Lifeboat Foundation

Prefatory Note: Our usual policy at The Threepenny Review is to assign one book to one author. But in this case two of our longtime writers—P. N. Furbank, an essayist, critic, and biographer who lives in London, and Louis B. Jones, a novelist and essayist who lives in the Sierra foothills—both wanted to review the same book. So we let them. We think the results are instructive: not oppositional, not mutually contradictory, but very different approaches to the same subject. We are also pleased that neither Jones nor Furbank trained as a professional philosopher. (After all, philosophical theories, if they bear on reality, should be meaningful to the rest of us.) So here they are—first Jones, then Furbank—commenting on Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, out in the fall of 2012 in both America and England from Oxford University Press.

My stranded trailer in the woods looks onto a clearing where wild sweet pea vies with starthistle, fescue with blue-eye grass and miner’s lettuce, all competing as they’ve done, possibly, since the Sierra first crumbled into soil and started inviting plants to colonize. It is a patch of ground, then, that existed through the geologic ages in the peculiar twilight oblivion of being unwitnessed—until the first Maidu people came along, probably climbing up from the creek below. Before the Maidu, the witnesses of the place were the animals. And now these days I’m here, to substantiate this little clearing’s existence. It’s almost a weary old joke in philosophy, but still a surefire, hard-to-retire joke—that I’m necessary to this clearing’s existence. My mind. The joke, however, is making a serious, small comeback in this century.

You can demonstrate a subjective quality like redness is different from red light. If you add a device that converts a red signal into a green one, between the retina and the optic nerve, the strawberry will seem green. It’s not about light hitting the retina, it’s about how the signal is processed. In this case, the greenness must be a quality of our conscious knowledge of the strawberry, not of the red light landing on the retina. If you use sufficient, well defined terminology, you can objectively communicate the nature of subjective qualities. For example, even though you know what it is like to see something that is red you cannot know that what happens inside my brain is the same as yours. It may be that “My redness is like your greenness, both of which we call red.” The properties of the red light are the same, but the experience the light produces could be different.

Researchers are exploring how large language models (LLMs) can generate social networks, which are crucial for applications like epidemic modeling and social simulations.

Contribute to snap-stanford/llm-social-network development by creating an account on GitHub.

The Taichi-II chiplet, which could one day power super-intelligent AI models, ups the ante in light-based processing.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the brink of reaching a new significant milestone. A team of researchers aims to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), capable of surpassing human intelligence in various fields, by establishing a global network of ultra-powerful supercomputers. This project, led by SingularityNET, will commence in September with the launch of the first supercomputer specifically designed for this purpose.

Researchers have come up with a new method for 3D-printed adhesive that is much stronger than any other glue.

Footage making the rounds on social media shows what appear to be astonishingly lifelike humanoid robots posing at the World Robot Conference in Beijing last week.

But instead of showing off the latest and greatest in humanoid robotics, two of the “robots” turned out to be human women cosplaying as futuristic gynoids, presumably hired by animatronics company Ex-Robots.

“Many people think these are all robots without realizing they’re actually two human beings cosplayed as robots among the animatronics,” reporter Byron Wan tweeted.

Year 2022 face_with_colon_three

It might seem that the world’s landmasses are fixed, but as Richard Fisher discovers, there are major changes coming.

Nearly 500 years ago, the Flemish cartographer Geradus Mercator produced one of the world’s most important maps.

Continue reading “How the next ‘supercontinent’ will form” »

As an undergraduate he was drawn to theory, but he quickly switched to experiment.

“Theory was good, but I was driven to experimental particle physics because even if I write a theory, someone has to test it anyway,” says Gandrakota, who is now a postdoc at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. “I’d rather be the person who tests and finds stuff than the person who predicts it.”

But he never lost his soft spot for theoretical physics. Today, Gandrakota and his colleagues on the CMS experiment are developing a machine-learning tool that will allow theorists even more freedom and creativity.