Hello, and welcome to this first mid-week update in The Human Ingenuity Feed.
My aim is to distribute these mid-week posts, or “Software Updates”, on a weekly basis. Going forward, this will be one of the elements of this newsletter that’s only available to paid subscribers.
Hopefully, they won’t cause any blue screens of death.
You know how the software world works… The first update is free. The others reel you in. By the way, here’s that inconspicuous button to subscribe or upgrade your subscription:
This will serve as a weekly space where I share articles, developments, and world updates that are related to the fields of exploration we’ll be covering in this Feed. I might make reading or content suggestions, share work from other individuals, and other tidbits that I hope (keyword) will provide you with additional value.
I’ll provide my commentary and thoughts where appropriate. As always, I invite you to do the same.
Each Software Update will be broken down into two major sections - The World Without and The World Within. The idea is to increase clarity and for you to more easily navigate towards what you are really interested in. It should also make it easier for you to take breaks between content pieces to later return (if you so choose).
Some of the subsections may float in and out with time.
This being the first, it’ll be a little more all-encompassing. There are more bugs to quash in any first release, after all.
Here we go…
The World Without
Spinning Globe
The latest on Human Ingenuity.
A New Theory in Physics Claims to Solve the Mystery of Consciousness
There’s a new approach to an understanding of consciousness.
It essentially says that consciousness should be understood as a relativistic phenomenon. In other words, its experience varies according to the viewer’s frame of reference: you can infer that someone’s happy by seeing them smile or laugh; by the oppenness of their posture; the glint in their eyes. But seeing the feeling isn’t the same as feeling the feeling.
You may even be happy yourself through their happiness, but you don’t experience their happiness.
It pays to discriminate between sentience and consciousness. The debate on them isn’t even close to finished. However, let’s say that sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations. Consciousness is the awareness of your own individuality and its states; the awareness of the world external to it; and being able to recognize the interplay, the constant tug-of-war between both of them.
I find the article’s introductory bit particularly appealing, as it differentiates between our brainwaves’ representation of consciousness (which can be read with increasing fidelity) and the actual experience of consciousness.
Unfortunately, brainwaves don’t accurately represent the experience of consciousness. Correlation is not causation.
The truth of something is one thing; another is the way we have of representing it, of seeing it; of framing it.
None of us experience reality. We only experience a limited aspect of it. The first limitation starts with actually being human - we’re confined by our senses (whose sensitivity varies from person to person) and our biological frontiers. The second confine happens at the individual level - it’s the domain of knowledge, curiosity and action.
That we still haven’t found where and how exactly our conscious experiences arise within us - and the fact that they’re much more than the frequencies and amplitudes of a brainwave pattern - is termed the hard problem of consciousness.
I like hard problems and I can not lie.
On Sentience and Google’s LaMDA AI
This story is partly related with the one above. Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who came out saying that we already have a sentient AI among us, recently wrote a piece clarifying his definition of sentience. This is a requirement for any debate - if the concepts and the meanings of words aren’t clear or agreed to, we might as well be throwing apples (and oranges) at each other.
This is a matter that I’m looking to write about in future issues of The Human Ingenuity Feed, so I’ll leave it at that for now. For further context, you can read Wired’s interview of Blake Lemoine, titled “Blake Lemoine Says Google's LaMDA AI Faces 'Bigotry'” from when he first talked about LAMDA.
Hint: Isn’t the Wired article’s banner image “interesting”? What association does it bring to mind? Does it qualify as bias, clever manipulation, or just as an innocent quip? I’m interested in how you interpret this little detail, so please: sound off in the comments.
Passive Quality
Content for nurture, not mindless consumption.
Watch: Whiplash, by Damien Chazelle (2014)
Whiplash. Whiplash. Whiplash. If you’re looking for two hours of a high-octane psychological drama movie centered around jazz, Whiplash is the movie for you. An exploration on the thin line between passion and obsession, it asks difficult questions about embarking on a road to perfection - and what is allowed in its pursuit.
Whiplash features masterful performances, beautiful cinematography, incredible soundtrack, and will place you in a state of tension until the final, satisfying resolution.
I watched the movie five times already, and this particular bit has stuck with me:
There are no two words as damaging in the English language as “good job”.
Read: The Great Silence, by Ted Chiang
The Great Silence (follow the link to read), written by Ted Chiang, is my favorite short story ever. After reading it four times, it still gets me on the edge of tears as I read it. A showcase of mankind’s hubris, and the tragedy of looking far with near being so close.
Did I mention the main and only character is… a parrot?
An incredible piece of thoughtful, emotional speculative fiction. Bonus points for explaining The Fermi Paradox.
The Great Silence is part of Ted Chiang’s 2019 collection, Exhalation. Trust me: you won’t be disappointed with it if you like character-driven speculative fiction that’s rooted in science.
The World Within
The Human Ingenuity Feed Soundscapes
How do you study? How do you read?
How do you write and think?
Do your thoughts take flight to the sound of binaural beats or do you prefer to float in whitespace?
Do you like to simulate human presence by turning the TV on in the background?
The purity of silence?
Personally, I like to embrace soundscapes that allow me to travel to parallel universes.
Never in those universes did I find my writing done for me, unfortunately. But I digress…
Long story short, here’s the Spotify playlist I listen to most when I’m writing:
Most of these are melodic: they just transport you through low and high frequency bands. I’d place the playlist in a cyberpunk sound spectrum.
I like the action these bring me; the flow; the way they make me type in a trance. Sometimes more energetic, sometimes more mellow.
Like everything, the playlist itself is a work in progress.
If I had to pick a song, I’d tell you to listen to Metamyther and Leanne “LeeLoo” Greenman’s collaboration on “Elegy for Arecibo”. It gives me the shivers (the good kind) every time.
I invite you to share your own listenings in the comments. Then, If you want to, share a few words on the why and how they make you feel.
This is a safe space, remember?
Tech Writing
I’ve been writing articles on consumer technology since 2016, having started at TechPowerUp. I’ve since been invited to contribute to Tom’s Hardware as well, where I’ve branched out towards High Performance Computing (HPC), emergent technologies, and dear to my heart, quantum computing. In this section, you can find the weekly articles I write - the ones I find most interesting.
Ethereum Testnet Success Paves Way for 'The Merge' in September
Ethereum's successful update of its last testnet, Goerli, means the Web3 platform is in the final throes of a technological transition that's been a long time coming.
SSDs Are Worse for the Planet Than HDDs: Report
According to a recent study, SSD's excessive carbon footprint compared to HDDs comes from the manufacturing process itself. And while the study’s verdict is that SSDs have twice the environmental impact of an HDD, reality might not be that clear after all.
Quantum World Record Set for Two-Qubit Gate Operation
Researchers with the Japanese Institute for Molecular Science have broken the previous record for the fastest two-qubit gate operation ever done in quantum computing. The age of quantum is fast approaching - this time, at the nanosecond scale.
Record on Quantum Entanglement at a Distance Broken, Pulling in The Timeline for a Quantum Internet
A team of researchers from China managed to entangle two different quantum memories across a 12.5 km distance in an urban environment, bringing the promise of a quantum internet closer.
Fiction Writing
I didn’t have the time to work on my fiction writing this week. This could generate a good discussion on productivity, balance, and spreading ourselves too thin: but that too will be left for a Future Issue™ (with so many things already on the list, it feels right to just make it a feature already).
In the meantime, below are a couple of links to fiction writing pieces I’ve already published, followed by a tagline and a glimpse into the writing process behind each of them.
These are all flash fiction pieces - less than 1,500 words. Just click the title for the actual piece - you’ll be taken to the Medium page it’s published at.
The Crownless King - A Letter to a Future Child
A king repeats the mantra he was brought up on. But sharing ideals is different from living by them.
In this piece, I wanted to explore the disconnect between our ideals and our ability - or willingness - to live by them.
I originally wrote this back in 2015 (I gave it a 2022-me facelift before publishing). When I started writing it, I had the concept I wanted to convey and, for some reason, the image of a bloodied knife on the floor as the finale (not a spoiler, I guarantee you). That’s all I had, but it was enough for the setting and everything else.
I frequently quote Jordan Peterson’s definition of greatness as shared on Lewis Howes’ “The School of Greatness” podcast. Here’s the relevant section:
“To utter and abide by beautiful truths.”
I find that second element, to abide, to enact, to be an indispensable part of being.
It’s also the hardest.
Active Idling
The abyss sometimes looks back at us through an unidentified text message.
This piece was written less than two months ago - on my cellphone, during a train ride home. My “firestarter” - my prompt - was the photograph I took in the Parisian Metro, back in January of this year.
The photograph lends itself to storytelling pretty well. There’s a clear subject, and the cellphone in her hand opens up the door for multiple venues of exploration.
We then just have to sprinkle imagination.
The story that came to me was one about vulnerability - about how the unknown might carry a heavier weight on women than it does on men.
I tried to work on tension and rhythm, with short sentences and paragraphs keeping readers on the edge of their seats.
A note: curse words have their place in writing. But they’re powerful; they dominate the readers’ attention. As such, they must be used sparingly and within context.
La Différence
A woman and a child meet, leaving the perfectly arranged chairs in Musée Rodin more alive than before.
This piece was written some days after Active Idling. Its firestarter was a photograph I took in Paris’ Musée Rodin last January.
That was all I had. I liked the picture. I liked the little bit of chaos in the chairs’ arrangement.
Stephen King explains his writing process on his aptly-named book, On Writing. He refers to it as the “magnet” process, where an idea is just left to stew for a long enough span of time that other elements start to stick to it.
This is my usual process as well, and it’s exactly what happened here. If you’ve ever heard the sentence “characters gain a life of their own”, it’s true. The first idea to stick to the photograph was the character of Akane. I felt she had more to be discovered - being a Japanese immigrant in Paris and all - and that was the element I chose to explore in this story.
I thought it’d be interesting to confront young-adult Akane with the sincerity of a young boy. Them being different is what they have in common - hence the title.
The rest, as they say, is flash fiction.
A note: good writing starts strong and finishes strong. I’m very, very happy with both the starting and ending sentences. Notice the symmetry. This symmetry is broken within the story, which shows progression - the setting changed through the characters’ actions. They took part in it. They changed the world.
Perhaps they even changed one another.
Well… That was longer than I expected it to be.
And it still falls so devastatingly short of the world’s complex beauty.
Time being the ultimate resource, perhaps it speaks to the importance of having started on this road that I loved every minute poring over this issue of The Human Ingenuity Feed.
To wrap this newsletter up, and to try and clarify things, here’s what’s to be expected as standard from issues labeled Software Update:
Weekly posts
Available only to paid subscribers
Section: The World Without
Spinning Globe: 2 to 3 recent articles on human ingenuity - with commentary
Passive Quality: 2 to 3 pieces of external content to enrich your world
Section: The World Within
Tech Writing: collection of my weekly tech articles written for other publications
Fiction Writing: collection of my fiction writing. I will strive to make it a permanent occurrence, but I’ll likely fail.
Lastly, I invite you to sound off in the comments with suggestions on content that’s meaningful to you. Bonus cookies (not the bad, Internet kind) for sharing what specifically moved you. Any thoughts you have, I’m interested.
That’s all for this week, folks. Take care.
And remember: keep being curious, keep thinking - but most of all, keep being human.
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