mail bombs, attempting to stop the technological progress, or at least intimidate and set an example, trying curve the path the human civilization, and ultimately, to save our entire species. At the core of the issue, human nature demands freed...

  <the rest of the story is archived, as of 2021/12/06>

If experiences are nothing but an approximation of reality, are they doomed to only live within ourselves? If art is an expression of our inner-selves, A holistic experience for the world to share, And the brain hallucinates the now, Then it's our dreams that create the future. The people you meet is who you become, Life imitates art, And I imitate you .