Carlos E. Perez
FOLLOWS YOU The Artificial Intuition, Fluency & Empathy guy. Peircian Architectonic. https://t.co/hvGgkhYsSU https://t.co/dGlZwY2g93 ceperez@sigmoid.social
150+ Book Recommendations by Carlos E. Perez
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
Leonard Shlain
Chapter 7 of "Alphabet and the Goddess" is an illuminating read. It covers the transformation of Egyptian hieroglyphics as well as the evolution of religion. https://t.co/BWSvQNThNT
The Evolution of Agency
Michael Tomasello
Michael Tomasello has a new book that explores the evolution of human agency. In this book, he proposes a model. Let's contrast this model in light of semiotics. https://t.co/W6uWHuWj8O
The Art of the Metaobject Protocol
Gregor Kiczales
@MikePFrank Yes, it is! It is, ever since they noticed that programming languages have reflective constructs! https://t.co/NyAeoXEvZQ
Artificial Intuition
Carlos E Perez
I challenge you to find a field as interesting and exciting as Deep Learning. This book is a spin-off from my previous book "The Deep Learning AI Playbook." The Playbook was meant for a professional audience. This is targeted to a much wider audience. There are two kinds of audiences, those looking to explore and those looking to optimize. There are two ways to learn, learning by exploration and learning by exploitation. This book is about exploration into the emerging field of Deep Learning. It's more like a popular science book and less of a business book. It's not going to provide any practical advice of how to use or deploy Deep Learning. However, it's a book that will explore this new field in many more perspectives. So at the very least, you'll walk away with the ability to hold a very informative and impressive conversation about this unique subject. It's my hope that having less constraints on what I can express can lead to a more insightful and novel book. There are plenty of ideas that are either too general or too speculative to fit within a business oriented book. With a business book, you always want to manage expectations. Artificial Intelligence is one of those topics that you want to keep speaking in a conservative manner. That's one reason I felt the need for this book. Perhaps the freedom to be more liberal can give readers more ideas as where this field is heading. Also, it's not just business that needs to understand Deep Learning. We are all going to be profoundly impacted by this new kind of Artificial Intelligence and it is critical we all develop at least a good intuition of how it will change the world.The images in the front cover are all generated using Deep Learning technology.My second book "Artificial Intuition" was inspired by Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow." My analytic upbringing would have never appreciated the importance of intuition to cognition without reading this book. https://t.co/bOBUOzB4ce
Creating Language
Morten H. Christiansen
@noble_podcast Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing by Morten H. Christiansen et al. https://t.co/VI61U3badQ
The Mind Is Flat
Nick Chater
We can either interpret all intelligence as being shallow. Alternatively, we can interpret general intelligence as a process that leads to unbounded creativity. https://t.co/hlsMbqBwhp
The Science of Can and Can't
Chiara Marletto
Deutsch proposes an alternative way of how formulating explanations. Let's say we abandon initial conditions, what we are left with is a different kind of prediction that is much broader. What is possible, and what is impossible. https://t.co/qI2o3rhkGv
Mind Is Flat
Nick Chater
The human mind is like a Transformer model, that is it has limited depth. Hence the book "The Mind is Flat." Does anyone want to argue otherwise? https://t.co/aOvZb48zVM
Wayfinding
M. R. O'Connor
At once far flung and intimate, a fascinating look at how finding our way make us human. In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision—especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O'Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate. O’Connor explores the neurological basis of spatial orientation within the hippocampus. Without it, people inhabit a dream state, becoming amnesiacs incapable of finding their way, recalling the past, or imagining the future. Studies have shown that the more we exercise our cognitive mapping skills, the greater the grey matter and health of our hippocampus. O'Connor talks to scientists studying how atrophy in the hippocampus is associated with afflictions such as impaired memory, dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease, depression and PTSD. Wayfinding is a captivating book that charts how our species' profound capacity for exploration, memory and storytelling results in topophilia, the love of place. "O'Connor talked to just the right people in just the right places, and her narrative is a marvel of storytelling on its own merits, erudite but lightly worn. There are many reasons why people should make efforts to improve their geographical literacy, and O'Connor hits on many in this excellent book—devouring it makes for a good start." —Kirkus Reviews@shackletonjones You will love this book on the subject: https://t.co/We5WG5QoPz
Artificial Intuition
Carlos Perez
Around a year ago, we discovered reversible induction machines. We know these now as diffusion models. The first kinds of these were discovered 7 years ago, I mention them in my book. https://t.co/MLjweGUe8K
Artificial Intuition
Carlos Perez
The reason why System 2 is "slow" is because it is emulated using System 1. I've said this for years, yet people don't seem to grok it! https://t.co/MLjweHbhaK
The Search for Certainty
Krzysztof Burdzy
@balazskegl @mraginsky @chi_thanh_lam I looked at the review from Amazon to get an idea. Appears the book is good at revealing the flaws of both interpretations. https://t.co/otffTxPxHb
The Enigma of Reason
Hugo Mercier
@GaryMarcus You've read this book? https://t.co/Bnfq4NAyAK
Principles of biological autonomy
Francisco J Varela
@PeterLozoPhD https://t.co/g8ZUPkZJS2
Infinite Powers
Steven Strogatz
Long overdue! I should have finished reading @stevenstrogatz book "Infinite Powers" instead of doomscrolling! I recommend this to anyone working on Deep Learning. DL is simply calculus at scale. https://t.co/q82G6VqdCH
The Tree of Knowledge
Humberto R. Maturana
@MatthewEGunter Read: https://t.co/Jol72ErxlF
Surfaces and Essences
Douglas Hofstadter
Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.Human cognition does not revolve around categorization, rather it's based on just-in-time conceptual blending. Douglas Hofstadter identified this as analogy-making. https://t.co/emxWfXLXsR
Language vs. Reality
N.J. Enfield
A fascinating examination of how we are both played by language and made by language: the science underlying the bugs and features of humankind’s greatest invention. Language is said to be humankind’s greatest accomplishment. But what is language actually good for? It performs poorly at representing reality. It is a constant source of distraction, misdirection, and overshadowing. In fact, N. J. Enfield notes, language is far better at persuasion than it is at objectively capturing the facts of experience. Language cannot create or change physical reality, but it can do the next best thing: reframe and invert our view of the world. In Language vs. Reality, Enfield explains why language is bad for scientists (who are bound by reality) but good for lawyers (who want to win their cases), why it can be dangerous when it falls into the wrong hands, and why it deserves our deepest respect. Enfield offers a lively exploration of the science underlying the bugs and features of language. He examines the tenuous relationship between language and reality; details the array of effects language has on our memory, attention, and reasoning; and describes how these varied effects power narratives and storytelling as well as political spin and conspiracy theories. Why should we care what language is good for? Enfield, who has spent twenty years at the cutting edge of language research, argues that understanding how language works is crucial to tackling our most pressing challenges, including human cognitive bias, media spin, the “post-truth” problem, persuasion, the role of words in our thinking, and much more.However, creativity in language does not exist in the preciseness of legal text. To be a good scientist, avoid becoming a lawyer! https://t.co/H8A2dGOMKk
Principles of biological autonomy
Francisco J Varela
Thus there is a new emphasis on understanding autonomy. This was something two decades ago Varella was pounding the table. The topic was so out of vogue that his book is now out of print! https://t.co/g8ZUPkZJS2
Metazoa
Peter Godfrey-Smith
In our midst is an endless variety of general intelligence occupying an endless diversity of niches. Conscious minds are a consequence of living in this world. https://t.co/CWOO9rTlft
Language vs. Reality
N.J. Enfield
https://t.co/3j3ucef8ux
A World Beyond Physics
Stuart A. Kauffman
How did life start? Is the evolution of life describable by any physics-like laws? Stuart Kauffman's latest book offers an explanation-beyond what the laws of physics can explain-of the progression from a complex chemical environment to molecular reproduction, metabolism and to early protocells, and further evolution to what we recognize as life. Among the estimated one hundred billion solar systems in the known universe, evolving life is surely abundant. That evolution is a process of "becoming" in each case. Since Newton, we have turned to physics to assess reality. But physics alone cannot tell us where we came from, how we arrived, and why our world has evolved past the point of unicellular organisms to an extremely complex biosphere. Building on concepts from his work as a complex systems researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, Kauffman focuses in particular on the idea of cells constructing themselves and introduces concepts such as "constraint closure." Living systems are defined by the concept of "organization" which has not been focused on in enough in previous works. Cells are autopoetic systems that build themselves: they literally construct their own constraints on the release of energy into a few degrees of freedom that constitutes the very thermodynamic work by which they build their own self creating constraints. Living cells are "machines" that construct and assemble their own working parts. The emergence of such systems-the origin of life problem-was probably a spontaneous phase transition to self-reproduction in complex enough prebiotic systems. The resulting protocells were capable of Darwin's heritable variation, hence open-ended evolution by natural selection. Evolution propagates this burgeoning organization. Evolving living creatures, by existing, create new niches into which yet further new creatures can emerge. If life is abundant in the universe, this self-constructing, propagating, exploding diversity takes us beyond physics to biospheres everywhere.@MelMitchell1 Stuart Kauffman in his 2019 book (I'm not 100% but his papers argue against possibility of AI): https://t.co/UpXP2qWvQy
The Promise of Artificial Intelligence
Brian Cantwell Smith
An argument that—despite dramatic advances in the field—artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. In this provocative book, Brian Cantwell Smith argues that artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. Second wave AI, machine learning, even visions of third-wave AI: none will lead to human-level intelligence and judgment, which have been honed over millennia. Recent advances in AI may be of epochal significance, but human intelligence is of a different order than even the most powerful calculative ability enabled by new computational capacities. Smith calls this AI ability “reckoning,” and argues that it does not lead to full human judgment—dispassionate, deliberative thought grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action. Taking judgment as the ultimate goal of intelligence, Smith examines the history of AI from its first-wave origins (“good old-fashioned AI,” or GOFAI) to such celebrated second-wave approaches as machine learning, paying particular attention to recent advances that have led to excitement, anxiety, and debate. He considers each AI technology's underlying assumptions, the conceptions of intelligence targeted at each stage, and the successes achieved so far. Smith unpacks the notion of intelligence itself—what sort humans have, and what sort AI aims at. Smith worries that, impressed by AI's reckoning prowess, we will shift our expectations of human intelligence. What we should do, he argues, is learn to use AI for the reckoning tasks at which it excels while we strengthen our commitment to judgment, ethics, and the world.@MelMitchell1 Brian Cantwell Smith in his 2019 book: https://t.co/AXvHxIYlAq
How We Learn
Stanislas Dehaene
This reminds me that Dehaene, in his book, has 4 pillars to learning: attention, active engagement, error feedback, and consolidation. Which has a final chapter attempting to reconcile education with neuroscience discoveries. https://t.co/yUiKDcuAqj
The Evolution of Memory Systems
Elisabeth Murray
Current theories about human memory have been shaped by clinical observations and animal experiments. This doctrine holds that the medial temporal lobe subserves one memory system for explicit or declarative memories, while the basal ganglia subserves a separate memory system for implicit or procedural memories, including habits. Cortical areas outside the medial temporal lobe are said to function in perception, motor control, attention, or other aspects of executive function, but not in memory. 'The Evolution of Memory Systems advances dramatically different ideas on all counts. It proposes that several memory systems arose during evolution and that they did so for the same general reason: to transcend problems and exploit opportunities encountered by specific ancestors at particular times and places in the distant past. Instead of classifying cortical areas in terms of mutually exclusive perception, executive, or memory functions, the authors show that all cortical areas contribute to memory and that they do so in their own ways-using specialized neural representations. The book also presents a proposal on the evolution of explicit memory. According to this idea, explicit (declarative) memory depends on interactions between a phylogenetically ancient navigation system and a representational system that evolved in humans to represent one's self and others. As a result, people embed representations of themselves into the events they experience and the facts they learn, which leads to the perception of participating in events and knowing facts. 'The Evolution of Memory Systems is an important new work for students and researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and biology.It's argued from an evolutionary perspective that there we have 7 memory systems (reinforcement, navigation, biased competition, manual foraging, feature, goal and social). https://t.co/QYgP2Avlnv
Design Patterns
Gamma Erich
If you've ever read the gang of four book on design patterns, the authors have 3 categories of patterns: creational, structural and behavioral. https://t.co/0zdWAmXHbF
The Dawn of Everything
David Graeber
A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? What was really happening during the periods that we usually describe as the emergence of "the state"? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations@autoletics David Graeber argues that adjacent communities seek to differentiate themselves. So the English are not like the Scottish. In the same way, in software development, generations attempt to be different from previous ones. https://t.co/iLvjtgDP7z
The Promise of Artificial Intelligence
Brian Cantwell Smith
An argument that—despite dramatic advances in the field—artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. In this provocative book, Brian Cantwell Smith argues that artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. Second wave AI, machine learning, even visions of third-wave AI: none will lead to human-level intelligence and judgment, which have been honed over millennia. Recent advances in AI may be of epochal significance, but human intelligence is of a different order than even the most powerful calculative ability enabled by new computational capacities. Smith calls this AI ability “reckoning,” and argues that it does not lead to full human judgment—dispassionate, deliberative thought grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action. Taking judgment as the ultimate goal of intelligence, Smith examines the history of AI from its first-wave origins (“good old-fashioned AI,” or GOFAI) to such celebrated second-wave approaches as machine learning, paying particular attention to recent advances that have led to excitement, anxiety, and debate. He considers each AI technology's underlying assumptions, the conceptions of intelligence targeted at each stage, and the successes achieved so far. Smith unpacks the notion of intelligence itself—what sort humans have, and what sort AI aims at. Smith worries that, impressed by AI's reckoning prowess, we will shift our expectations of human intelligence. What we should do, he argues, is learn to use AI for the reckoning tasks at which it excels while we strengthen our commitment to judgment, ethics, and the world.@pfvasconcellos Nice! An entire book was written around this specific word and AI! https://t.co/GLQ3c1mUIg
The View From Nowhere
Thomas Nagel
Discusses the mind-body problem, knowledge, personal identity, free will, ethics, death, reality, values, and the meaning of life.I discovered a new phrase that I really like "the view from nowhere." It expresses a detached and objective perspective. This originates from: https://t.co/uyVfo7pNQC
The Enigma of Reason
Hugo Mercier
I suspect too few realize that human reasoning is a consequence of human intuition. The book that explains this in more depth: https://t.co/YNgebkpzem
Life Ascending
Nick Lane
Recommends https://t.co/fAQBDpQI6I
The Master and His Emissary
Iain McGilchrist
I'm still working myself through Mcgilchrist's book "The Master and the Emissary". Although it's about the human mind, it explores areas I'm unfamiliar with in Philosophy and Society. But it does resonate with ideas about AGI that I'm pursuing. https://t.co/pzy0WyMrzR
Livewired
David Eagleman
@zxul767 @Rares82 @NickRMorgan Here's a very good book on the subject: https://t.co/g7a8e2pXTo
Metazoa
Peter Godfrey-Smith
The books in order of my reading: "Metazoa", "Journey of the Ming", "Being You" written by an Australian, Americans and a Brit. All the books revolve around the explanation of minds of living beings. I recommend reading them all because surprisingly the stories are not the same.
Being You
Megan Madison
A picture book edition of the bestselling board book about gender, offering adults the opportunity to begin important conversations with young children in an informed, safe, and supported way. A board book bestseller - now in picture book! Developed by experts in the fields of early childhood development and activism against injustice, this topic-driven book offers clear, concrete language and imagery to introduce the concept of gender. This book serves to normalize and celebrate the range of gender identities, preferences, and pronouns, and recognize the institutionalized ideas about gender that feminists are working to correct. While young children are avid observers and questioners of their world, adults often shut down or postpone conversations on complicated topics because it's hard to know where to begin. Research shows that talking about issues like race, gender, and our bodies from the age of two not only helps children understand what they see, but also increases self-awareness, self-esteem, and allows them to recognize and confront things that are unfair, like discrimination and prejudice. These books offer a supportive approach that considers both the child and the adult. Illustrative art accompanies the simple and interactive text, and the backmatter offers additional resources and ideas for extending this discussion.The books in order of my reading: "Metazoa", "Journey of the Ming", "Being You" written by an Australian, Americans and a Brit. All the books revolve around the explanation of minds of living beings. I recommend reading them all because surprisingly the stories are not the same.
Being You
Anil Seth
A book about consciousness that exceeded my original expectations! @anilkseth https://t.co/cY7kcxf6I3
The Deep Learning AI Playbook
Carlos E Perez
As I've emphasized in my book, automated cognitive systems should compensate for our intrinsic human cognitive biases. They should not take over our entire thought process. They should be bicycles of the mind. https://t.co/Nmzbf8EeMN
Vital Question
Nick Lane
Why is life the way it is? Bacteria evolved into complex life just once in four billion years of life on earth-and all complex life shares many strange properties, from sex to ageing and death. If life evolved on other planets, would it be the same or completely different?In The Vital Question, Nick Lane radically reframes evolutionary history, putting forward a cogent solution to conundrums that have troubled scientists for decades. The answer, he argues, lies in energy: how all life on Earth lives off a voltage with the strength of a bolt of lightning. In unravelling these scientific enigmas, making sense of life's quirks, Lane's explanation provides a solution to life's vital questions: why are we as we are, and why are we here at all?This is ground-breaking science in an accessible form, in the tradition of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.However, the book that really dropped my jaw is Nick Lane's The Vital Question. Reading this book will forever change how you look at biology. https://t.co/T5UzB7xOz0
Behavior and Culture in One Dimension
Dennis P. Waters
Also released last year, @dpwaters is a must-read. Waters provides a solid explanation that differentiates physics and biology. https://t.co/1vNKJpmpX4
Metazoa
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Metazoa is also a very good book, much better than Godfrey-Smith's previous book. I do recommend reading 'Journey of the Mind' and then reading Metazoa after. The former starts with a stronger foundation. https://t.co/CWOO9rSNpV
Journey of the Mind
Ogi Ogas
Two neuroscientists trace a sweeping new vision of consciousness across eighteen increasingly intelligent minds, from microbes to humankind and beyond.It's such a delight when you accidentally stumble on a book and discover that it exceeds your original expectations. This is an excellent book that recently came out. https://t.co/0s0NLrJO2q
Feynman Lectures On Computation (Frontiers in Physics)
Richard P. Feynman
@mraginsky @KordingLab How does the book compare with Feynman's? https://t.co/FS8N3MG2FO
A New Kind of Science
Stephen Wolfram
NOW IN PAPERBACK"€"Starting from a collection of simple computer experiments"€"illustrated in the book by striking computer graphics"€"Stephen Wolfram shows how their unexpected results force a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe.@PessoaBrain This is what's described in @stephen_wolfram A New Kind of Science (two decades ago!). https://t.co/Xx6dJb6uvw
Artificial Intuition
Carlos Perez
I've decided to refactor my books to create a trilogy. I wrote 'Artificial Intuition' in 2017. This book will need to be updated to align with recent developments. https://t.co/MLjweGTGjc
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Gregory Bateson
Schismogenesis proposed by Gregory Bateson explains why societies develop values and practices different from neighboring societies. https://t.co/sAu2bBSCFY
The Nature of Technology
W. Brian Arthur
“More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being,” says W. Brian Arthur. Yet despite technology’s irrefutable importance in our daily lives, until now its major questions have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions and more, setting forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology. The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology’s origins and evolution. Achieving for the development of technology what Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress, Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives. The Nature of Technology is a classic for our times.@kaznatcheev @KordingLab @TonyZador @Abebab @IrisVanRooij @CT_Bergstrom @stevenstrogatz @cailinmeister @KevinZollman @JunhyongKim @PetrovADmitri @CancerConnector One could say the same for any technology. https://t.co/VrxmOGczLi
The Dawn of Everything
David Graeber
@conways_law Good book because it challenges our conventional framing of human society development. https://t.co/pB05bkU86E
Artificial Intuition
Carlos E Perez
I challenge you to find a field as interesting and exciting as Deep Learning. This book is a spin-off from my previous book "The Deep Learning AI Playbook." The Playbook was meant for a professional audience. This is targeted to a much wider audience. There are two kinds of audiences, those looking to explore and those looking to optimize. There are two ways to learn, learning by exploration and learning by exploitation. This book is about exploration into the emerging field of Deep Learning. It's more like a popular science book and less of a business book. It's not going to provide any practical advice of how to use or deploy Deep Learning. However, it's a book that will explore this new field in many more perspectives. So at the very least, you'll walk away with the ability to hold a very informative and impressive conversation about this unique subject. It's my hope that having less constraints on what I can express can lead to a more insightful and novel book. There are plenty of ideas that are either too general or too speculative to fit within a business oriented book. With a business book, you always want to manage expectations. Artificial Intelligence is one of those topics that you want to keep speaking in a conservative manner. That's one reason I felt the need for this book. Perhaps the freedom to be more liberal can give readers more ideas as where this field is heading. Also, it's not just business that needs to understand Deep Learning. We are all going to be profoundly impacted by this new kind of Artificial Intelligence and it is critical we all develop at least a good intuition of how it will change the world.The images in the front cover are all generated using Deep Learning technology.The cart and the horse is an apt analogy. The cart is like representation and the horse is the intuition that drives the interpretation of symbols. Artificial intuition drives complex thought, but they employ symbols as a means to scale attractor states. https://t.co/aonVdK3Rtc
The Vital Question
Nick Lane
Why is life the way it is? Bacteria evolved into complex life just once in four billion years of life on earth-and all complex life shares many strange properties, from sex to ageing and death. If life evolved on other planets, would it be the same or completely different? In The Vital Question, Nick Lane radically reframes evolutionary history, putting forward a cogent solution to conundrums that have troubled scientists for decades. The answer, he argues, lies in energy: how all life on Earth lives off a voltage with the strength of a bolt of lightning. In unravelling these scientific enigmas, making sense of life's quirks, Lane's explanation provides a solution to life's vital questions: why are we as we are, and why are we here at all? This is ground-breaking science in an accessible form, in the tradition of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.The previous book I finished (end to end) was Nick Lane's 'The Vital Question'. This one was a real eye-opener for me in that it introduced to me an entirely new vocabulary of how to think about biology. The book ends with Eukaryotic cells. It's a good segway to Metazoans.
The Nature of Technology
W. Brian Arthur
“More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being,” says W. Brian Arthur. Yet despite technology’s irrefutable importance in our daily lives, until now its major questions have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions and more, setting forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology. The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology’s origins and evolution. Achieving for the development of technology what Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress, Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives. The Nature of Technology is a classic for our times.@renatrigiorese You need to discard your anthropocentric viewpoint. I use the word technology in the sense advocated in https://t.co/6jvs0TcTsP
Other Minds
Peter Godfrey-Smith
@S33light @Mark_Solms @Everdojuan @mjdramstead @AsafKlaf @RiddhiJP @anilkseth A biological thing does not have to be conscious of its behavior. The idea of consciousness is that somewhere in the spectrum of biological minds, there is a state where a mind becomes aware of itself. See: https://t.co/Clp0stuuwW
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
The first volume of the graphic adaptation of Yuval Noah Harari's smash #1 New York Times and international bestseller recommended by President Barack Obama and Bill Gates, with gorgeous full-color illustrations and concise, easy to comprehend text for readers of all ages. One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one--homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us? In this first volume of the full-color illustrated adaptation of his groundbreaking book, renowned historian Yuval Harari tells the story of humankind's creation and evolution, exploring the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be "human." From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens challenges us to reconsider accepted beliefs, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and view specific events within the context of larger ideas. Featuring 256 pages of full-color illustrations and easy-to-understand text covering the first part of the full-length original edition, this adaptation of the mind-expanding book furthers the ongoing conversation as it introduces Harari's ideas to a wide new readership.I was thinking that I needed to revisit Sapiens by @harari_yuval . Well I just discovered that the book is now a graphic novel: https://t.co/QtUvKLdNiF. .
From Bacteria to Bach and Back
Daniel C. Dennett
One of America's foremost philosophers offers a major new account of the origins of the conscious mind.Daniel Dennett has an intriguing explanation of why Bach became famous. In his latest book (I don't know if he has a newer one) he argues that many became familiar with Bach's music style via the church choirs he wrote. https://t.co/uMiTlj1viE
The Scout Mindset
Julia Galef
The difference between an exploitation and an exploration mindset. https://t.co/9KPUyPrMWQ https://t.co/UN9D56jIRY
The Price of Tomorrow
Jeff Booth
I just read a book 'The Price of Tomorrow' by Jeff Booth that frames the world economy as the tension of the inflationary forces of fiat currencies and the deflationary force of technology. https://t.co/Dq0zTb47uL
Artificial Intuition
Carlos E Perez
I challenge you to find a field as interesting and exciting as Deep Learning. This book is a spin-off from my previous book "The Deep Learning AI Playbook." The Playbook was meant for a professional audience. This is targeted to a much wider audience. There are two kinds of audiences, those looking to explore and those looking to optimize. There are two ways to learn, learning by exploration and learning by exploitation. This book is about exploration into the emerging field of Deep Learning. It's more like a popular science book and less of a business book. It's not going to provide any practical advice of how to use or deploy Deep Learning. However, it's a book that will explore this new field in many more perspectives. So at the very least, you'll walk away with the ability to hold a very informative and impressive conversation about this unique subject. It's my hope that having less constraints on what I can express can lead to a more insightful and novel book. There are plenty of ideas that are either too general or too speculative to fit within a business oriented book. With a business book, you always want to manage expectations. Artificial Intelligence is one of those topics that you want to keep speaking in a conservative manner. That's one reason I felt the need for this book. Perhaps the freedom to be more liberal can give readers more ideas as where this field is heading. Also, it's not just business that needs to understand Deep Learning. We are all going to be profoundly impacted by this new kind of Artificial Intelligence and it is critical we all develop at least a good intuition of how it will change the world.The images in the front cover are all generated using Deep Learning technology.@JohnDobbin Nice wording of a queston. Yes we do. https://t.co/bOBUOzAwmG
Artificial Intuition
Carlos E Perez
I challenge you to find a field as interesting and exciting as Deep Learning. This book is a spin-off from my previous book "The Deep Learning AI Playbook." The Playbook was meant for a professional audience. This is targeted to a much wider audience. There are two kinds of audiences, those looking to explore and those looking to optimize. There are two ways to learn, learning by exploration and learning by exploitation. This book is about exploration into the emerging field of Deep Learning. It's more like a popular science book and less of a business book. It's not going to provide any practical advice of how to use or deploy Deep Learning. However, it's a book that will explore this new field in many more perspectives. So at the very least, you'll walk away with the ability to hold a very informative and impressive conversation about this unique subject. It's my hope that having less constraints on what I can express can lead to a more insightful and novel book. There are plenty of ideas that are either too general or too speculative to fit within a business oriented book. With a business book, you always want to manage expectations. Artificial Intelligence is one of those topics that you want to keep speaking in a conservative manner. That's one reason I felt the need for this book. Perhaps the freedom to be more liberal can give readers more ideas as where this field is heading. Also, it's not just business that needs to understand Deep Learning. We are all going to be profoundly impacted by this new kind of Artificial Intelligence and it is critical we all develop at least a good intuition of how it will change the world.The images in the front cover are all generated using Deep Learning technology.@MakingmyselfMkm We are Intuition Machines. https://t.co/wwMVje4v0r
The Deep Learning AI Playbook
Carlos E Perez
To understand how to apply Deep Learning, read my book that I wrote in 2017. https://t.co/CxuR3D0Ywp
The Evolution of Beauty
Richard O. Prum
@robinhanson The Evolution of Beauty might be a good book that relates to this.
A Pattern Language
Christopher Alexander
Christopher Alexander noticed that the complexities of expressing tacit architectural decisions. He realized that we can improve our designs by systematically formulating our tacit knowledge into new expressions. He called this pattern languages. https://t.co/pzxV1SuI3m
The Sum of Us
Heather McGhee
"Heather C. McGhee's specialty is the American economy--and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. As she dug into subject after subject, from the financial crisis to declining wages to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common problem at the bottom of them all: racism--but not just in the obvious ways that hurt people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It's the common denominator in our most vexing public problems, even beyond our economy. It is at the core of the dysfunction of our democracy and even the spiritual and moral crises that grip us. Racism is a toxin in the American body and it weakens us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out? To find the way, McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Mississippi to Maine, tallying up what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm--the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others. Along the way, she collects the stories of white people who confide in her about losing their homes, their dreams and their shot at a better job to the toxic mix of American racism and greed. This is the story of how public goods in this country--from parks and pools to functioning schools--have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world's advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare. It's why we fail to prevent environmental and public health crises that require collective action. But in unlikely places of worship and work, McGhee also finds proof of what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: gains that come when people come together across race, to the benefit of all involved"--This mirrors the draining of the public pools. Many places in the USA favored draining and closing down their public pools over the possibility of races mixing together and enjoying the benefits of the pool. https://t.co/Olg0BfQmCz
Atlas of AI
Kate Crawford
The hidden costs of artificial intelligence, from natural resources and labor to privacy and freedom What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? In this book Kate Crawford reveals how this planetary network is fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of research, award-winning science, and technology, Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the energy and minerals needed to build and sustain its infrastructure, to the exploited workers behind "automated" services, to the data AI collects from us. Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms, Crawford offers us a political and a material perspective on what it takes to make artificial intelligence and where it goes wrong. While technical systems present a veneer of objectivity, they are always systems of power. This is an urgent account of what is at stake as technology companies use artificial intelligence to reshape the world.Kate Crawford @katecrawford has an insightful book 'The Altas of AI' which examines in great detail the extent of exploitation that makes possible the knowledge and information economy that we live in. https://t.co/2ySLoKUfvW
LAWS, LANGUAGE and LIFE
Howard Hunt Pattee
Howard Pattee is a physicist who for many years has taken his own path in studying the physics of symbols, which is now a foundation for biosemiotics. By extending von Neumann’s logical requirements for self-replication, to the physical requirements of symbolic instruction at the molecular level, he concludes that a form of quantum measurement is necessary for life. He explains why all non-dynamic symbolic and informational controls act as special (allosteric) constraints on dynamical systems. Pattee also points out that symbols do not exist in isolation but in coordinated symbol systems we call languages. Such insights turn out to be necessary to situate biosemiotics as an objective scientific endeavor. By proposing a way to relate quiescent symbolic constraints to dynamics, Pattee’s work builds a bridge between physical, biological, and psychological models that are based on dynamical systems theory. Pattee’s work awakes new interest in cognitive scientists, where his recognition of the necessary separation—the epistemic cut—between the subject and object provides a basis for a complementary third way of relating the purely symbolic, computational models of cognition and the purely dynamic, non-representational models. This selection of Pattee’s papers also addresses several other fields, including hierarchy theory, artificial life, self-organization, complexity theory, and the complementary epistemologies of the physical and biological sciences.@okw @GaneshNatesh So there's a 'phase transition' between life and non-life and its artifact is DNA. It's not a continuum. I suggest further reading: https://t.co/wxH1GK5TLY
The Nature of Technology
W. Brian Arthur
“More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being,” says W. Brian Arthur. Yet despite technology’s irrefutable importance in our daily lives, until now its major questions have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions and more, setting forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology. The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology’s origins and evolution. Achieving for the development of technology what Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress, Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives. The Nature of Technology is a classic for our times.@ole_b_peters A good book to read in Arthur's 'The Nature of Technology'. Technology progress is always initially tied to existing legacy technologies. It doesn't magically replace everything in an instant.
LAWS, LANGUAGE and LIFE
Howard Hunt Pattee
Howard Pattee is a physicist who for many years has taken his own path in studying the physics of symbols, which is now a foundation for biosemiotics. By extending von Neumann’s logical requirements for self-replication, to the physical requirements of symbolic instruction at the molecular level, he concludes that a form of quantum measurement is necessary for life. He explains why all non-dynamic symbolic and informational controls act as special (allosteric) constraints on dynamical systems. Pattee also points out that symbols do not exist in isolation but in coordinated symbol systems we call languages. Such insights turn out to be necessary to situate biosemiotics as an objective scientific endeavor. By proposing a way to relate quiescent symbolic constraints to dynamics, Pattee’s work builds a bridge between physical, biological, and psychological models that are based on dynamical systems theory. Pattee’s work awakes new interest in cognitive scientists, where his recognition of the necessary separation—the epistemic cut—between the subject and object provides a basis for a complementary third way of relating the purely symbolic, computational models of cognition and the purely dynamic, non-representational models. This selection of Pattee’s papers also addresses several other fields, including hierarchy theory, artificial life, self-organization, complexity theory, and the complementary epistemologies of the physical and biological sciences.But to break out of the contradiction between physics and biology, one has to read Howard Pattee. Pattee is originally a physicist, so the way he frames his derivation of biology is from a perspective that makes sense to me. You can find his ideas here: https://t.co/EzsnVB6cUB
How We Learn
Stanislas Dehaene
I just read two interesting books about brains "How We Learn" by Dehaene and "Metazoa" by Godfrey-Smith. I am surprised to find that Grothendieck is described in both books. I've only heard of the name in passing, so I'm definitely missing something! https://t.co/dhrGno63By
Metazoa
Peter Godfrey-Smith
The scuba-diving philosopher who wrote Other Minds explores the origins of animal consciousness In his acclaimed 2016 book Other Minds, the philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith explored the mind of the octopus—the closest thing to an intelligent alien on earth, as he put it. In Metazoa, Godfrey-Smith expands his inquiry to animals at large, investigating the evolution of subjective awareness with the assistance of the far flung species he has met undersea. Combining vivid animal encounters with philosophical reflections and the latest news from biology, Metazoa reveals that even in our hi-tech, AI-driven times, there is no understanding minds without understanding nerves, muscles, and our active bodies. The result is a story as rich and vibrant as life itself, one that explains the mystery of animal consciousness in accessible and riveting prose.I just read two interesting books about brains "How We Learn" by Dehaene and "Metazoa" by Godfrey-Smith. I am surprised to find that Grothendieck is described in both books. I've only heard of the name in passing, so I'm definitely missing something! https://t.co/dhrGno63By
The Evolution of Beauty
Richard O. Prum
A FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, SMITHSONIAN, AND WALL STREET JOURNAL A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences—what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful"—create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world. In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum—reviving Darwin's own views—thinks not. Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus Pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. In thirty years of fieldwork, Prum has seen numerous display traits that seem disconnected from, if not outright contrary to, selection for individual survival. To explain this, he dusts off Darwin's long-neglected theory of sexual selection in which the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons—for the mere pleasure of it—is an independent engine of evolutionary change. Mate choice can drive ornamental traits from the constraints of adaptive evolution, allowing them to grow ever more elaborate. It also sets the stakes for sexual conflict, in which the sexual autonomy of the female evolves in response to male sexual control. Most crucially, this framework provides important insights into the evolution of human sexuality, particularly the ways in which female preferences have changed male bodies, and even maleness itself, through evolutionary time. The Evolution of Beauty presents a unique scientific vision for how nature's splendor contributes to a more complete understanding of evolution and of ourselves.Stumbled upon chance this book 'The Evolution of Beauty. Here's a lecture by the author. Appears the beauty is an emergent property of choice. https://t.co/y6eJN4WqSO
Signs of Meaning in the Universe (Advances in Semiotics)
Jesper Hoffmeyer
On this tour of the universe of signs, Jesper Hoffmeyer travels back to the Big Bang, visits the tiniest places deep within cells, and ends his journey with us - complex organisms capable of speech and reason. He shows that life at its most basic depends on the survival of messages written in the code of DNA molecules, and on the tiny cell - the fertilized egg - that must interpret the message and from it construct an organism. What propels this journey is Hoffmeyer's attempt to discover how nature could come to mean something to someone; indeed, how "something" could become "someone." How could a biological self become a semiotic self?@DrYohanJohn If you want an even shorter book, this one I also liked: https://t.co/RDR1T3TV50
Biosemiotics
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Recent debates surrounding the teaching of biology divide participants into three camps based on how they explain the appearance of the human race: evolution, creationism, or intelligent design. Biosemiotics discovers an intriguing higher ground respecting those opposing theories by arguing that questions of meaning and experiential life can be integrated into the scientific study of nature. This groundbreaking book shows how the linguistic powers of humans imply that consciousness emerges in the evolutionary process and that life is based on sign action, not just molecular interaction. Biosemiotics will be essential reading for anyone interested in the nexus of linguistic possibility and biological reality.@DrYohanJohn https://t.co/ymhsK8a2tN
Artificial Intuition
Carlos Perez
@leonardkish @TexPine Indeed. Please read my book "Artificial Intuition". https://t.co/9rO3RZXyqr
Feynman Lectures On Computation (Frontiers in Physics)
Richard P. Feynman
Very few are aware that there exists a Feynman Lectures on Computation: https://t.co/FS8N3MG2FO
Scale
Geoffrey West
Geoffrey West in his investigation of scale began with the question of why do organisms as ourselves die. He argues that one can not completely understand biology by ignoring death. https://t.co/PMmGUcvUr9
Radical Markets
Eric A. Posner
Revolutionary ideas on how to use markets to bring about fairness and prosperity for all Many blame today's economic inequality, stagnation, and political instability on the free market. The solution is to rein in the market, right? Radical Markets turns this thinking—and pretty much all conventional thinking about markets, both for and against—on its head. The book reveals bold new ways to organize markets for the good of everyone. It shows how the emancipatory force of genuinely open, free, and competitive markets can reawaken the dormant nineteenth-century spirit of liberal reform and lead to greater equality, prosperity, and cooperation. Eric Posner and Glen Weyl demonstrate why private property is inherently monopolistic, and how we would all be better off if private ownership were converted into a public auction for public benefit. They show how the principle of one person, one vote inhibits democracy, suggesting instead an ingenious way for voters to effectively influence the issues that matter most to them. They argue that every citizen of a host country should benefit from immigration—not just migrants and their capitalist employers. They propose leveraging antitrust laws to liberate markets from the grip of institutional investors and creating a data labor movement to force digital monopolies to compensate people for their electronic data. Only by radically expanding the scope of markets can we reduce inequality, restore robust economic growth, and resolve political conflicts. But to do that, we must replace our most sacred institutions with truly free and open competition—Radical Markets shows how.I first learned about quadratic voting in that wonderful book "radical markets". A must-read for anyone who wants to refactor civilization.
How We Learn
Stanislas Dehaene
Stanislas Dehaene in his book How We Learn describes four pillars of learning. https://t.co/7kqfjAOuuH
Artificial Intuition
Carlos Perez
IMHO, if you don't understand intuition and its relationship to deep learning, then you aren't on the right path. https://t.co/MLjweGTGjc
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
Leonard Shlain
Forging provocative connections among many fields, the author of Art and Physics demonstrates how alphabetic literacy caused the development of the brain's left half over the right, which affected the role and power of women. Reprint. Tour.@ETagliazucchi @KordingLab @WiringTheBrain @tyrell_turing Another book that I found interesting is Shlain's Goddess and the Alphabet. This is more about history but it revolves also around the same dichotomy: https://t.co/IBybi6Sbau
Radical Markets
Eric A. Posner
This reminds me, Radical Markets is loaded with innovative ideas: https://t.co/2vHkILnodF
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
Leonard Shlain
Forging provocative connections among many fields, the author of Art and Physics demonstrates how alphabetic literacy caused the development of the brain's left half over the right, which affected the role and power of women. Reprint. Tour.@personalitygeni Yes, thoughts do not require an expression in language. The book 'The Alphabet and the Goddess' examines the historical competition between language and empathy.
The Luminous Ground
Christopher Alexander
Christopher Alexander, an architect, who wrote 'A Pattern Language' that has immensely influenced software development, wrote four books exploring this idea (see: Nature of Order).
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman's book 'Thinking Fast and Slow' that is meant for a popular audience if virtually unknown by most people. I did not know of it until I tried to attempt an understanding of Deep Learning technology.
Catching Ourselves in the Act
Horst Hendriks-Jansen
Catching Ourselves in the Act uses situated robotics, ethology, and developmental psychology to erect a new framework for explaining human behavior. Rejecting the cognitive science orthodoxy that formal task-descriptions and their implementation are fundamental to an explanation of mind, Horst Hendriks-Jansen argues for an alternative model based on the notion of interactive emergence. Situated activity and interactive emergence are concepts that derive from the new discipline of autonomous agent research. Hendriks-Jansen puts these notions on a firm philosophical basis and uses them to anchor a "genetic" or "historical" explanation of mental phenomena in species-typical activity patterns that have been selected by a cultural environment of artifacts, language, and intentional scaffolding by adults. Situated robotics, allied with techniques and principles from ethology, allows the testing of hypotheses framed in terms of natural kinds that can be grounded through the theory of natural selection. This approach negotiates the "nature versus nurture" dispute in a radically new way. Catching Ourselves in the Act provides a thorough overview of autonomous agent research in America and Europe, focusing in particular on work by such eminent researchers as Rodney Brooks, Pattie Maes, Maja Mataric, and Rolf Pfeifer. It reassesses the basic principles of artificial life and explores the repercussions of autonomous agent research for human psychology and the philosophy of mind, as well as its affinities with the "contextual revolution" in sociology and anthropology. A Bradford Book. Complex Adaptive SystemsInteractive Emergence is a neologism that Horst Hendriks-Jensen uses in his book Catching Ourselves in the Act. https://t.co/JvX0Eilkw9
The Luminous Ground
Christopher Alexander
Almost everyone involved in software architecture knows of Christopher Alexander's book "A Pattern Language". However, few know of his later writings "The Nature of Order".
Physics from Fisher Information
B. Roy Frieden
A unified derivation of physics from Fisher information, giving new insights into physical phenomena.@FroehlichMarcel @sir_deenicus @GaneshNatesh @_fernando_rosas This is the book: https://t.co/H0vSl2qEZ7
Artificial Intuition
Carlos Perez
My journey into my explorations into general intelligence began with my book 'Artificial Intuition'. https://t.co/kg4BdMlOWP
Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
Lisa Feldman Barrett
From the author of How Emotions Are Made, a myth-busting primer on the brain in the tradition of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Have you ever wondered why you have a brain? Let renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett demystify that big gray blob between your ears. In seven short essays (plus a bite-sized story about how brains evolved), this slim, entertaining, and accessible collection reveals mind-expanding lessons from the front lines of neuroscience research. You'll learn where brains came from, how they're structured (and why it matters), and how yours works in tandem with other brains to create everything you experience. Along the way, you'll also learn to dismiss popular myths such as the idea of a "lizard brain" and the alleged battle between thoughts and emotions, or even between nature and nurture, to determine your behavior. Sure to intrigue casual readers and scientific veterans alike, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is full of surprises, humor, and important implications for human nature--a gift of a book that you will want to savor again and again.Seven and a Half Lessons about the brain is a short insightful book that points out the many misconceptions the general audience has about the brain. @LFeldmanBarrett https://t.co/nPSijnj3m5
Other Minds
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Enjoyed his book OTHER MINDS about octopuses. Looking forward to this! https://t.co/4qpmF4cOe9
Surfaces and Essences
Douglas Hofstadter
Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.@FroehlichMarcel @coecke @LimDonghunk Hofstadter's book is a unique treatment of categories: https://t.co/Lomb9Aav01
- The major principles and systems of C. S. Peirce's ground-breaking theory of signs and signification are now generally well known. Less well known, however, is the fact that Peirce initially conceived these systems within a 'Philosophy of Representation', his latter-day version of the traditional grammar, logic and rhetoric trivium. In this book, Tony Jappy traces the evolution of Peirce's Philosophy of Representation project and examines the sign systems which came to supersede it. Surveying the stages in Peirce's break with this Philosophy of Representation from its beginnings in the mid-1860s to his final statements on signs between 1908 and 1911, this book draws out the essential theoretical differences between the earlier and later sign systems. Although the 1903 ten-class system has been extensively researched by scholars, this book is the first to exploit the untapped potential of the later six-element systems. Showing how these systems differ from the 1903 version, Peirce's Twenty-Eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation offers an innovative and valuable reinterpretation of Peirce's thinking on signs and representation. Exploring the potential of the later sign-systems that Peirce scholars have hitherto been reluctant to engage with and extending Peirce's semiotic theory beyond the much canvassed systems of his Philosophy of Representation, this book will be essential reading for everyone working in the field of semiotics.
@rplevy @PsychScientists @LimDonghunk @vanbettauer @NoahGuzman14 Here's an available book that sheds more light on this: https://t.co/LYaowX2MrU
Rhythms of the Brain
Gyorgy Buzsaki
@markburgess_osl @purpleidea @elonmusk But if you want to know more about rhythms and brains then this I think is where you should start: https://t.co/RT41LymrQd
The Inevitable
Kevin Kelly
It's 2046. You don't own a car, or much of anything else, instead subscribing to items as you need them. Virtual reality is as commonplace as cell phones. You talk to your devices with hand gestures. Practically all surfaces have become a screen, and each screen watches you back. Robots and AI took over your old job but also created a new one for you, work you could not have imagined back in 2016. In The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly, the visionary thinker who foresaw the scope of the internet revolution, provides a plausible, optimistic road map for the next 30 years. He shows how the coming changes can be understood as the result of a few long-term forces that are already in motion. Kelly both describes these 12 deep trends-including cognifying our surroundings, valuing access over ownership, tracking everything-and demonstrates how they are codependent on one another. These larger forces will completely revolutionize the way we work, play, learn, buy, and communicate with each other. Ultimately, predicts Kelly, all humans and machines will be linked up into a global matrix, a convergence that will be seen as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event ever up to this time. The Inevitablewill be indispensable to anyone who seeks guidance on where to position themselves as this new world emerge.@neuro_data @KordingLab @criticalneuro @danilobzdok @DLBarack @tyrell_turing @BWJones @fchollet @Everyone But if you are trying to make sense of this world, then @kevin2kelly is the go to book: The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
Wayfinding
M. R. O'Connor
At once far flung and intimate, a fascinating look at how finding our way make us human. In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision—especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O'Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate. O’Connor explores the neurological basis of spatial orientation within the hippocampus. Without it, people inhabit a dream state, becoming amnesiacs incapable of finding their way, recalling the past, or imagining the future. Studies have shown that the more we exercise our cognitive mapping skills, the greater the grey matter and health of our hippocampus. O'Connor talks to scientists studying how atrophy in the hippocampus is associated with afflictions such as impaired memory, dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease, depression and PTSD. Wayfinding is a captivating book that charts how our species' profound capacity for exploration, memory and storytelling results in topophilia, the love of place. "O'Connor talked to just the right people in just the right places, and her narrative is a marvel of storytelling on its own merits, erudite but lightly worn. There are many reasons why people should make efforts to improve their geographical literacy, and O'Connor hits on many in this excellent book—devouring it makes for a good start." —Kirkus Reviews@neuro_data @KordingLab @criticalneuro @danilobzdok @DLBarack @tyrell_turing @BWJones @fchollet @Everyone For vacation and something that will stimulate your mind about machine learning? I got the perfect book: Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World
The Luminous Ground
Christopher Alexander
This is a book that begins with his ideas and the subsequent refinement of his ideas from the likes of David Bohm and Christopher Alexander. This is a book about how general intelligence arises from a simple idea.
How We Learn
Stanislas Dehaene
"In today's technological society, with an unprecedented amount of information at our fingertips, learning plays a more central role than ever. In How We Learn, Stanislas Dehaene decodes its biological mechanisms, delving into the neuronal, synaptic, and molecular processes taking place in the brain. He explains why youth is such a sensitive period, during which brain plasticity is maximal, but also assures us that our abilities continue into adulthood, and that we can enhance our learning and memory at any age. We can all "learn to learn" by taking maximal advantage of the four pillars of the brain's learning algorithm: attention, active engagement, error feedback, and consolidation. The human brain is an extraordinary machine. Its ability to process information and adapt to circumstances by reprogramming itself is unparalleled, and it remains the best source of inspiration for recent developments in artificial intelligence. The exciting advancements in A.I. of the last twenty years reveal just as much about our remarkable abilities as they do about the potential of machines. How We Learn finds the boundary of computer science, neurobiology, and cognitive psychology to explain how learning really works and how to make the best use of the brain's learning algorithms, in our schools and universities as well as in everyday life"--@peremayol @SubutaiAhmad @dileeplearning https://t.co/xBT0lFT4Hg
Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit
Donna E. West
This book constitutes the first treatment of C. S. Peirce’s unique concept of habit. Habit animated the pragmatists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who picked up the baton from classical scholars, principally Aristotle. Most prominent among the pragmatists thereafter is Charles Sanders Peirce. In our vernacular, habit connotes a pattern of conduct. Nonetheless, Peirce’s concept transcends application to mere regularity or to human conduct; it extends into natural and social phenomena, making cohesive inner and outer worlds. Chapters in this anthology define and amplify Peircean habit; as such, they highlight the dialectic between doubt and belief. Doubt destabilizes habit, leaving open the possibility for new beliefs in the form of habit-change; and without habit-change, the regularity would fall short of habit – conforming to automatic/mechanistic systems. This treatment of habit showcases how, through human agency, innovative regularities of behavior and thought advance the process of making the unconscious conscious. The latter materializes when affordances (invariant habits of physical phenomena) form the basis for modifications in action schemas and modes of reasoning. Further, the book charts how indexical signs in language and action are pivotal in establishing attentional patterns; and how these habits accommodate novel orientations within event templates. It is intended for those interested in Peirce’s metaphysic or semiotic, including both senior scholars and students of philosophy and religion, psychology, sociology and anthropology, as well as mathematics, and the natural sciences.@rplevy @prathyvsh @vanbettauer Speaking about Peirce's ideas on habit, there apparently is a book that ties his idea with affordances. https://t.co/p3W8wBkrGF
Surfaces and Essences
Douglas Hofstadter
Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.@bnielson01 I suggest reading Hofstadter's book to understand Analogy making: https://t.co/DbNaioxEr8
The Promise of Artificial Intelligence
Brian Cantwell Smith
An argument that—despite dramatic advances in the field—artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. In this provocative book, Brian Cantwell Smith argues that artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. Second wave AI, machine learning, even visions of third-wave AI: none will lead to human-level intelligence and judgment, which have been honed over millennia. Recent advances in AI may be of epochal significance, but human intelligence is of a different order than even the most powerful calculative ability enabled by new computational capacities. Smith calls this AI ability “reckoning,” and argues that it does not lead to full human judgment—dispassionate, deliberative thought grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action. Taking judgment as the ultimate goal of intelligence, Smith examines the history of AI from its first-wave origins (“good old-fashioned AI,” or GOFAI) to such celebrated second-wave approaches as machine learning, paying particular attention to recent advances that have led to excitement, anxiety, and debate. He considers each AI technology's underlying assumptions, the conceptions of intelligence targeted at each stage, and the successes achieved so far. Smith unpacks the notion of intelligence itself—what sort humans have, and what sort AI aims at. Smith worries that, impressed by AI's reckoning prowess, we will shift our expectations of human intelligence. What we should do, he argues, is learn to use AI for the reckoning tasks at which it excels while we strengthen our commitment to judgment, ethics, and the world.Brian Cantwell-Smith's short book explains the limits of current AI well. I do recommend everyone in the field read it. https://t.co/GLQ3c1mUIg
Surfaces and Essences
Douglas Hofstadter
Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.@markcannon5 Read Hofstadter to see how abstractions relate to thinking. https://t.co/Lomb9Aav01
The Promise of Artificial Intelligence
Brian Cantwell Smith
An argument that—despite dramatic advances in the field—artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. In this provocative book, Brian Cantwell Smith argues that artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. Second wave AI, machine learning, even visions of third-wave AI: none will lead to human-level intelligence and judgment, which have been honed over millennia. Recent advances in AI may be of epochal significance, but human intelligence is of a different order than even the most powerful calculative ability enabled by new computational capacities. Smith calls this AI ability “reckoning,” and argues that it does not lead to full human judgment—dispassionate, deliberative thought grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action. Taking judgment as the ultimate goal of intelligence, Smith examines the history of AI from its first-wave origins (“good old-fashioned AI,” or GOFAI) to such celebrated second-wave approaches as machine learning, paying particular attention to recent advances that have led to excitement, anxiety, and debate. He considers each AI technology's underlying assumptions, the conceptions of intelligence targeted at each stage, and the successes achieved so far. Smith unpacks the notion of intelligence itself—what sort humans have, and what sort AI aims at. Smith worries that, impressed by AI's reckoning prowess, we will shift our expectations of human intelligence. What we should do, he argues, is learn to use AI for the reckoning tasks at which it excels while we strengthen our commitment to judgment, ethics, and the world.@rtk254 @zacharylipton @MelMitchell1 Best book out there that makes clear the scope of AGI.
The Madness of Crowds
Douglas Murray
@pwang https://t.co/lZsT7razQo
- It has been the opinion of many that Wiener will be remembered for his Extrapolation long after Cybernetics is forgotten. Indeed few computer-science students would know today what cybernetics is all about, while every communication student knows what Wiener's filter is. The work was circulated as a classified memorandum in 1942, as it was connected with sensitive war-time efforts to improve radar communication. This book became the basis for modern communication theory, by a scientist considered one of the founders of the field of artifical intelligence. Combining ideas from statistics and time-series analysis, Wiener used Gauss's method of shaping the characteristic of a detector to allow for the maximal recognition of signals in the presence of noise. This method came to be known as the "Wiener filter."
@markburgess_osl Perhaps you might want to read Wiener's book that was actually classified at the time but served as Shannon's inspiration. https://t.co/iI8XeNWfcJ
The Promise of Artificial Intelligence
Brian Cantwell Smith
An argument that—despite dramatic advances in the field—artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. In this provocative book, Brian Cantwell Smith argues that artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. Second wave AI, machine learning, even visions of third-wave AI: none will lead to human-level intelligence and judgment, which have been honed over millennia. Recent advances in AI may be of epochal significance, but human intelligence is of a different order than even the most powerful calculative ability enabled by new computational capacities. Smith calls this AI ability “reckoning,” and argues that it does not lead to full human judgment—dispassionate, deliberative thought grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action. Taking judgment as the ultimate goal of intelligence, Smith examines the history of AI from its first-wave origins (“good old-fashioned AI,” or GOFAI) to such celebrated second-wave approaches as machine learning, paying particular attention to recent advances that have led to excitement, anxiety, and debate. He considers each AI technology's underlying assumptions, the conceptions of intelligence targeted at each stage, and the successes achieved so far. Smith unpacks the notion of intelligence itself—what sort humans have, and what sort AI aims at. Smith worries that, impressed by AI's reckoning prowess, we will shift our expectations of human intelligence. What we should do, he argues, is learn to use AI for the reckoning tasks at which it excels while we strengthen our commitment to judgment, ethics, and the world.@MelMitchell1 Excellent book. It's now my go-to guide on how hard it is to achieve AGI.
The Inevitable
Kevin Kelly
It's 2046. You don't own a car, or much of anything else, instead subscribing to items as you need them. Virtual reality is as commonplace as cell phones. You talk to your devices with hand gestures. Practically all surfaces have become a screen, and each screen watches you back. Robots and AI took over your old job but also created a new one for you, work you could not have imagined back in 2016. In The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly, the visionary thinker who foresaw the scope of the internet revolution, provides a plausible, optimistic road map for the next 30 years. He shows how the coming changes can be understood as the result of a few long-term forces that are already in motion. Kelly both describes these 12 deep trends-including cognifying our surroundings, valuing access over ownership, tracking everything-and demonstrates how they are codependent on one another. These larger forces will completely revolutionize the way we work, play, learn, buy, and communicate with each other. Ultimately, predicts Kelly, all humans and machines will be linked up into a global matrix, a convergence that will be seen as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event ever up to this time. The Inevitablewill be indispensable to anyone who seeks guidance on where to position themselves as this new world emerge.@kevin2kelly @Rickenhacker @thisischristina @stewartbrand @janemetcalfe BTW, your book 'The Inevitable' is indistinguishable from magic!
The Nature of Technology
W. Brian Arthur
“More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being,” says W. Brian Arthur. Yet despite technology’s irrefutable importance in our daily lives, until now its major questions have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions and more, setting forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology. The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology’s origins and evolution. Achieving for the development of technology what Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress, Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives. The Nature of Technology is a classic for our times.@emollick I recommend https://t.co/5H2Nm8zEIg so you can get a better handle of understanding technology.
Principles of biological autonomy
Francisco J Varela
Going through Varela's 1979 book 'Principles of Biology and Autonomy'. https://t.co/LACoMBTkFF
Wayfinding
M. R. O'Connor
At once far flung and intimate, a fascinating look at how finding our way make us human. In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision—especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O'Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate. O’Connor explores the neurological basis of spatial orientation within the hippocampus. Without it, people inhabit a dream state, becoming amnesiacs incapable of finding their way, recalling the past, or imagining the future. Studies have shown that the more we exercise our cognitive mapping skills, the greater the grey matter and health of our hippocampus. O'Connor talks to scientists studying how atrophy in the hippocampus is associated with afflictions such as impaired memory, dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease, depression and PTSD. Wayfinding is a captivating book that charts how our species' profound capacity for exploration, memory and storytelling results in topophilia, the love of place. "O'Connor talked to just the right people in just the right places, and her narrative is a marvel of storytelling on its own merits, erudite but lightly worn. There are many reasons why people should make efforts to improve their geographical literacy, and O'Connor hits on many in this excellent book—devouring it makes for a good start." —Kirkus Reviews@SimsYStuart Along similar lines but for humans: https://t.co/OSiKcgZEmn
The Beginning of Infinity
David Deutsch
A pioneer in the field of quantum computation explores the nature and progress of knowledge in the universe, arguing that humans are subject to the laws of physics but unlimited by what can be understood, controlled, and achieved.@rudzinskimaciej @pp0196 @sir_deenicus @bitking69 But I recommend @DavidDeutschOxf book 'Beginning of Infinity' for an explanation of where the ability for explanation comes from and thus perhaps the G-factor.
Gut Feelings
Gerd Gigerenzer
An accessible discussion of the science behind Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling "Blink" reveals the importance of intuition in decision-making, explaining how gut feelings occur as a result of unconscious mental processes that effectively function as practical information filters.In popular literature, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a bestseller 'Blink' (2005) that captured the idea of intuition. Gigerenzer followed with his less known book 'Gut Feelings' (2007).
Debt
David Graeber
Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. --@markburgess_osl Debt is indeed a promise! https://t.co/eJkiAOyH5h. .
Artificial Intuition
Carlos Perez
https://t.co/9rO3RZXyqr https://t.co/9DdXTgmjTt
Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking
Daniel C. Dennett
The philosophy professor behind Breaking the Spell and Consciousness Explained offers exercises and tools to stretch the mind, offering new ways to consider, discuss and argue positions on dangerous subject matter including evolution, the meaning of life and free will.I finally finished @danieldennett 's book 'Intuition Pumps'. https://t.co/0X90wtAk2n. .
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
@EnricGuinovart Best to read Kahneman's book 'Thinking Fast and Slow'.
Artificial Intuition
Carlos E Perez
I challenge you to find a field as interesting and exciting as Deep Learning. This book is a spin-off from my previous book "The Deep Learning AI Playbook." The Playbook was meant for a professional audience. This is targeted to a much wider audience. There are two kinds of audiences, those looking to explore and those looking to optimize. There are two ways to learn, learning by exploration and learning by exploitation. This book is about exploration into the emerging field of Deep Learning. It's more like a popular science book and less of a business book. It's not going to provide any practical advice of how to use or deploy Deep Learning. However, it's a book that will explore this new field in many more perspectives. So at the very least, you'll walk away with the ability to hold a very informative and impressive conversation about this unique subject. It's my hope that having less constraints on what I can express can lead to a more insightful and novel book. There are plenty of ideas that are either too general or too speculative to fit within a business oriented book. With a business book, you always want to manage expectations. Artificial Intelligence is one of those topics that you want to keep speaking in a conservative manner. That's one reason I felt the need for this book. Perhaps the freedom to be more liberal can give readers more ideas as where this field is heading. Also, it's not just business that needs to understand Deep Learning. We are all going to be profoundly impacted by this new kind of Artificial Intelligence and it is critical we all develop at least a good intuition of how it will change the world.The images in the front cover are all generated using Deep Learning technology.If you prefer a physical book, the you can find this at Amazon: https://t.co/bOBUOzAwmG .
The Angel and the Assassin
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
"Until recently, microglia were thought to be the boring little housekeepers of the brain, helpfully pruning away dead cells. But science now understands them to have a terrifying Jekyll and Hyde control over brain health. When triggered, they morph into destroyers, causing a wide range of issues: from memory problems and anxiety to depression and Alzheimer's. Under the right circumstances, however, microglia are indeed angelic healers, making repairs in ways that reduce symptoms and, now that we understand their true role, could one day prevent disease. A fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the science that identified microglia as our neurological immune system, The Angel and the Assassin also explores the promising medical implications of this game-changing discovery. Award-winning journalist Jackson Nakazawa (who herself has health issues explained by microglial behavior) follows three patients as they seek to reduce their psychiatric symptoms and cognitive issues through new treatments. Giving new meaning to the mind-body connection--emotional distress alters our physical health, and our physical health impacts our mental health--the discovery of the true role of microglia in brain health could rewrite psychiatry and medical texts as we know them. The Angel and the Assassin stands to change everything we thought we knew about how to heal our bodies and our brains"--It turns out there's a new book on this that just came out this month: https://t.co/d1ctq1y0HR . Bought!
The Deep Learning AI Playbook
Carlos E Perez
I wrote about his Jobs to be Done (JTBD) approach in my book The Deep Learning Playbook. He will be missed but his ideas will continue to resonate. https://t.co/cCZuxC1sps
The Deep Learning AI Playbook
Carlos E Perez
In 2017, I wrote the book 'The Deep Learning Playbook' https://t.co/CxuR3D0Ywp that described 3 pillars of research that will drive innovation: Meta-Learning, Modularity and Game Theory.
The Nature of Technology
W. Brian Arthur
“More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being,” says W. Brian Arthur. Yet despite technology’s irrefutable importance in our daily lives, until now its major questions have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions and more, setting forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology. The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology’s origins and evolution. Achieving for the development of technology what Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress, Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives. The Nature of Technology is a classic for our times.@gideonro Did he write this book: https://t.co/VrxmOGczLi ? Greater complexity happens because of the combinatory explosion of technologies that can be combined for use.
QUARK AND THE JAGUAR
MURRAY GELL-MANN
From one of the architects of the new science of simplicity and complexity comes an explanation of the connections between nature at its most basic level and natural selection, archaeology, linguistics, child development, computers, and other complex adaptive systems. Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann offers a uniquely personal and unifying vision of the relationship between the fundamental laws of physics and the complexity and diversity of the natural world.Gell-mann's https://t.co/b01oAPFTeJ page 229 for increasing complexity and page 231 for decreasing complexity. My intuitive explanation is slightly different.
The Enigma of Reason
Hugo Mercier
Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so useful, why didn't it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense? In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, is not geared to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. What reason does, rather, is help us justify our beliefs and actions to others, convince them through argumentation, and evaluate the justifications and arguments that others address to us. In other words, reason helps humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment. This interactionist interpretation explains why reason may have evolved and how it fits with other cognitive mechanisms. It makes sense of strengths and weaknesses that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists--why reason is biased in favor of what we already believe, why it may lead to terrible ideas and yet is indispensable to spreading good ones.--@YablokoU @GaryMarcus @AymericPM @MelMitchell1 No. The reasoning system that is supported by System 1 is described in the book 'The Enigma of Reason' that you have yet to finish.
Artificial Intuition
Carlos Perez
Glad to be one of the few people who kept saying that #deeplearning was an Intuition machine (i.e. System 1) several years ago. https://t.co/9rO3RZXyqr .
The Strange Order of Things
Antonio Damasio
"Damasio undertakes nothing less than a reconstruction of the natural history of the universe. . . . [A] brave and honest book." --The New York Times Book Review The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular existence and other primitive life-forms; and that inherent in our very chemistry is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate and transmit life. The Strange Order of Things is a landmark reflection that spans the biological and social sciences, offering a new way of understanding the origins of life, feeling, and culture. www.antoniodamasio.com@SimsYStuart @mathtick @markcannon5 Nano-intentionality. Read Damasio's book 'The Strange Order of Things'.
The Promise of Artificial Intelligence
Brian Cantwell Smith
An argument that—despite dramatic advances in the field—artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. In this provocative book, Brian Cantwell Smith argues that artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. Second wave AI, machine learning, even visions of third-wave AI: none will lead to human-level intelligence and judgment, which have been honed over millennia. Recent advances in AI may be of epochal significance, but human intelligence is of a different order than even the most powerful calculative ability enabled by new computational capacities. Smith calls this AI ability “reckoning,” and argues that it does not lead to full human judgment—dispassionate, deliberative thought grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action. Taking judgment as the ultimate goal of intelligence, Smith examines the history of AI from its first-wave origins (“good old-fashioned AI,” or GOFAI) to such celebrated second-wave approaches as machine learning, paying particular attention to recent advances that have led to excitement, anxiety, and debate. He considers each AI technology's underlying assumptions, the conceptions of intelligence targeted at each stage, and the successes achieved so far. Smith unpacks the notion of intelligence itself—what sort humans have, and what sort AI aims at. Smith worries that, impressed by AI's reckoning prowess, we will shift our expectations of human intelligence. What we should do, he argues, is learn to use AI for the reckoning tasks at which it excels while we strengthen our commitment to judgment, ethics, and the world.@markcannon5 @mathtick @SimsYStuart I recommend you read some philosophy: https://t.co/GLQ3c1mUIg
The Promise of Artificial Intelligence
Brian Cantwell Smith
An argument that—despite dramatic advances in the field—artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. In this provocative book, Brian Cantwell Smith argues that artificial intelligence is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. Second wave AI, machine learning, even visions of third-wave AI: none will lead to human-level intelligence and judgment, which have been honed over millennia. Recent advances in AI may be of epochal significance, but human intelligence is of a different order than even the most powerful calculative ability enabled by new computational capacities. Smith calls this AI ability “reckoning,” and argues that it does not lead to full human judgment—dispassionate, deliberative thought grounded in ethical commitment and responsible action. Taking judgment as the ultimate goal of intelligence, Smith examines the history of AI from its first-wave origins (“good old-fashioned AI,” or GOFAI) to such celebrated second-wave approaches as machine learning, paying particular attention to recent advances that have led to excitement, anxiety, and debate. He considers each AI technology's underlying assumptions, the conceptions of intelligence targeted at each stage, and the successes achieved so far. Smith unpacks the notion of intelligence itself—what sort humans have, and what sort AI aims at. Smith worries that, impressed by AI's reckoning prowess, we will shift our expectations of human intelligence. What we should do, he argues, is learn to use AI for the reckoning tasks at which it excels while we strengthen our commitment to judgment, ethics, and the world.Must read book for anyone doing research on any kind of AI. Explains the philosophical underpinning so GOFAI and 2nd wave AI (i.e. Deep Learning). Also explains the ideas from a historical perspective. I'm a big fan of Brian Cantwell Smith. https://t.co/kSmepRxll5
Surfaces and Essences
Douglas Hofstadter
Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.@miguelalonsojr @MelMitchell1 @lexfridman Read 'Surfaces and Essences' if you want the excruciating detail of analogies. It's a very long book that gets very repetitive. But if you want the gist, head to the last chapter that compares it with 'category making'.
Artificial Intuition
Carlos Perez
@yudapearl A key building block towards empathy is intuition. Some (like Yoshua Bengio) would call this 'system 1' in the dual process theory framework: https://t.co/SGDqiYfRJu
The User Illusion
Tor Norretranders
Explores how the "user illusion" of the computer world applies to our own consciousness, and encourages readers to find a better understanding of the consciousness and to celebrate the joys of the world@mpigliucci @danieldennett Another strange this is that Dennett's User Interface illusion is Tor Norretranders' https://t.co/uDkomBXNZZ . But Norretranders is never mentioned in @mpigliucci essay.
The Strange Order of Things
Antonio Damasio
"Damasio undertakes nothing less than a reconstruction of the natural history of the universe. . . . [A] brave and honest book." --The New York Times Book Review The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular existence and other primitive life-forms; and that inherent in our very chemistry is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate and transmit life. The Strange Order of Things is a landmark reflection that spans the biological and social sciences, offering a new way of understanding the origins of life, feeling, and culture. www.antoniodamasio.com@JulioMTNeuro @JohnKubie @andpru @NatashaMhatre @OlivierCodol @paulgribble @JCashaback @action_brain @lena_pl I agree that homeostasis is the purpose. Furthermore, I claim that the brain maintains homeostasis by deciding on action. Actually, this idea is explored in greater detail in Damasio's book "The Strange Order of Things"
The Art of War
Sun Tzu
The Art of War is composed of only about 6,000 Chinese characters, it is considered by many to be the greatest book on strategy and strategic thinking ever written. . 350F PROFESSIONAL READING LIST.Everything about human strategy can be learned by reading the 'art of war'. Example here of regurgitating very old wisdom: https://t.co/hvi2uxMdar
Why Red Doesn't Sound Like a Bell
J. Kevin O'Regan
The book starts by analyzing the problem of how we can see so well despite what, to an engineer, might seem like horrendous defects of our eyes. An explanation is provided by a new way of thinking about seeing, the "sensorimotor" approach. In the second part of the book the sensorimotor approach is extended to all sensory experience. It is used to elucidate an outstanding mystery of consciousness, namely why, unlike today's robots, humans actually can feel things. The approach makes predictions and opens research avenues, among them the phenomena of change blindness, sensory substitution, and "looked but failed to see", as well as results on color naming and color perception and the localisation of touch on the body.@SimsYStuart My definition of consciousness aligns with O'Regan's. https://t.co/8mCdz8Mm14 . I'm certain the trouble with consciousness debates is due to a difference in definition.
The Emotion Machine
Marvin Minsky
A leading contributor to artificial intelligence offers insight into the numerous ways in which the mind works to demonstrate how emotions and feelings are just different ways of thinking, in an account that poses controversial ideas about the potential for designing machines that are capable of thinking like humans. By the author of The Society of Mind. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.@ThomasODuffy I have his later book "Emotion Machine" (2007).
The Strange Order of Things
Antonio Damasio
Damasio's Strange Order of Things explains these interactions in great detail: https://t.co/e22BKrykHr
Machine Learning
Marco Gori Ph.D.
Machine Learning: A Constraint-Based Approachprovides readers with a refreshing look at the basic models and algorithms of machine learning, with an emphasis on current topics of interest that includes neural networks and kernel machines. The book presents the information in a truly unified manner that is based on the notion of learning from environmental constraints. For example, most resources present regularization when discussing kernel machines, but only Gori demonstrates that regularization is also of great importance in neural nets. This book presents a simpler unified notion of regularization, which is strictly connected with the parsimony principle, and includes many solved exercises that are classified according to the Donald Knuth ranking of difficulty, which essentially consists of a mix of warm-up exercises that lead to deeper research problems. A software simulator is also included. Presents fundamental machine learning concepts, such as neural networks and kernel machines in a unified manner Provides in-depth coverage of unsupervised and semi-supervised learning Includes a software simulator for kernel machines and learning from constraints that also includes exercises to facilitate learning Contains 250 solved examples and exercises chosen particularly for their progression of difficulty from simple to complex@rhyolight @KordingLab The more apt term is 'constraint satisfaction'. All perception and learning is 'constraint satisfaction'. Here's a book you should read: https://t.co/vZO5peRzKm
Lifespan
David A. Sinclair PhD
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A paradigm-shifting book from an acclaimed Harvard Medical School scientist and one of Time’s most influential people. It’s a seemingly undeniable truth that aging is inevitable. But what if everything we’ve been taught to believe about aging is wrong? What if we could choose our lifespan? In this groundbreaking book, Dr. David Sinclair, leading world authority on genetics and longevity, reveals a bold new theory for why we age. As he writes: “Aging is a disease, and that disease is treatable.” This eye-opening and provocative work takes us to the frontlines of research that is pushing the boundaries on our perceived scientific limitations, revealing incredible breakthroughs—many from Dr. David Sinclair’s own lab at Harvard—that demonstrate how we can slow down, or even reverse, aging. The key is activating newly discovered vitality genes, the descendants of an ancient genetic survival circuit that is both the cause of aging and the key to reversing it. Recent experiments in genetic reprogramming suggest that in the near future we may not just be able to feel younger, but actually become younger. Through a page-turning narrative, Dr. Sinclair invites you into the process of scientific discovery and reveals the emerging technologies and simple lifestyle changes—such as intermittent fasting, cold exposure, exercising with the right intensity, and eating less meat—that have been shown to help us live younger and healthier for longer. At once a roadmap for taking charge of our own health destiny and a bold new vision for the future of humankind, Lifespan will forever change the way we think about why we age and what we can do about it.Turns out David Sinclair published a new book a few months ago. https://t.co/KBo2sYxY26
Scale
Geoffrey West
Geoffrey West's book "Scale" ponders the question of why we age. He doesn't quite get to a model but discovers a universality in that a mammal's average lifespan is inversely related to its metabolism. Mice with higher metabolisms than humans live much shorter lives.
Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking
Daniel C. Dennett
The philosophy professor behind Breaking the Spell and Consciousness Explained offers exercises and tools to stretch the mind, offering new ways to consider, discuss and argue positions on dangerous subject matter including evolution, the meaning of life and free will.@GaryMarcus @danieldennett I'll only be convinced if you can survive Daniel's lion den of 'inversion of reason'. To prepare yourself, you'll need to read @danieldennett book 'Intuition Pumps'.
Surfaces and Essences
Douglas Hofstadter
Shows how analogy-making pervades human thought at all levels, influencing the choice of words and phrases in speech, providing guidance in unfamiliar situations, and giving rise to great acts of imagination.@GaryMarcus @fchollet Perhaps you need to read Hofstadter's latest book https://t.co/RFWuhfyItg . Should tell you what you need to know of what's missing in today's AI. Not symbols... but analogies.
Artificial Intuition
Carlos Perez
I'm glad I wrote a book about it two years ago: https://t.co/9rO3RZXyqr .
Artificial Intuition
Carlos Perez
@GaryMarcus @FelixHill84 @nutanc @geoffreyhinton But a word of caution. There are many problems in the domain of modern human problems that can't be solved using an S2 system. But solving AGI isn't one of those problems. AGI is completely an S1 problem and we have biological evidence that this is true. https://t.co/MLjweGTGjc
Mind in Motion
Barbara Tversky
An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we describe how we think, we usually do so in terms of an internal conversation. Indeed, some have even called language the stuff of thought. But if you can fill up a bathtub with just enough water to submerge your body without flooding the bathroom, you've accomplished something remarkable: abstract thinking without using any words at all. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky reveals that spatial cognition isn't just an aspect of thought, but its foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodily senses and the world around us. Spatial reasoning helps us to use maps, turn strategy into plans, design skyscrapers and spacecraft, even create mathematic abstractions. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.@KordingLab @MHendr1cks @jpmartinsci @RomainBrette I just finished reading 'Mind in Motion' by Barbara Tversky. But what you've just said means that all life is about motion. But what kind of motion do mammalian brains process that can't be processed by more primitive brains?
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned
Kenneth O. O. Stanley
@rudzinskimaciej @IrisVanRooij @zerdeve Considering the openendeness of reality, one has to explore intrinsic motivation rather than objective function. Read: https://t.co/Mal7TuvvxL @kenneth0stanley
Homo Deus
Yuval Noah Harari
Official U.S. edition with full color illustrations throughout. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity’s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods. Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style—thorough, yet riveting—famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda. What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century—from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus. With the same insight and clarity that made Sapiens an international hit and a New York Times bestseller, Harari maps out our future.@rudzinskimaciej @IrisVanRooij @zerdeve Brian Arthur has a good book that explores technology. Yuval Harari in Home Deus has a good historical explanation of how credit accelerates innovation. Innovation and learning are the same thing... knowledge discovery. So a meta-process is a good way to understand both.
I Am a Strange Loop
Douglas R. Hofstadter
@kanair @vijay750 Well, Hofstadter has another book "The Strange Loop" which metaphorically relates to an information closure. Cycles in Deep Learning are indeed an interesting concept that needs to be exploited more" https://t.co/do2OlsSXbL
Cybernetics
Norbert Wiener
2013 Reprint of 1961 Second Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Acclaimed one of the "seminal books... comparable in ultimate importance to... Galileo or Malthus or Rousseau or Mill," "Cybernetics" was judged by twenty-seven historians, economists, educators, and philosophers to be one of those books published during the "past four decades," which may have a substantial impact on public thought and action in the years ahead." -- Saturday Review. Cybernetics was defined in the mid 20th century by Norbert Wiener as "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine." Fields of study which have influenced or been influenced by cybernetics include game theory, system theory (a mathematical counterpart to cybernetics), perceptual control theory, sociology, psychology (especially neuropsychology, behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology), philosophy, architecture, and organizational theory. Contents: Part one: original edition - Newtonian and Bergsonian time - Groups and statistical mechanics - Time series, information, and communication - Feedback and oscillation - Computing machines and nervous system - Gestalt and universals - Cybernetics and psychopathology - Information, language, and society - Part two: supplement chapters - On learning and self - reproducing machines - Brain waves and self - organizing systems.@danbri @GaryMarcus Norbert Wiener's 1948 Cybernetics was a very good book. :-D I wonder if @GaryMarcus the many books on Cybernetics or later books involving Complex Adaptive Systems. A lot of the Enactivist Cognition arose out of this. My suspicion is that he has not. I could be wrong though.
Scale
Geoffrey West
@agonisti Read Geoffrey West's Scale https://t.co/PtSkouF2Y8
A New Kind of Science
Stephen Wolfram
NOW IN PAPERBACK"€"Starting from a collection of simple computer experiments"€"illustrated in the book by striking computer graphics"€"Stephen Wolfram shows how their unexpected results force a whole new way of looking at the operation of our universe.@GaryMarcus @MaharriT @NautilusMag When computers were invented did we change how we did science? Was that a fundamental change? Have you read Wolfram's ANKS, that argues that if computers came before calculus then science would be very different. To what extent is DL fundamental, that's unresolved.
The Inevitable
Kevin Kelly
It's 2046. You don't own a car, or much of anything else, instead subscribing to items as you need them. Virtual reality is as commonplace as cell phones. You talk to your devices with hand gestures. Practically all surfaces have become a screen, and each screen watches you back. Robots and AI took over your old job but also created a new one for you, work you could not have imagined back in 2016. In The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly, the visionary thinker who foresaw the scope of the internet revolution, provides a plausible, optimistic road map for the next 30 years. He shows how the coming changes can be understood as the result of a few long-term forces that are already in motion. Kelly both describes these 12 deep trends-including cognifying our surroundings, valuing access over ownership, tracking everything-and demonstrates how they are codependent on one another. These larger forces will completely revolutionize the way we work, play, learn, buy, and communicate with each other. Ultimately, predicts Kelly, all humans and machines will be linked up into a global matrix, a convergence that will be seen as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event ever up to this time. The Inevitablewill be indispensable to anyone who seeks guidance on where to position themselves as this new world emerge.@jim_rutt Brian Arthur's book is foundational in understanding technology. From this framework, we have to understand the existing technology landscape. Here I highly recommend @kevin2kelly book "The Inevitable". https://t.co/YaxAAgAmGu
The Nature of Technology
W. Brian Arthur
“More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being,” says W. Brian Arthur. Yet despite technology’s irrefutable importance in our daily lives, until now its major questions have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur answers these questions and more, setting forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology. The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology’s origins and evolution. Achieving for the development of technology what Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress, Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives. The Nature of Technology is a classic for our times.@eripsa @jancorazza @sugarbanter Have you read Brian Arthur? https://t.co/X3UJTrFGJS
The Strange Order of Things
Antonio Damasio
@PezeshkiCharles I just began reading Antonio Damasio's new book https://t.co/e22BKrykHr . Strangely enough, he's channeling the same idea of bacteria and ants having complex social coordination.
Artificial Intuition
Carlos Perez
Perhaps 95% of these books I haven't read when I wrote my first books https://t.co/HHvLHtJb36 and https://t.co/9rO3RZXyqr
Lost in Math
Sabine Hossenfelder
Most physicists think of beauty as the royal road to discovery; a leading critic shows it is instead the road to nowhere Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria. Worse, these "too good to not be true" theories are actually untestable and they have left the field in a cul-de-sac. To escape, physicists must rethink their methods. Only by embracing reality as it is can science discover the truth.@markburgess_osl @elonmusk @skdh has a book https://t.co/2KaUPDgWh0 that I believe tries to deconstruct 'semantic clarity'.
From Bacteria to Bach and Back
Daniel C. Dennett
@sd_marlow In D. Dennett's book Bacteria, Bach and Back, he employs his 'Inversion of Reasoning' to human society. That is why Bach is in the title. Collectives of nano-intentional agents aren't incompatible with inversion of reasoning. This is precisely how collections become smarter!