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Meetups Every Weekday and Sunday at 8pm ET &
See all upcoming Meetups at a glance here: https://www.meetup.com/52LivingIdeas/events/calendar/
Bring your curiosity, your love of learning, share what you have learnt and let us build a vibrant intellectual community. Looking forward to your active and ambitious participation. See you soon!
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Upcoming events
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•OnlineComprehensivist Wednesdays: The Cost of Choosing
OnlineWe face options, we choose, and we move on. But judgment only really appears when not everything can be kept. Scarcity forces us to rule things out. Time, attention, and consequences make choices stick. When decisions are irreversible and costs are real, selection becomes something we must live with. In this meetup, we will explore how scarcity gives rise to judgment and how judgment helps explain consciousness.
Language models offer a useful contrast. As Murray Shanahan explains, large language models can be seen as simulators. At any moment, they generate a range of possible next sentences and then select one. Humans do something similar. We also carry multiple possible next sentences and choose among them. The difference is that human choices carry ownership and cost. A model selects without consequence. A person selects and then lives inside the result.
We will examine Antonio Damasio’s work and connect it to consciousness. Consciousness is not just awareness or information processing. It is the felt experience of having a self. It is where loss is registered, responsibility persists over time, and decisions become part of who we are. Consciousness is not what computes choices. It is what feels their consequences.
Sources:
There Are Monsters in Your LLM (Murray Shanahan)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztNdagyT8po
The Quest to Understand Consciousness (Antonio Damasio)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMrzdk_YnYY
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CJ Fearnley's book "Collaborating for Comprehensivity," is a unique exploration of comprehensive thinking, inquiry, and collaboration, is now available on Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and free PDF formats.
- The free PDF version can be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bapsUhFtRDSPdAW6zRBe7omBlcghz-yi/
- Available on Amazon Kindle for the lowest price Amazon allows of $0.99 here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CW1K18B5/
- Available as a paperback on Amazon for the lowest price Amazon allows of $8.31 here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D11GHC9V/
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Welcome to the series "Comprehensivist Wednesdays." Transdisciplinarity, Renaissance humanism, homo universalis, and Polymathy are some of the ways of describing this approach which Buckminster Fuller called Comprehensivity and described as “macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive.”
See the calendar at https://www.meetup.com/52LivingIdeas/events/calendar/
We record all our Meetups and post them on YouTube. Feel free to keep your video on or off as you prefer. Watch Past Meetups here.5 attendees
Past events
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