iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by @afferentinput.bsky.social

worm @rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

If you ever wondered why visible light is those particular wavelengths, it's because life evolved to see in the narrow range where water is transparent

Diagram of absorption of emf by water. There's a gap right that dips in the 500 nm range

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Indeed. This is from an article posted in Aug. finimize.com/content/cana...

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

And I say, "Hey! Lama! How about little something, ya know, for the effort?!?" www.youtube.com/shorts/NNhq7...

youtube.com

Caddyshack - Bill Murray's story about the Dalai Lama

YouTube video by Buzz Probe

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

His next project should be a reboot of this movie

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

What are these supposed good times he speaks of? There are zero prospects on the horizon for most Americans....

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Yeah, good point. It's 2026, and there is one poll showing her winning. In 2020, every single poll showed that Collins would lose, some by double digits. So I fully expect Collins to beat Jackson by 20+ points this time because why not.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Might be that I am in a bad mood, but not a single damn poll in 2020 had Collins up over her opponent. Some had her losing by double digits! I fully expect Collins to win, and probably by a lot, because America is a forsaken nation where nothing good ever happens.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Yeah, well, the same thing happened in 2020, and, look at that, she's still there. God hates us and wants us all to suffer, and he revels in toying with us. It's the only explanation. www.brookings.edu/articles/the....

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Inside each of us there are two Bruce Campbells.

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Reposted by @afferentinput.bsky.social

Jeff Berardelli @weatherprof.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

JUST IN: Today El Niño Broke its Record Hottest Temperature Ever! 🥵 Today the El Niño region surpassed 2015 for the highest temp ever measured in the El Niño (3.4) region. It comes 2 months earlier than typical peak (late Nov/ Dec)…

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Yeah, but you have to count the previews and commercials before the movie starts. Then it's more than 12 hours...

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

More evidence that vaccines work, lol pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

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Reposted by @afferentinput.bsky.social

afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

About ten years ago, my 6 YO son that was in Kindergarten had a Google classroom attached to his name that was called "I Love Porn". It was being used as chat room for bunch of fifth grade boys to post stupid memes and crap. How did this happen? ....

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The school district IT was not pleased, needless to say. At first they thought it might have been my younger son, which was soooooo funny. But they figured it out pretty quickly closed the loophole.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Turns out his older brother figured out that younger kids have google accounts that we not yet set up as "student" or "teacher", and when you log in for the first time, you can choose. So he hijacked his younger brother's account and started the classroom and invited all his friends.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Sidenote: "personhood" is the right concept, but the wrong word, since AI cannot and will not ever be people. Anyway, just some random thoughts from a neuroscientist about a weighty issues that came to "mind" because I read the thoughts of one of my favorite authors...

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

And, while LLMs and LRMs are not exactly how humans "think", there are some similarities, and they are much more similar than other "natural" processes. AI does not deserve personhood (yet), but it's not inconceivable that such things may need to be considered sooner than later.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I definitely don't want to be accused of strawmanning Doctorow's argument. He doesn't explicitly say that the human mind is built upon magic, and I would certainly guess he doesn't believe such a thing.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

They are not the same as human minds, no doubt. But the processes that underlie AI "thinking and reasoning" share much more with the processes that human "thinking and reasoning" than the processes that generate a sunset shares with a those that generate the painting of a sunset.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

AI is not yet at the level of what humans can do, particularly when it comes to creativity, as Doctorow points out. I have also noticed the "smoothness" he describes about AI output. But that isn't to say that these processes are wholly different from those that underlie the human "mind".

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

And they are driven by various subsystems in the brain, with interaction between all of them. Much of this was articulated by Gilbert Ryle nearly 80's years ago in his book The Concept of Mind. Fun side note, he coined the term "Ghost in the Machine" in this book. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Con...

en.wikipedia.org

The Concept of Mind - Wikipedia

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

But the human mind is not something that is magical. And, in fact, it can't be magic, because the "mind" is not a thing that exists. It's a useful concept to describe a series of processes that brains do. Perception, memory, emotion, language, categorization, attention... these are all processes.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Almost all of us, atheists included, put the human mind on too high a pedestal. I get it. I am a neuroscientist, and I am stunned by the brain's complexity. It's an extraordinary feat of evolution that something like the brain evolved at all, let alone emerged as the amazing organ it is.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

But does that mean AI-generated content is more like a natural sunset and less like a painted one? I would argue that, at the very least, it is something in between, and probably more like latter than the former. I think Doctorow is making a category error almost everyone makes.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Things and events for which we have no natural explanation can be easily explained by the doings of Gods and Monsters. It's easy for use to imagine spirits imbued in our environment when so much of it, by random chance, is going to trigger the facial-recognition parts of our brains.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

seeing humanity in things that are not human. A knot of a tree looks like human face. Does this tree have a soul? A cloud undulates like a dragon flying through the sky, giving us the sense of intention and purpose. And this knack becomes a useful way of explaining the unknown.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I think the human impulse to ascribe "intention" and "purpose" to things and events that are not the result of the activity of minds is one the core reasons why humans developed belief in the supernatural and higher beings in the first place. We anthropomorphize, ....

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Doctorow declares, though, that AI images of a sunset are not the result of a designer, despite the fact that AI-generated images can thoroughly impress us, especially at first. These are, instead, the result of mindless "mathematics", algorithms smoothing out human-generated efforts.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

He goes on to explain how a painting of sunset can still spark awe and wonder, but we know, of course, that a painting has a painter, which represents her "mind's eye's" expression, springing forth from her mental image and experience of what makes a sunset beautiful.

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Just about everyone can agree that sunsets are beautiful, but are they purposeful? Did a mind "make" a sunset? As Doctorow points out, many Believers see the colors of a sunset and think that God made this just for them (or humanity in general if they are less self-absorbed)

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afferentinput.bsky.social @afferentinput.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

First, I want to point out parts I agree with that are totally worth highlighting. Humans have a knack for ascribing "intent" and "purpose" to things that, in fact, are not the result of the action of a mind. This is the core problem with the Intelligent Design movement bsky.app/profile/doct...

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