Here I present some thoughts about consciousness, especially arguing against the idea that consciousness is somehow not real, or an illusion. Descartes was the famous originator of cogito ergo sum. He argued that even if your senses were deceived, you could still be sure that you were conscious. And so consciousness would be the Tier 1 truth amongst the beliefs we hold. This is indeed the case for me, at least. Consider the following set of things: quantum field theory, the theory of relativity, neuroscienc…

A reply to some comments and an article I'd like to thank  SchopenHauer Pauer, [REDACTED], and Francois Tremblay for their comments in my previous post. Francois also wrote an article in response, which you can find here. I will address their comments in order. ANyone who thinks Benatar is the smug one, not the avowed pollyanna’s, needs a polemical spanking, and I’m just the guy. Why do I think Benatar is being a bit smug? Well, going to the book we find things like 'The cheery will say', optimists being …

Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted this week that seem interesting. Comments on some of them. This week I've been busy, so not many comments... Artificial Intelligence Evolution strategies as a scalable alternative to reinforcement learning "ES is easy to implement and scale. Running on a computing cluster of 80 machines and 1,440 CPU cores, our implementation is able to train a 3D MuJoCo humanoid walker in only 10 minutes" ... Well, at least it's technically not another case of…

Collections of papers and articles that I’ve spotted the last two weeks this week that seem interesting. Comments on some of them. Economics Are the rich more selfish than the poor, or do they just have more money? A natural field experiment. Turns out that controlling for the marginal value of money, they behave equally That is, people respond similarly to similar incentives here after that control. Other papers about this: More likely to make a charitable donation and contribute a larger percentage of …

[This is part of the Soviet series] The USSR Constitution of 1977 said Article 19. The social basis of the USSR is the unbreakable alliance of the workers, peasants, and intelligentsia. The state helps enhance the social homogeneity of society, namely the elimination of class differences and of the essential distinctions between town and country and between mental and physical labour, and the all-round development and drawing together of all the nations and nationalities of the USSR. One would thus expect…

Collections of papers and articles that I’ve spotted this week that seem interesting. Comments on some of them. Economics Short-Termism and capital flows I argued in this blog a while ago that short-termism is not an issue in capital markets. Even when it seems that stock buybacks are a case of short termism This paper provides further evidence of my view. Low interest rates: depression economics, not secular trends Okay, but this "The Great Depression was only ended by rearmament and war" no…