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In a bid to combat the ongoing homelessness crisis, Los Angeles County is using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and support individuals at the highest risk of becoming homeless.

This pioneering pilot program analyzes data from seven county agencies, including medical visits, mental health care, substance abuse diagnoses, arrests, and public benefit sign-ups, to identify those most vulnerable to homelessness.

Dedicated case managers then reach out to these individuals, offering comprehensive support for four to six months, including access to $4,000 to $6,000 in aid to cover essential expenses like rent, utilities, and groceries. This assistance is designed to stabilize not only their housing but also their overall well-being.

It is already disorienting enough to accept that our attention only absorbs a fraction of the events and phenomena unfolding within and around us at any given moment. Now consider that our memory only retains a fraction of what we have attended to in moments past. In the act of recollection, we take these fragments of fragments and try to reconstruct from them a totality of a remembered reality, playing out in the theater of the mind — a stage on which, as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has observed in his landmark work on consciousness, we often “use our minds not to discover facts, but to hide them.”

We do this on the personal level — out of such selective memory and by such exquisite exclusion, we compose the narrative that is the psychological pillar of our identity. We do it on the cultural level — what we call history is a collective selective memory that excludes far more of the past’s realities than it includes. Borges captured this with his characteristic poetic-philosophical precision when he observed that “we are our memory… that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.” To be aware of memory’s chimera is to recognize the slippery, shape-shifting nature of even those truths we think we are grasping most firmly.

Nearly a century after Nietzsche admonished that what we call truth is https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/03/26/nietzsche-on-truth…ral-sense/ the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (March 23, 1910–September 6, 1998) created an exquisite cinematic metaphor for the slippery memory-mediated nature of truth in his 1950 film Rashomon, based on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story “In a Grove” — a psychological-philosophical thriller about the murder of a samurai and its four witnesses, who each recount a radically different reality, each equally believable, thus undermining our most elemental trust in truth.

https://www.hdiac.org/podcast/neuroweapons-part-2/

The second installment of this two-part podcast continues the conversation with Dr. Giordano on the implications of weaponizing brain science. In an article he wrote for HDIAC in 2016 titled ‘Battlescape Brain’, Dr. Giordano hinted at the possibility of a neuroweapons arms race that could follow from international surveillance. Dr. Giordano provides an updated look at these concerns in the context of today’s environment. He concludes by describing ethical frameworks that could regulate future policies for biotechnology as the world moves forward in this dynamic area.

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https://www.hdiac.org/podcast/neuroweapons-part-1/

In part one of this two-part podcast, HDIAC analyst Mara Kiernan interviews Dr. James Giordano, a Professor in the department of Neurology and Biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center. The discussion begins with Dr. Giordano defining neuroweapons and explaining their applied technologies. He provides insight into the manner in which international weapons conventions govern the use neuroweapons and discusses the threats presented by neuroweapons in today’s environment. Dr. Giordano goes on to review the need for continuous monitoring, including his views regarding challenges and potential solutions for effectively understanding global developments in neuroweapon technologies.

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What is the mechanism that allows our brains to incorporate new information about the world, and form memories? New work by a team of neuroscientists led by Dr Tomás Ryan from Trinity College Dublin shows that learning occurs through the continuous formation of new connectivity patterns between specific engram cells in different regions of the brain.

Whether on purpose, incidentally, or simply by accident, we are constantly learning and so our brains are constantly changing. When we navigate the world, interact with each other, or consume media content, our brain is grasping information, creating new memories.

The next time we walk down the street, meet our friends, or come across something that reminds us of the last podcast we listened to, we will quickly re-engage that memory information somewhere in our brain. But how do these experiences modify our neurons to allow us to form these new memories?

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In the grand theater of the cosmos, amidst a myriad of distant suns and ancient galaxies, the Fermi Paradox presents a haunting silence, where a cacophony of alien conversations should exist. Where is Everyone? Or are we alone?

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Credits:
The Fermi Paradox Compendium of Solutions & Terms.
Episode 420; November 9, 2023
Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Editors: Donagh Broderick.

Graphics by:
Darth Biomech.
Jeremy Jozwik.
Katie Byrne.
Ken York YD Visual.
Legiontech Studios.
Sergio Botero.
Tactical Blob.
Udo Schroeter.

Music Courtesy of:
Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Markus Junnikkala, “Memory of Earth“
Stellardrone, “Red Giant”, “Ultra Deep Field“
Sergey Cheremisinov, “Labyrinth”, “Forgotten Stars“
Miguel Johnson, “The Explorers”, “Strange New World“
Aerium, “Fifth star of Aldebaran”, “Windmill Forests”, “Deiljocht“
Lombus, “Cosmic Soup“
Taras Harkavyi, “Alpha and…”

0:00:00 Intro.

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Is the Matrix really real? And if so, which pill would David Chalmers take?

Join us for a mind-bending journey through virtual worlds, human consciousness, technology, philosophy, and religion, and find out!

David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University and co-director of NYU’s Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness (along with Ned Block).

Remastered from an interview in 2022

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