On the role of uncertainty in evolution, markets, neuroscience, and AI The world is unpredictable in many ways. This has been the natural state of affairs for all living beings fighting an uphill battle for survival within an ever-evolving world.…
When I first started work on my doctoral degree, a project skirting the lines of neuroscience and molecular genetics, I had a mild idea of what I wanted from the science I was about to pursue and what I was…
In the ever-quickening pace of modern life, stress is an ever-present factor. Stress is one of the most important risk factors for mental and physical health in developed countries, increasing the incidence of mental illness and mortality. Two thirds of…
There’s no doubt that our lives are constantly filled with decisions. Whether it’s figuring out what to have for breakfast, which route to take to work, or what to watch on Netflix for the evening, we always need to make…
…with important implications for AI The mind tries to understand the world in terms of concepts, most of which are dressed in language and in some cases, in mathematics. But our conceptual understanding of the world suffers from a chicken-and-egg…
…and their connections to Neuroscience, AI and Russian Poetry “My dreams, my dreams! What has become of their sweetness? What indeed has become of my youth?”― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin It might seem strange to start an article on Markov…
How do structure and meaning relate, and how do we explain the existence of such structures? By story or by reason? Welcome back to Part III of our series on the philosophical foundations of AI. (In case you missed them:…
Logic, meaning, and the social and ethical side of things In Part II of this series (see Part I here), we move from the biblical foundations of language and logic to more of the human, social side of things. You…
Tracing the history of Western thought from Plato, Descartes, and eventually, to science and AI This series of posts explores the unfathomably complex intellectual landscape connecting the history of philosophy with modern AI. AI is, in some sense, the most…
The Association for Critical and Interdisciplinary Thinking (ACIT) is a global non-profit think-tank and research institute founded to understand the intersections of artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, and social change. ACIT is dedicated to spreading free education in the world, supporting…
This article was originally released in Switzerland’s leading communication magazine Persönlich. You can find the original German version here. The pandemic has fundamentally changed the ways in which companies operate and people work together. But what impact does this digitalization…
Seeing the light is a choice, not seeing the light is no choice.Douglas Horton The pandemic has changed the working habits of millions of people around the globe. For many, remote work has quickly turned from an emergency solution to…
The 14th century. Times are tough — the Hundred Years’ War is raging, newly freed peasants are trying to find a place in society, and a plague is afoot. The Black Death has already killed a third of the population…
Keep on with the force don’t stopDon’t stop ’til you get enough.– Michael Jackson The world is a rich place of opportunities waiting to be discovered, of actions to be taken and choices to be made. We mere mortals have…
Distinguishing uncertainties helps us better understand neural networks. Neural networks are riddled with uncertainty. After feeding an input through a neural network to retrieve an output, we cannot be sure that the output we got is a correct description of…
…how problems encountered in AI research mirror our own cognitive biases The brain is an intricate organ, with billions of neurons with trillions of connections forming a hugely intricate nonlinear dynamical system. It’s arguably the most complex structure in the…
People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people. — Carl Jung A virus is an infectious agent that replicates in the living cell of a host organism. In a sense, a virus in itself is not alive. It instead relies on…
It’s scary how much people believe in science.Stephen Wolfram Immanuel Kant, perhaps the most important philosopher of modernity, hated determinism. How could man retain what made him most humane in the face of the unfolding clockwork of the universe? (Wo)man,…
The role of attention in neuroscience, deep learning, and everyday life The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is one of the most intricate machines mankind has ever built. When it’s running, every second approximately one billion particles smash into each other…
On the limitations of reductionism “The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe”.P.W.Anderson What is the most real thing in the world? Is it the…
On the interplay between art, emotions, and our brains that construct them “‘Tristan und Isolde’ is the central work of all music history, the hub of the wheel… I have spent my life since I first read it, trying to…
While ACIT is an organization about critical thinking and science, we believe that the boundaries of art and science don’t always need to be so clear cut. That’s why we wanted to take up the opportunity of Beethoven’s 250th birthday…
Traditionally, human beings are said to have five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. Our senses bring us into contact with the outside world. All we know about the world has to come in through our sensory organs before it…
How human history is shaped by neural anatomy “Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast, each seeks to rule without the other. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century,…
How our biases and expectations keep shaping our results The 16th century was a turbulent time for Europe. With Luther’s reformation and Henry’s separation of the English from the Catholic Church (the original Brexit, if you will), the hold Rome…
In times of increasing division between the Right and the Left, I want to spend a couple of minutes leaving all political tension and controversy aside, approaching the whole problem of Left and Right from a somewhat different angle. In…
..and how they can help us understand our DNA Photo by Brian Kostiuk – @BriKost on Unsplash Turing machines are the ultimate computers. A Universal Turing machine can compute so well, it can even compute other Turing machines that can…
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay After the mildly clickbaity title, I have to start out with some honesty: we don’t really know if the brain is a quantum computer or not. But as with many a question we don’t…
Learning from one of mankind’s greatest geniuses What did the inventor of the helicopter, the inventor of scuba diving gear, the first man to design a parachute, and the first person to correctly describe the blood flows in the heart…
…how the brain creates conceptual spaces By José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior [Public domain] We think every day, but it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly we mean by the word. When we try to understand thought, we have to grasp…
A case for overcoming the p-value Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash When is a scientific discovery really a discovery? When does a hunch about something that could be true turn into something mankind collectively holds to be true? The…
…how the physics of life could explain why we haven’t met any aliens yet It is still weird for me to think that humans just happened to wake up here on earth one day without having a clue where we…
How self-learning AI could re-define our concepts of creativity The triumph of Google’s AlphaGo in 2016 against Go world champion Lee Sedol by 4:1 caused quite the stir that reached far beyond the Go community, with over a hundred million…
A physicist’s letter of complaint “I have become Time, the destroyer of your desire to do physics.” Bhagavad Gita, approximate translation Every child knows what time is. It’s literally everywhere. Nothing makes sense without it. No one can even imagine…
“When one understands the causes, all vanished images can easily be found again in the brain through the impression of the cause. This is the true art of memory…” Rene Descartes, Cogitationes privatae. Close your eyes (bad opening phrase when…
How much information do you need to build a human being and, more specifically, a human brain? After all, we are by far the most complex species on the planet. To take it up a notch, some of our brains…
Photo by Stephen Radford on Unsplash Why did you click on this post? Because of the title? Because of the picture of an explosion that will be absolutely unrelated to the content of this article? Did you even consciously decide…
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, — My friend, you would not tell with such high zest…
On the importance of Sexual Selection in the Evolution of Human Intelligence The question of how mankind got here is a curious one. How is it that we differ so profoundly from all the other animals on the planet? How…
How our brain evolved to look into the future If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not… Macbeth, William Shakespeare Life is riddled with uncertainty, and no one can tell…
In my previous article, I looked at What’s so Weird About Quantum Mechanics. I closed with a quote of Feynman stating that “Quantum Mechanics is so confusing that I don’t even know if there’s a problem.” Now I want to move…
I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” (R. Feynman) Quantum Mechanics (QM) is the “best” theory of the world physicists have at the moment (at least of everything apart from gravity). But it’s infamously hard to…