I think from first principles. I can translate every aspect of my experience – including the messy, emotional, human bits – into physics and mathematics. What follows is my faith. I believe that I am a cluster of conscious experience, traversing a massive mathematical structure that contains all possible states of all possible physical worlds. […]
The first time I heard the idea that roads should be privatized, I had the reaction most people do: “How on earth would that even be possible?” “You’d need to have cameras all over the place, and each of these companies would have to keep track of how far you drove on which road, at […]
We recently potty-trained our three year old daughter. This process was a great chance to integrate my understanding of predictive processing with a real life case of personal growth. Potty training a child is also a great example of how understanding yourself as a computational system can help you achieve your own personal growth. One […]
I watched myself make a choice the other night. It was fascinating. Earlier that afternoon, I was at the park with my daughter. I’d brought her some goldfish crackers as a snack. While she finished them, I picked out two, and ate them. I don’t normally eat that kind of food, but they were right […]
A common belief among rational, materialist adults is that faith is destructive. People like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins argue that all of our beliefs should be based on reason and evidence. By ignoring reason and evidence, they argue, faith allows people to believe all kinds of destructive falsehoods that end up having strongly negative […]
The ability to simulate other computational systems is incredibly powerful. When a human mentally simulates a machine, we call it debugging or reasoning. When a human mentally simulates another human, we call it empathy. Yet in both cases, the process is the same: a computational system (human or machine) models and predicts the behavior of […]
The predictive processing model of whole brain function gives a pretty good explanation for why the advice “show it, don’t tell it” works so well. When you tell someone, you’re giving them a higher level narrative, which ostenbily generates sensory predictions. These sensory predictions don’t necessarily line up with the current observed sensory inputs, and […]
It’s impossible to understand humanity without understanding how we store and transmit information. The technology of writing has heavily shaped the human experience. When writing was invented, it enabled new kinds of human cooperation, such as governments and commerce. Most people don’t think of writing as a technology, and most people don’t think of governmental […]
Why Justice Requires Computation I’d like to be able to say for certain that I own zero slaves. Of course, I don’t own slaves outright, in the de jure sense. There is no person who works for me without pay, and I don’t have any title or deed to such a person. But I’m not […]
Any electrical engineer will tell you: the two ways to overcome noise on a channel are using energy to boost your signal, and adding redundancy on the channel. Energy makes the signal louder. Redundancy allows receivers to better deal with loss. Shakespeare didn’t have electrical amplifiers, but he did have ancient, error-correcting code technology known […]