Lifeboat Foundation

Evolutionary accounts of feelings, and in particular of negative affect and of pain, assume that creatures that feel and care about the outcomes of their behavior outperform those that do not in terms of their evolutionary fitness. Such accounts, however, can only work if feelings can be shown to contribute to fitness-influencing outcomes. However, simply assuming that a learner that feels and cares about outcomes is more strongly motivated than one that doesn’t is not enough — if only because motivation can be tied directly to outcomes through an appropriate reward function, without leaving any apparent role to feelings (as it is done in state-of-the-art engineered systems based on reinforcement learning). Here, we propose a possible mechanism whereby pain contributes to fitness: an actor-critic functional architecture for reinforcement learning, in which pain reflects the costs imposed on actors in their bidding for control, so as to promote honest signaling and ultimately help the system optimize learning and future behavior.

Been waiting for this to come out since discovering the Shawn ryan show…pretty excited to be finally getting around to it!

Shawn Ryan Show · Episode.

In a new animation, scientists map the planet’s plate tectonics over the last 40 percent of its history. It’s the longest such reconstruction yet.

This is a ~40 minute talk on the future of medicine from my perspective given remotely to students at the University of Bologna, Italy.

Google partners with GASA and DNS RF to launch Global Signal Exchange, enhancing real-time scam detection.

Mozilla urges users to update Firefox after critical CVE-2024–9680 vulnerability is actively exploited.

I like philosophy, especially since science emerged out of philosophy. This fascinating aspect of intellectual history gets missed when philosophy is an outlier of longevity events and even excluded. Bottom line: we still need philosophy re: AI, AGI, longevity, and new types of environments — from virtual to space. So, while we may not need philosophy to explain the physical world or the science of longevity, we still need it to help deal with human complexities. Philosophy is crucial to thinking about the future for several important reasons, at the very least to form conceptual analyses in understanding the limits of our knowledge about the future.

Essentia Foundation’s Hans Busstra visited Vienna to attend a conference on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and interview physicists on the metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics. In this essay, he argues that what is called ‘experimental metaphysics’ might be at the heart of future progress in physics, and that philosophy and physics are moving closer together.

In recent research on Large Language Models (LLMs), there’s been a focus on improving how these models handle complex reasoning tasks.