A Complex-Collectivist Manifesto

Years after Martin Luther King Jr’s riveting recountal of his dream for the future of America, theoverturning of “separate but equal” Jim Crow laws, and much hand-wringing by liberal Americans,racial segregation in the cities was continuing unabated. Perplexed by this…

Compassion for the Collective

Understanding the need of compassionate behaviour for a prosocial community You are on a zoom call, near the end of a long day spent in front of your laptop screen, and the person on the other end appears to have…

Man vs machine: The opportunities and fear of AI

There is such a thing as robophobia — an anxiety disorder defined by the irrational fear of technological advances in robotics, which encompasses drones, robots and artificial intelligence (AI). As Baun et al. noted, the underlying fear is that of artificially intelligent…

The Importance of Noise

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.…

How Unhealthy Is Stress, Really?

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…

Understanding Markov Chains

…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…

Superstitious Pigeons

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…

The Stories We Tell Us About Ourselves

…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…

The Epidemiology of Ideas

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…

The Brain’s Most Precious Resource

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…

More Is Different

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…

A Deaf Guy Gone Mad

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…

Romanticism and the Divided Brain

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,…

Alchemy and the Problems of Modern Science

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…

The Difference between Left and Right

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…

A Non-Technical Guide to Turing Machines

..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…

Is the Brain a Quantum Computer?

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…

The Geometry of Thought

…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…

Why Time is so Annoying

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…

Smart is the old sexy

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…

The Bayesian Brain Hypothesis

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…

What’s so weird about Quantum Mechanics

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…