Sambourne House in London - a well-preserved Victorian middle class home, decorated by the Punch cartoonist Linley Sambourne - is a dream. I didn't want to leave

Typical of the waking self to think sleep is strange and wonder why we need it. Unconscious sleep is a return to the ordinary way of things. Wakefulness is just a neat trick for a certain kind of unconsciousness to sustain itself. How odd that we spend 2/3 of our lives awake aeon.co/essays/sleep...

This web version of Werner's Nomenclature of Colours by @rougeux.bsky.social is glorious. This is emblematic of what the internet should be for - edifying and beautiful

A lot of good sense in this one

Some refreshing conceptual clarity from @timbayne.bsky.social on ways of defining consciousness, though I think there's more of a break between his view and the mainstream one than this article explores

There's a terrible hubris in the label ‘the hard problem of consciousness’. It says: we have understood everything so well so far that this thing we cannot understand must indicate a mystery inherent in the fabric of the universe-

Best title for a paper I've seen for a while: 'Is the dynamical quantum Cheshire cat detectable?' arxiv.org/abs/2204.03374

Gauss: easy winner for best signature?

Interesting results but the paper doesn't define compositionality robustly enough. Condition (iii) - the meaning of the sum is "derived" from the parts - is a synonymous description, not a definition. Then measuring it as relative Euclidean distance in a semantic space is a weak proxy at best

I don't think current AI models are human-like but I also don't think anthropomorphic descriptions are problematic. Anthropomorphism is core to perception and language (it's the intentional stance) - better just to dissociate it from psychology, as when describing reasoning in e.g. insect behaviour