“Principles of choice, or “personal rules,” represent self-enforcing contracts with your future motivational states; such contracts depend on your seeing each current choice as a precedent that predicts how you’re apt to choose among similar options in the future. Short-range interests evade personal rules by proposing exceptions that might keep the present case from setting a precedent. The will is a recursive process that bets the expected value of your future self-control against each of your successive temptations.”
― Breakdown of Will
― Breakdown of Will
“If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything.”
― Freedom Evolves
― Freedom Evolves
“Evolution is all about turning "bugs" into "features," turning "noise" into "signal," and the fuzzy boundaries between these categories are not optional; the opportunistic open-endedness of natural selection depends on them.”
― From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
― From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
“Wild cognition, it seems, has (literally) no time for the filing cabinet.”
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“Representation is a process of informational triangulation. Its aim is the specification of distal stimuli. It achieves that aim by corralling the output of multiple information channels integrated at their point of confluence. The integration process, in short, disambiguates individual information channels via the mutual constraints each channel provides others. The specificity won thereby falls on a continuum from the highly unspecific (simple transducers, little integrative depth) to the highly specific (subtle transducers, manifold integration).”
― Simple Minds
― Simple Minds
Hélio’s 2025 Year in Books
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