CM memes

I tried to report and record what is going on in mind while doing my daily 20 minutes of 'free-style' meditation.

I first reflect on my recent experiment with having a time-delayed interview on the show. Then I review the steps that let to my flip to idealism, in order to answer a listener question about how idealism has changed my daily life. Finally, I start to explore a new, 'practical' way of 'living' idealism - a topic some future episodes of this podcast may return to. References: The Lagrangian of the Standard Model (Ugly stuff) and Ian Miller's blog (Beautiful stuff).

We start to talk about the theoretical possibility of top-down-causation, using arguments from cybernetic control theory. We end with an hypothetical agent that dreams up the world and has a bias for simplicity.

In this first non-solo episode, I have a (time-delayed) conversation with Dr. Arthur Franz, who is devoting his time to built a 'thinking machine' - a generally intelligent agent that can create deep models of the world. This episode mainly serves a test case for the 'new' podcast format and to introduce Arthur and his way of thinking. Further conversations are planned in the future where we will dive deeper into Artificial General Intelligence and related scientific and philosophical topics. You can visit Arthur's WEBSITE to learn more about his unique approach.

In this improvised episode, I talk about the beauty and danger of reductionistic worldviews.

I struggle (again) with the Buddhist concept of emptiness and offer a (preliminary) interpretation from my naive perspective as a scientific idealist.

Motivated by a listener comment, I first reflect on whether it is a problem to talk publicly about topics without (much) knowledge. Finally, as part 1 of a new mini series on Buddhist concepts, I talk about Emptiness.

I first talk about the vagueness of notions like matter and mind, then about perplexity as a desirable mind state.

I start with new theories of natural evolution, touch on the limits of present AI, and end with new interpretations of prediction error minimization. LINKS

I respond to two important listener comments on existence (W.S.) and artificial consciousness (C.M.), ending up with the speculation that the brain  is actively preventing us from leaving the 'human subspace of consciousness'.