The hottest Cognitive Science Substack posts right now

Mathiness can make people feel more confident, especially if they aren't familiar with math.
Adding complex math or 'mathiness' to information can influence how people perceive its quality, especially if they lack knowledge in math and models.
It's important to be cautious of trusting information just because it includes numbers or complex equations; don't assume accuracy or rigor without verifying.

The OODA loop consists of observe, orient, decide, and act, crucial for agency in a cybernetic system.
Fast transients and maintaining awareness are key to disorienting adversaries and maintaining agency.
Tools for thought expand awareness, build memory, and increase bandwidth for synthesis, essential for navigating complex environments.

The article discusses the binding problem in consciousness theories, which is about combining different features into a unified awareness.
Functionalism is challenged by the boundary problem, questioning why there are limits to our conscious experiences.
Electromagnetic theories of consciousness are explored, considering the role of EM fields in demarcating conscious entities and potential solutions using field topology.

Too much information leads people to rely on pattern recognition.
Under conditions of information abundance, any piece of data can be incorporated into competing narratives.
In a world of abundant information, everyone becomes a conspiracy theorist and we are all cultists.

Transformer models, like LLMs, are often considered black boxes, but recent work is shedding light on the internal processes and interpretability of these models.
Induction heads in transformer models help with in-context learning and the ability to predict information based on the sequence of tokens seen before.
By analyzing hidden states and conducting memory-based experiments, researchers are beginning to understand how transformer models store and manipulate information, providing insights into how these models may represent truth internally.

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Cognitive science shifted focus from meaning to information processing with the rise of the computational model.
The narrative mode of cognition, based on intentions and beliefs, is as essential as logical paradigmatic thinking.
Human self-understanding is influenced by cultural meanings and narratives, not just objective biology.

Gaps in AI capabilities are not evidence of human exceptionalism.
The 'God of the Gaps' logical fallacy relates to invoking higher powers in areas of ignorance.
Humans being unique is due to temporary limits, not supernatural qualities.

AI alignment can be viewed as a translation problem between different learning agents.
The AI-human translation problem is more about humans learning from AIs than vice versa.
Equipping AIs with human inductive biases may be crucial for developing more 'natural' AI.

The Aaron Lee Master Framework integrates various logical systems to understand language dynamics, emphasizing the contextual nature of meaning.
Key components like Non-Monotonic Logic and Fuzzy Logic help in adjusting beliefs based on new information and dealing with gradations in meaning, respectively.
The Framework's philosophical and logical foundations aim to provide a comprehensive model for the complexities of language and semantics by elucidating the emergence of meaning through interactions and context.