Holidays Do Not Imply Travelling

There are myriad ways to say this, and unedited they all sound wrong. So, ahem.

"Dear colleagues, friends, and miscellaneous masters of my universe. I said I was going on holiday. I did not say I was leaving town. I have no use for casual travels when I can see, hear, and feel most of those things in my head. When I said I needed a holiday, I meant getting a few months to work on the important things in my life, namely mathematics, software development, and showing the world that humans are trivial objects... without being distracted by folks so lacking in imagination as those who find meaning in commercial activity. Kthxbai"

The Worst Way to AI

I just realised that it sounds a lot more commercial, if I say that my undergraduate research was on "requirements analysis for the digitisation of human thought," instead of "analytical phenomenology."

Your AI needs to have a model of sensation in all known modalities. If there is no model of sensation, it is a Chinese room.

The controversial bit is saying, that once you have a model of sensation, there's no mental difference between AI and homo sapiens.

:P

Algorithmic Reactions to Stochastic Loss

There's this meme going around that says the main predictor of success is grit, but that's rather tautologous. I'd like to refine that to say, it's how the subject responds to loss. The unforeseen loss of assets in a random fashion, enervates us all. The question is, which algorithm of response is fittest?

Consciousness, in the FMRI?

What you see in an MRI is the implementation of a data structure. I prefer to maintain that the architecture and not the implementation, is what constitutes consciousness. Have a large enough Excel sheet, linked a certain way, and it would be conscious too.