Clearly there’s a tradeoff to be made here. In order to learn about the world, you need to let ideas in. But the more ideas you let in, the more bad ideas you let in. You can (and should) set up border controls, but you can’t achieve perfect truth-filtering any more than you can turn your house into a cleanroom or ride the subway in a hazmat suit.

In order to get any thinking done, you have to accept some probability of being wrong. The question is, how much?

~ Kevin Simler from, https://www.meltingasphalt.com/border-stories/

If you’ve been following me a while, you’ve been exposed to Melting Asphalt and know what to expect if you follow that link.

…but especially if you don’t know what to expect, you should click that link and go have your horizons broadened, and your borders strengthened.

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What I’m going to argue today is that agency is a fundamental property of the brain. Not only is agency the function of the brain — and thus it’s very reason for existence — but it’s also built into the brain’s fabric and architecture. Because even neurons have agency, in the form of (metabolic) selfishness, higher-order brain systems don’t need to create agency ‘from scratch’ out of mindless robotic slaves. They inherit agency pretty much for free.

~ Kevin Simler from, http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/

The question of agency occassionally sucks me into a deep whirlpool of introspection. The idea that it might arise as an emergent property simply from the huge number of neurons is intriguing.

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