…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…