progress:
(page 146 of 416)
"LONG overdue, but finally got myself around re-starting it. As is known, it's much more technical than The Experience Machine, but all the more fascinating because of that. The nitty-gritty is indispensible for a real taste of just how powerful and promising PP is. Clark's constant emphasis on action-prediction loops and on integration with enactive/embodied cognition are major pluses here too. Beautiful stuff." — Jan 16, 2026 10:01AM
"LONG overdue, but finally got myself around re-starting it. As is known, it's much more technical than The Experience Machine, but all the more fascinating because of that. The nitty-gritty is indispensible for a real taste of just how powerful and promising PP is. Clark's constant emphasis on action-prediction loops and on integration with enactive/embodied cognition are major pluses here too. Beautiful stuff." — Jan 16, 2026 10:01AM
“The great value of the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm is the way it helps us understand how what once was "noise" (e.g., unselected-uncorrelated variation) can become new "signal" under changing circumstances.”
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“Mechanism design takes up Hume's challenge by designing games in which the knaves to whom power is delegated are treated as players. The checks in the constitution are the rules of the game. These are used to prevent a player going off the rails in situations that the designer can effectively monitor and evaluate. However, it is the controls that are more important, since these apply to decisions that the designer can't monitor, or doesn't know how to evaluate. To get the players to act in accordance with the designer's aims rather than their own in such situations, it is necessary that the payoffs of the game be carefully chosen to provide the right incentives.”
― Natural Justice
― Natural Justice
“In the cosmic scheme of things, your life barely registers as a blip. It is hardly noticeable in the long arc of history. The information you produce by moving your arm up is not going to tell you much about anything of interest. But when you scope down in a way that reflects the horizon scaled to human thought and action, your life looms large in the image. It doesn’t just loom large; it occupies a central place. The events of your life provide the frame of reference around which the events of History arrange themselves in circles of diminishing knowledge and concern. The difference that your choices make to your own future is large, indeed.”
― How Physics Makes Us Free
― How Physics Makes Us Free
“When playing an outer-circle game as though it were an inner-circle game, the players will sometimes happen to coordinate on an equilibrium of the outer-circle game. The group will then have stumbled upon an equilibrium selection device for the outer circle game. This device consists of the players behaving as though they were constrained by the rules of the inner-circle game, when the rules by which they are actually constrained are those of the outer circle game.”
― Natural Justice
― Natural Justice
“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
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