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Animal Sentience

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Human reasoning isn’t flawed, it’s a social tool we use in the wrong places. It’s about sharing and evaluating intuitive claims, not generating rational ones. AI is fundamentally this but crippled: without the grounded intuitions and social friction that makes it work.

AI Hallucination is just Man-Guessing

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One time I was out drinking with some Swedish folks and they told me about the word killgissa. It means something like ‘man-guessing’, referring to when you sound like you know what you’re talking about but you’re actually just guessing. I reckon AI hallucination is just man-guessing, but on your behalf. To explain, I first have to convince you that human reason isn’t actually that reasonable. With any luck it’ll make you better at managing your own processes of reason and your AIs. Let’s see.

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betterment digital-architecture on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture thought-architecture wealth-architecture

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System 1 vs System 2 is a useful shorthand, but our minds aren’t two-speed engines—they’re multi-process coalitions of specialised agents working in parallel and in series.

Beyond System 1 and System 2

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Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2—our fast, intuitive autopilot versus slow, deliberative override—have become a shorthand for human thought. But thinkers from Evans and Sloman to Stanovich and Minsky remind us that cognition isn’t just a two-lane road. It’s a bustling coalition of specialised processes—heuristics, conflict-detectors, symbolic reasoners—all running in parallel or in nested hierarchies. Fast versus slow will do as a starting point, but the real story lies in the many flavours and layers of mind at work behind the scenes.

System 1 vs System 2 is a useful shorthand, but our minds aren’t two-speed engines—they’re multi-process coalitions of specialised agents working in parallel and in series.

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betterment gratification on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture spiritual-architecture

article

Without time-travel, evolutionary narratives can only identify theories that don’t make sense (like death drives). It can’t tell you what theories do make sense, because you can make many to explain the same thing. All they do is let you see what people wish the world was like.

Evolution is overrated

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People love a good evolutionary narrative. I wouldn’t be able to count the number of times I’ve heard “back in our evolutionary past…”. Somewhere along the line, evolutionary theories went from a useful way to fix psychological theories, to a generator of some of the most superficially idiotic. And I think, reading between the lines, we can find a new use for them. But first, let me convince you that evolutionary narratives aren’t usually worth very much.

Without time-travel, evolutionary narratives can only identify theories that don’t make sense (like death drives). It can’t tell you what theories do make sense, because you can make many to explain the same thing. All they do is let you see what people wish the world was like.

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betterment on-aesthetics on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture thought-architecture

article

There’s no hidden version of you. If anything, we are a collection of bits and pieces that we weave together from the stories we learn from others. You don’t need to find an authentic self, you need to find a story you can weave that makes you happy.

There is no authentic self

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There’s this idea that other people’s expectations stop us from finding our ‘authentic’ self. Other people somehow take us away from who we are. Inside us is some truer version of us that is slowly withering in the face of the demands of the world around us to be something else. And I just reject this premise out of hand.

There’s no hidden version of you. If anything, we are a collection of bits and pieces that we weave together from the stories we learn from others. You don’t need to find an authentic self, you need to find a story you can weave that makes you happy.

Check it out

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betterment gratification on-(un)happiness on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning somatic-architecture spiritual-architecture

article

AI has human-like output, but a very different environment and different values for than environment, and until all three align, they will never actually be human-like.

AI is never human-like

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People treat lots of stuff like they treat humans. AI is one of them. We talk about how human-like they are. How long until their ‘intelligence’ is like our intelligence. How long until they start doing human things, like murdering their competitors. Things like this. But AI isn’t even approaching human-like. In two very fundamental ways. And until those things change, they’ll continue to be completely incomprehensible to us.

AI has human-like output, but a very different environment and different values for than environment, and until all three align, they will never actually be human-like.

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betterment digital-architecture on-the-nature-of-things on-thinking-and-reasoning thought-architecture

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