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This was the core premise behind my research during grad school and beyond. My favorite project — which ultimately became my dissertation — was a proposal to co
by timshell 2mo ago
This was the core premise behind my research during grad school and beyond. My favorite project — which ultimately became my dissertation — was a proposal to connect reinforcement learning algorithms, neuronal data, psychological behavior, and phenomenology. Specifically, the idea was the feeling of cognitive fatigue is a mathematical signal to ‘rest’, in which the value of rest is defined by offline mechanisms that contribute to decision-making. I proposed a connection to hippocampal replay, and was able to leverage fMRI and choice data to evaluate the hypothesis.
Zooming out of my specific work, the “best” success stories were connections across math/CS, neuro, and psych and the golden child is the dopamine model of reinforcement learning where firing patterns encode the TD prediction error
- bofadeez 2mo agoThat's not going to work: https://vod.video.cornell.edu/media/1_sfv907qp https://vod.video.cornell.edu/media/1_sfv907qp Conscious agents are creating spacetime. Not the other way around: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4060643/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4060643/
- CMay 1mo agoIs this a misunderstanding of what the double slit experiment actually means, or am I misinterpreting it? If this is based on the idea that reality changes strictly as a result of a conscious observer existing and it is somehow related to consciousness, etc, that is not accurate. I learned this years ago from Philip Ball, one of the editors of Nature. There have been other scientists helping to clear up the confusion recently, though. Here is Sean Carroll explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNOJV4G7Ips https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNOJV4G7Ips Here is Sabine Hossenfelder explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npc6Mn2CZV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npc6Mn2CZV8 Philip Ball explained it in Beyond Weird: https://www.audible.com/pd/Beyond-Weird-Audiobook/B07L5XK4BL https://www.audible.com/pd/Beyond-Weird-Audiobook/B07L5XK4BL
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- bofadeez 1mo agoWell, Nima has shown that space-time is emergent from higher geometry like he amplituhedron and is not the fundamental basis of reality. Then Hoffman suggests that conscious agents could plausibly be the substrate through his category theoretic work. It's not a misunderstanding of the double slit experiment. (I think that was a talking point for a long time amongst hippies.) The interpretation that wave function collapse requires a conscious agent would be consistent with this idea though, and also consistent with simulation theory.
- CMay 1mo agoNima is a theoretical physicist and many of them have diverged away from hard science. Hard science needs to connect and relate back to classical physics mathematically and ideally have a way of being tested. Not all theoretical physics ever gets there, probably most don't. The best adjusted theoretical physicists are aiming to expand on our understanding of classical physics which we know to be useful and true to the best of our knowledge as opposed to coming up with entirely new untestable theories of physics that are themselves based on top of untested theories. Psychology is also a soft science, so while clinical psychology can be useful when it is grounded in real instances of human behavior, theoretical psychology is on the softer end of an already soft spectrum of science. Simulation theory isn't very convincing and it's really just the opposite end of the spectrum of people demonstrating proof of god. Both types of arguments are almost universally logically flawed. It doesn't prove or disprove them, it's just bad logic.