6 comments

  • layer8 3 hours ago
    The end game is described in this short story: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1995-egan.pdf
    • tigerlily 1 hour ago
      Either that, or something nasty like the Gonchong from the Fighting Fantasy book series Island of the Lizard King.

      I would post a link, but the only standalone topic page is on a Fandom site, which counts as doubly morbid.

    • lifeisloving 1 hour ago
      Why do people think we're going to live forever. We hardly understand anything about the body.
    • tiborsaas 1 hour ago
      Who is the author?
  • HPsquared 4 hours ago
    This is going to be something in the cookie banners at some point.
  • hoppp 5 hours ago
    "identifying cognitive and emotional states"

    I have been looking for sources that can list human cognitive states. It's visible when people switch from one state to another, like going from creative focused thinking to conforming group think

    I can identify quite a few from the outside when talking to people, but I would love to have a list so I can connect my observations with technical terms.

    • asgraham 4 hours ago
      I would be shocked if there’s an agreed upon list, certainly not one supported by neuro recordings. You’re probably well-served by coming up with a good set by your own informal observation.
    • rhodey 4 hours ago
      "Robert Plutchik" "Wheel of emotions"

      Joy, Trust, Fear, Surprise, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, Anticipation.

      A start.

      • hoppp 3 hours ago
        Those are emotions . An example of cognitive state switching as observed on others:

        I went to a harbor master to pay for my berth.

        1. First state is social, we had a quick chat.

        2. Then he went to enter my details into a computer, which is a more focused task oriented state.

        3. Then we had a chat again, a more social state.

        So there were 2 cognitive states switching, a social, a task oriented and then another social one.

        • Kim_Bruning 19 minutes ago
          So I was pretty sure I'd looked into some of this before. I auto-genned an html page really quickly based on my notes and some searching; here's a link to what I managed to pull together. You're asking a pretty specific question, so ymmv, but it might be of use?

          https://vps.kimbruning.nl/random/hoppp_reading_list.html

        • D-Machine 1 hour ago
          The emotion / cognition distinction is somewhat poor and often breaks down, because you can't really have one without the other (different mental states just involve differing degrees of both, phenomenologically). They aren't really causally separable, but are only really phenemonologically separable (cognition and emotion have different feels / textures, but almost always co-occur).

          Most importantly, you rarely have "cognition-free" emotional states, because emotions always involve some mental model or representation of the self / world / self and world, i.e. they involve a cognitive state. Only in very extreme cases (drugs, perhaps some cases of persistent depression, etc) might you be able to have emotions that are largely uncorrelated with any kind of particular cognition.

          Likewise, the same is almost certainly true for cognitive states, in that we tend to think about / model things because we need to evaluate those things. Evaluation too seems to rely heavily on emotional processes, in that damage to emotional processing tends to make rational / logical decision-making severely impaired (e.g. Damasio's work in the 90s, or https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2396787/). Regardless, you can't remove evaluation / valuation from most thinking, and that is fundamentally linked to emotion.

          Doesn't mean you couldn't potentially build a machine / thing that detects mental states, mind you. But it likely won't be very useful if it is just using simple folk-psychological terminology and concepts (or using such concepts will likely not result in much insights into the machine outputs).

    • chiefwilsion 4 hours ago
      [flagged]
    • measurablefunc 4 hours ago
      You should record yourself & then label the videos based on what state you were in so that you can then verify it w/ an AI if you guessed correctly or not.
  • AIorNot 2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • worldsavior 2 hours ago
    > increasingly exploring its potential for severe psychiatric illnesses including major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

    I feel like many mental disorders would be fixed by just doing sports. I know some can't do sports, but most people can, and all of these solutions are actually bandaids because of living in the current world environment (where you scroll through social media, etc.)

    • xandrius 1 hour ago
      Either you don't do sports either or you are living proof that sports don't fix all mental disorders.
    • torben-friis 2 hours ago
      Would you recommend the same to fix a person's a broken leg or eyesight problem?
      • worldsavior 2 hours ago
        Already said "I know some can't do sports." Also didn't say anything about fixing physical health issues.
        • torben-friis 2 hours ago
          My point is not ability to do the sport, is that you're taking mental diseases as different from "physical".

          The brain is harder for us to understand than a femur, but that doesnt warrant dismissing its malfunctions. Exercise, good sleep and similar stuff is healthy for everyone, but suggesting healing OCD with that is just as ascientifical as suggesting to tough it out for a broken bone.