Is your brain really like a computer?
As I’m reading Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, I found this article from Aeon1 about the brain and the bad analogy it suffers from computers.
In it, Robert Epstein writes that brains are not at all like computers, but their own organic things. For example, they don’t store information like computers: the author asked people to draw from memory 1$ bills and then to draw them with a reference. The results vastly differ, the first draw being very sparse and the second much more elaborate2, showing that our brain has trouble to store that kind of information, unlike computers who don’t have any problem to do it.
…Rich Cohen - The Fish That Ate The Whale
You may have casually heard the expression “Banana Republic” in a conversation, understanding vaguely its meaning but not really grasping where does it comes from, or why it does have this connotation.
If you take a dictionary, you would find this definition :
A small nation, especially in Central America, dependent on one crop or the influx of foreign capital.
Well, okay, but why is it used in a pejorative way? And why “Banana”, not something like a “Coffee Republic” or a “Sugar Cane Republic”?
…John Vaillant - The Golden Spruce
The first work from John Vaillant that I heard of was The Tiger, a story about the last great tiger in Siberia and of the mens who killed it. If the story looks interesting by itself, what was the most striking in this book was the amount of background and the depth of information in it; not only you learn about the story of how this beast was killed and why, but also the mindset of the people in this remote part of the world, the psychology of the animal, and much much more.The first work from John Vaillant that I heard of was The Tiger, a story about the last great tiger in Siberia and of the men who killed it. If the story looks interesting by itself, what was the most striking in this book was the amount of background and the depth of information in it; not only you learn about the story of how this beast was killed and why, but also the mindset of the people in this remote part of the world, the psychology of the animal, and much much more.
…Pierre Hadot - The Inner Citadel
Background
If there is someone who deeply influenced me in the last 6 months, it’s Ryan Holiday. Last summer, I stumbled on his monthly reading newsletter (you should subscribe here, it’s well worth it), and I found some great books to read. But if you have to start somewhere, go to his Reading List, and you will find some jewels.
The first book from his list is Marcus Aurelius “Meditations”, who he describes as :
…