After the Flood of Noah, humans' lifespan got greatly shortened to around 70 years old. Before the Flood of Noah, humans often lived for over 100 years. Methuselah in particular lived over 900 years.

Not sure what he meant by the "27 names", since before Noah there were only 9 patriarchs (from Adam to Lamech). The "flood" is the Flood of Noah.

Thersites - Wikipedia

Thersites was a soldier of the Greek army during the Trojan War.

Homer described him in detail in the Iliad, Book II, even though he plays only a minor role in the story. He is said to be bow-legged and lame, to have shoulders that cave inward, and a head which is covered in tufts of hair and comes to a point. Vulgar, obscene, and somewhat dull-witted, Thersites disrupts the rallying of the Greek army:

He got up in the assembly and attacked Agamemnon in the words of Achilles [calling him greedy and a coward] ... Odysseus then stood up, delivered a sharp rebuke to Thersites, which he coupled with a threat to strip him naked, and then beat him on the back and shoulders with Agamemnon's sceptre; Thersites doubled over, a warm tear fell from his eye, and a bloody welt formed on his back; he sat down in fear, and in pain gazed helplessly as he wiped away his tear; but the rest of the assembly was distressed and laughed .... There must be a figuration of wickedness as self-evident as Thersites—the ugliest man who came to Troy—who says what everyone else is thinking.

Herodias - Wikipedia

In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Herodias plays a major role in John the Baptist's execution, using her daughter's dance before Antipas and his party guests to ask for the head of the Baptist as a reward.

Hadrian was Roman emperor from 117 to 138. He had horses, but these horses' epitaphs are forgotten.

Herostratus - Wikipedia

Herostratus was a 4th-century BC Greek arsonist, who sought notoriety by destroying the second Temple of Diana in Ephesus. His acts prompted the creation of a damnatio memoriae law forbidding anyone to mention his name, orally or in writing.

Diana (mythology) - Wikipedia)

Diana is a goddess in Roman and Hellenistic religion, primarily considered a patroness of the countryside, hunters, crossroads, and the Moon.

Penitent thief - Wikipedia

The Penitent Thief, also known as the Good Thief, Wise Thief, Grateful Thief or the Thief on the Cross, is one of two unnamed thieves in Luke's account of the crucifixion of Jesus in the New Testament. The Gospel of Luke describes him asking Jesus to "remember him" when Jesus arrives at his kingdom. The other, as the impenitent thief, challenges Jesus to save himself and both of them to prove that he is the Messiah.

Pontius Pilate - Wikipedia

Pontius Pilate was the fifth governor of the Roman province of Judaea, serving under Emperor Tiberius from the year 26/27 to 36/37 AD. He is best known for being the official who presided over the trial of Jesus and later ordered his crucifixion.

Matthew 15:21-28:

21 Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”

23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”

24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

25 The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.

26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”

27 “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

28 Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.

In the philosophy of Aristotle, the condition of a thing whose essence is fully realized; actuality.

Sometimes also interpreted as a "vital force", something that makes things alive rather than mere dead matter.

Hieronymus Cardanus, De propria vita liber ("The Book of My Life "), chapter 9, "Cogitatio de nomine perpetuando" ("The thought of perpetuating my name")

Ergo nil mirum est me illo amore coactum flagrare; at nunc mirum est, his intellectis, posse; et tamen mansit haec stolida cupiditas. Nam Caesaris et illorum stultum fuit consilium; at cupiditas mea gloriae, inter tot, et aduersa, et impedimenta, stolida non tantum stulta. Non tamen unquam concupiui gloriam aut honores, imo spreui: cuperem notum esse quod sim, non opto ut sciatur qualis sim.

Therefore it is no wonder that I am compelled to burn with that love; but now it is wonderful that, when these things are understood, they can be and yet this stupid greed remained. For Caesar's and their advice was foolish; but my desire for glory, amid so many obstacles and obstacles, is stupid and not so stupid. I have not, however, ever longed for glory or honors, nay, I despised it; I desired to be known what I am.

"Omnia vanitas et pastio venti" is Latin for "all is vanity, chasing after the wind." which is from the Ecclesiastes.

"ut olim" means "as once"

Aquila (Hebrew: עֲקִילַס ‘áqīlas, fl. 130 AD) of Sinope was a translator of the Hebrew Bible into Greek.

Symmachus (late 2nd century) translated the Old Testament into Greek.

Charles V (24 February 1500 – 21 September 1558) was Holy Roman Emperor.

Hector was a hero of the Trojan War, which happened around 1300 BC. So if the world really can only last 6000 years, and the world was created before 2500 BC then Charles V's name cannot hope to last for another 2000 years (2 Methuselahs).

About 200 years before Christ, Rabbi Elias wrote that

the world endures six thousand years, two thousand before the law, two thousand under the law, and two thousand under the Messiah

This is a numerological belief: God took 6 days to create the world, so it's only natural for the world to last 6 thousand years.

The word "meridian" comes from Latin meridies, meaning "midday", so perhaps "meridian of time" means the mid-point of the history of the world, the mid-point between God's creation of the world and Judgment Day

To continue to exist in bones, and to exist like the Egyptian pyramids, is pointless. You might exist for a long duration, but your name is still forgotten. What's the point?

Some weird and hard-to-answer questions. They will be contrasted with some even-harder-to-answer questions.

Atropos or Aisa, in Greek mythology, was one of the three Moirai, goddesses of fate and destiny. Her Roman equivalent was Morta. Atropos was the oldest of the Three Fates, and was known as "the Inflexible One." It was Atropos who chose the manner of death and ended the life of mortals by cutting their threads.

Tiberius Caesar Augustus was the second Roman emperor. He reigned from AD 14 until 37.

Suet is Suetonius, who wrote in The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Chapter "The Life of Tiberius":

Yet his special aim was a knowledge of mythology, which he carried to a silly and laughable extreme; for he used to test even the grammarians,​ a class of men in whom, as I have said, he was especially interested, by questions something like this: "Who was Hecuba's mother?" "What was the name of Achilles among the maidens?" "What were the Sirens in the habit of singing?" Moreover, on the first day that he entered the senate after the death of Augustus, to satisfy at once the demands of filial piety and religion, he offered sacrifice after the example of Minos with incense and wine, but without a fluteplayer, as Minos had done in ancient times on the death of his son.

Phaedo - Wikipedia

Phædo, also known to ancient readers as On The Soul, is one of the best-known dialogues of Plato's middle period... The philosophical subject of the dialogue is the immortality of the soul. It is set in the last hours prior to the death of Socrates.

By engaging in dialectic with a group of Socrates' friends, including the two Thebans, Cebes, and Simmias, Socrates explores various arguments for the soul's immortality in order to show that there is an afterlife in which the soul will dwell following death.

The relevant quote:

... said Crito. “How would you like us to bury you?”

“Any way you like,” said Socrates, “that is, if you manage to catch me before I escape you,” he said and with a sweet laughter

Because when I die I shall leave this place so that Crito will be more able to bear the sadness and not feel too upset when he sees my body given the awful burial treatment, such as when it is burnt or buried and that he may not be given the opportunity at the funeral to say that he is laying out Socrates or that he is burying Socrates.

Ritual Greek, performed by J. Goar, at the funeral service.

The Euchologion

is one of the chief liturgical books of the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic churches, containing the portions of the services which are said by the bishop, priest, or deacon (it roughly corresponds to the Roman Rite's Missal, Ritual, and Pontifical, combined). There are several different volumes of the book in use.

Jacob Goar, O. P., edited the Euchologion, sive Rituale Graecorum ("Euchologion, or Greek Ritual") with very complete notes, explanations, and illustrations (Euchologion, sive Rituale Græcorum, 2nd ed., Venice, fol., 1720), which became the standard work of reference for Byzantine Rite Catholics.

Burnt offering (Judaism) - Wikipedia)

A burnt offering in Judaism is a form of sacrifice first described in the Hebrew Bible. The term is first used of the sacrifices of Noah. As a tribute to God, a burnt offering was entirely burnt on the altar.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

Ecclesiastes 12:7

From Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, ii.998. Basically, it says "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

“Cedit item retro, de terra quod fuit ante,

In terras, et quod missum ’st ex ætheris oris,

Id rursum cœli rellatum templa receptant.”

English:

That also which from earth first came, to earth

Returns, and that which from the ether’s coasts

Was sent, the vast wide regions of the sky

Receive again, returning to its home.”

And the vanity of Democritus is no less, who promised a resurrection thereof, and yet himself could never rise again.

1 Corinthians 6:19-20

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body.

And though Christians thought God would fix everything in their body when they are resurrected, they still take some care in how they are buried after death.

Christians follow laws that make life peaceful, thus avoiding brutal deaths.

Christians made the shape-changing of their body in death less ugly by taking care of their bodies while alive.

Allegory of the cave - Wikipedia

In the allegory, Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. Three higher levels exist: the natural sciences; mathematics, geometry, and deductive logic; and the theory of forms.

A long list of weird and contradictory facts from pagan mythology. Browne is trying to debunk pagan mythology.

The Roman goddess of death.

The Asphodel Meadows is a section of the ancient Greek underworld where ordinary souls are sent to live after death.

In Greek mythology, Tiresias was a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years.

The lower animals are soulless, so they cannot have an afterlife. They are also thoughtful, so they cannot imagine of being better. God, in his infinite wisdom and kindness, has thus created the animals so that they are naturally content in their lives.

There is no further state after death. This living state you are in right now is just a progress towards your death state. Your death state would make everything you've done in your life state empty and vain.

Only Christian martyrs are allowed into the heaven, to sit in the seats of the heavenly orchestras. Only Christian martyrs are worthy to receive glory. The brave pagans who contemn death because they are hot-headed, because they are full of adrenaline -- they don't count, they are unworthy of glory.

Those people who think there's no afterlife, they must think that death is way worse than the mere painful process of dying, since it also is followed by eternal nothingness. That makes us amazed at how they dared ("durst" = "dared") to become nothing and return to the chaos.

If such people say that there is no afterlife, and they also don't think you should fear death, then they certainly don't value life very much, if they even had a life to begin with.

Christians are lucky, because they lived after Christ has showed them that there is an afterlife. Before Christ, people lived with the disadvantage that they couldn't rely on faith, but only their reason. And so even the noblest minds were doubtful and melancholy when they died.

In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates presents reasons why a philosopher should even welcome death (albeit not permitting or encouraging suicide), because of its emancipation of the souls of those who are good in this life to a great afterlife.

In Canto 10 of Dante's Inferno, Dante visits the 6th circle of hell, where heretics are trapped in burning tombs forever. Epicurus was a serious heretic because he denied that humans have immortal souls.

From Josaphat return'd shall come, and bring

Their bodies, which above they now have left.

The cemetery on this part obtain

With Epicurus all his followers,

Who with the body make the spirit die.

Cato the Younger:

was a conservative Roman senator in the period of the late republic. A noted orator and a follower of the Stoic philosophy, he is remembered for his stubbornness and tenacity (especially in his lengthy conflict with Julius Caesar), as well as his immunity to bribes, his moral integrity, and his famous distaste for the ubiquitous corruption of the period.

In Utica, Cato did not participate in the battle and, unwilling to live in a world led by Caesar and refusing even implicitly to grant Caesar the power to pardon him, he committed suicide in April 46 BC. According to Plutarch, Cato attempted to kill himself by stabbing himself with his own sword, but failed to do so due to an injured hand.

Plutarch wrote that, on hearing of his death in Utica, Caesar commented, "Cato, I grudge you your death, as you would have grudged me the preservation of your life."

The following is a statue depicting Cato reading Plato's dialogue before his suicide.

Niccolò Machiavelli (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Machiavelli was no friend of the institutionalized Christian Church as he knew it. The Discourses makes clear that conventional Christianity saps from human beings the vigor required for active civil life (CW 228–229, 330–331). And The Prince speaks with equal parts disdain and admiration about the contemporary condition of the Church and its Pope (CW 29, 44–46, 65, 91–92).

Many scholars have taken such evidence to indicate that Machiavelli was himself profoundly anti-Christian, preferring the pagan civil religions of ancient societies such as Rome, which he regarded to be more suitable for a city endowed with virtù. Anthony Parel (1992) argues that Machiavelli's cosmos, governed by the movements of the stars and the balance of the humors, takes on an essentially pagan and pre-Christian cast. For others, Machiavelli may best be described as a man of conventional, if unenthusiastic, piety, prepared to bow to the externalities of worship but not deeply devoted in either soul or mind to the tenets of Christian faith.

If you are a good Christian, you would know the happiness of your life in the "next world" after the Judgment Day. In that sense, living this life is kinda like a martyrdom, since you are dying while holding closely the thought of your faith.

Epicurus taught that there is no afterlife, and the best way to live is to live modestly with good friends and simple pleasures, as it is the way to maximize happiness.

Some relevant quotes:

Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.

Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.

According to CliffsNotes, In Canto 4 of Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno,

the poets enter the first circle of Hell — Limbo — the place where virtuous pagans reside. Virgil explains that these shades (souls) are only here because they were born without the benefit of Christianity, either due to being born before Christ, or because the soul was an unbaptized child. Dante asks if any soul was ever redeemed from Limbo, and Virgil tells him that the "Mighty One" came once and took a number of souls to Heaven.

Homer's The Odyssey [Chapter 10.526]

glorious tribes of the dead

The context is a sacrificial ritual for the dead

And do thou earnestly entreat the powerless heads of the dead, vowing that when thou comest to Ithaca thou wilt sacrifice in thy halls a barren heifer, the best thou hast, and wilt fill the altar with rich gifts; and that to Teiresias alone thou wilt sacrifice separately a ram, wholly black, the goodliest of thy flock. But when with prayers thou hast made supplication to the glorious tribes of the dead, then sacrifice a ram and a black ewe, turning their heads toward Erebus but thyself turning backward, and setting thy face towards the streams of the river. Then many ghosts of men that are dead will come forth.

When times are hard, we feel like time is passing slowly. One hour feels like 3 hours. Not only that, we also age faster, due to stress.

Zeus persuaded Alcmene that he was her husband. Extending one night into three, Zeus slept with Alcmene, his great-granddaughter, thereby conceiving Heracles, while recounting Amphitryon's victories against the Teleboans.

Humans have about 2 billion heartbeats in a lifetime. This is a large number, but the Greek polymath Archimedes was the man that could count to it. He even wrote a whole paper on it!

The Sand Reckoner - Wikipedia

The Sand Reckoner (Greek: Ψαμμίτης, Psammites) is a work by Archimedes, an Ancient Greek mathematician of the 3rd century BC, in which he set out to determine an upper bound for the number of grains of sand that fit into the universe.

Psalm 90 - Wikipedia

Psalm 90 is the 90th psalm from the Book of Psalms. In the slightly different numbering system of the Greek Septuagint version of the bible, and in its Latin translation, the Vulgate, this psalm is Psalm 89. Uniquely among the Psalms, it is attributed to Moses. It is well known for its reference in verse 10 to human life expectancy being 70 or 80 ("threescore years and ten", or "if by reason of strength ... fourscore years" in the King James Version).

Pierio Valeriano Bolzani - Wikipedia

Pierio Valeriano (1477–1558), born Giovanni Pietro dalle Fosse, was a prominent Italian Renaissance humanist, specializing in the early study of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Latin says

Chaldean oracles with scholia of Psellus and Phethon. "Βίῃ λιπόντων σῶμα ψυχαὶ καθαρώταται." "By the force of the body, they abandon the purest soul."

The Greek is some Chaldean oracle text, and "scholia" is explanatory comments (something I'm doing right now!).

Chaldean Oracles - Wikipedia

The Chaldean Oracles are a set of spiritual and philosophical texts widely used by Neoplatonist philosophers from the 3rd to the 6th century CE. While the original texts have been lost, they have survived in the form of fragments consisting mainly of quotes and commentary by Neoplatonist writers.

No idea who is "Phethonis".

Psellus was a Byzantine Greek monk, savant, writer, philosopher, politician, historian and music theorist. He was born in 1017 or 1018, and is believed to have died in 1078.

He was a major fan of mystical Neo-Platonism, which is something Thomas Browne was also into.

Psellos was universally educated and had a reputation for being one of the most learned men of his time. He prided himself on having single-handedly reintroduced to Byzantine scholarship a serious study of ancient philosophy, especially of Plato. His predilection for Plato and other pagan (often Neoplatonic) philosophers led to doubts about the orthodoxy of his faith among some of his contemporaries, and at one point he was forced to make a public profession of faith in his defense.

In his Hellenism in Byzantium, Anthony Kaldellis states the following of Michael Psellos:

He expresses contradictory opinions regarding the worth of the Chaldean Oracles and goes on at length about topics that he then suddenly dismisses as nonsense, which has been seen as a possibly 'hypocritical compliance with the tenets of Christianity.'

So I would like to compose these verses into the bones. -- Tibullus. [Elegies III.2.26]

Here, Browne is saying that the bones, buried under ground, last far longer than above ground monuments and gravestones, and for free, requiring no maintenance.

Tibullus - Wikipedia

Albius Tibullus (c. 55 BC – 19 BC) was a Latin poet and writer of elegies. His first and second books of poetry are extant; many other texts attributed to him are of questionable origins.

Famous monuments can get defaced if political winds change, or get robbed by gravediggers.

Roman conquest of Britain, Norman conquest of Britain, and presumably the English Civil War.

Methuselah was a biblical patriarch and a figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His was the longest human lifespan of all those given in the Bible, 969 years.

1. Relaxation.
2. The process in which a solution of molten rocks separate into its constituents upon cooling

I have no idea what this means, and a Google search didn't help at all.

Pious Christians pass their days in great joy of their future eternal life. They don't cling to the current world, any more than they cling to the world before their birth.

The Christian idea of eternal life is so much better than any great monument that humans can build. The Christian eternal life is like a mountain of infinite height, and if you stand on it, the biggest pyramid's diameter diminishes to nothing.

"angles of contingency" seems like a weird phrase. Browne is probably making an analogy using the geometry of seeing and measuring in architecture.

I have no idea why Browne had to translate "angle of contingency" into Latin, as he was the only one who used that phrase after a quick Google search.

The metaphysics (the philosophy about "what exists") of Christians says that Christians can be resurrected and live forever, so they don't care if their names can be remembered after their death.

"predicament": One of the basic states or classifications described by Aristotle into which all things can be placed; a category.

"predicament of chimeras": to belong to the category of chimeras (a monster made by combining parts that should not be combined).

To be dead in the body and to be alive in name -- that's like a chimera.

"As content with no decoration or with lots of decorations on the grave."

"six foot" means "six foot under", meaning "dead and buried"

The tomb of the Roman emperor Hadrian, also called "Hadrian's mole". Very big and luxurious.

The Mausoleum of Hadrian, usually known as Castel Sant'Angelo (Italian pronunciation: [kaˈstɛl sanˈtandʒelo]; English: Castle of the Holy Angel), is a towering cylindrical building in Parco Adriano, Rome, Italy. It was initially commissioned by the Roman Emperor Hadrian as a mausoleum for himself and his family. The building was later used by the popes as a fortress and castle, and is now a museum.

Hadrian's ashes were placed here a year after his death in Baiae in 138, together with those of his wife Sabina, and his first adopted son, Lucius Aelius, who died in 138. Following this, the remains of succeeding emperors were also placed here, the last recorded deposition being Caracalla in 217.

Holy Innocents' Cemetery - Wikipedia

The Holy Innocents' Cemetery (French: Cimetière des Saints-Innocents or Cimetière des Innocents) is a defunct cemetery in Paris that was used from the Middle Ages until the late 18th century. It was the oldest and largest cemetery in Paris and had often been used for mass graves. It was closed because of overuse in 1780, and in 1786 the remaining corpses were exhumed and transported to the unused subterranean quarries near Montparnasse known as the Catacombs. The place Joachim-du-Bellay in the Les Halles district now covers the site of the cemetery.

From Camden’s Britannia, as englished by Philemon Holland (pp. 227-):

But, before I return from hence, I will briefly set downe unto you that, which Giraldum Cambrensis an eie-witnesse of the thing, hath more at large related touching Arthurs Sepulchre in the Churchyard there.

When Henrie the Second Kind of England, tooke knowledge out of the songs of British Bards, or Rhythmers, how Arthur that most noble Worthy of the Brtains who by his Martial prowesse, had many a time daunted the fury of the English Saxons, lay buried heere betweene two Pyramides, or sharpe-headed pillars,, hee caused the Bodie to be searched for: and scarcely had they digged seven foot deepe in to the earth, but they lighted upon a Tomb or Grave-stone, on the upper face whereof was fastened a broade Crosse of lead grossly wrought: which being taken forth shewed an inscription of letters: and under the seid stone almost nine foot deeper, was found a Sepulchre of oake made hollow, wherin the bones of that famour Arthur were bestowed, which Inscription or Epitaph, as it was sometimes exemplified, and drawn out of the first Copie in the Abbey of Glascon, I thought good for the antiquitie of the characters here to put downe. The letters being made after a barbarous manner, & resembling the Gothish Character, bewray plainely the barbaritie of that age, when ignorance (as it were) by fatall destinie bare such way, taht there was none to be found, by whose writings the renowne of Arthur might be blazed, and commended to posteritie. A mater and argument doubtlesse, meet to have beene handled by the skill and eloquence of some right learned man, who in celebrating the praises of so great a prince, might have wonne due commendation also for his owne wit. For, the most valiant Champion of the British Empire, seemeth even in this behalfe onely, most unfortunate, that hee never met with such a trumpeter, as might worthily have sounded out the praise of his valour. But behold the said Crosse and Epitaph therein.

William Camden - Wikipedia

William Camden (2 May 1551 – 9 November 1623) was an English antiquarian, historian, topographer, and herald, best known as author of Britannia, the first chorographical survey of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Annales, the first detailed historical account of the reign of Elizabeth I of England.

But, we people of Britain, remember how the Romans brought civilization to Britain, and would forgive the Romans for their cruelties during their colonization project.

The whole human history is barely enough to teach us how to live well, so let's look carefully at old things and old events (like these urns).

From the Latin word for "patchwork," the cento (or collage poem) is a poetic form composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets. Early examples can be found in the work of Homer and Virgil. Modern centos are often witty, creating irony or humor from the juxtaposition of images and ideas.

"It was so simple back then, now people are growing more and more sinful."

Yes, Browne might be complaining about kids those days.

"supinity" - passiveness, not fighting to let its voices heard

Here, Browne says that the old days lie dead in the past, not shouting at us to take notice of the cool people who used to live back then.

Thomas Browne was a doctor for 50 years until he died.

You've seen a lot of urns and ashes, so these newly discovered urns and ashes aren't that new to you. You've also seen many faces. Indeed, due to fast population growth, the number of people alive now might be more than the number of people dead.

We wish that these urns would reflect sound of praise and honor to you, like those urns in the Roman horse-racing stadiums.

On learning that the ancient Theseus, son of Aegeus, had fled in exile from Athens to Scyros, but had been treacherously put to death there, through fear, by Lycomedes the king, Cimon eagerly sought to discover his grave. For the Athenians had once received an oracle bidding them bring back the bones of Theseus to the city and honour him as became a hero, but they knew not where he lay buried, since the Scyrians would not admit the truth of the story, nor permit any search to be made. Now, however, Cimon set to work with great ardour, discovered at last the hallowed spot, had the bones bestowed in his own trireme, and with general pomp and show brought them back to the hero's own country after an absence of about four hundred years.

[Petronius, Satyricon 42.]

He went to many.

The most outstanding diamond of the old cliff.

It makes no difference whether corruption dissolve the carcase or the funeral pile.

M. Annaeus Lucanus, Pharsalia, book 7, line 728

De Bello Civili (Latin pronunciation: [deː ˈbɛlloː kiːˈwiːliː]; On the Civil War), more commonly referred to as the Pharsalia, is a Roman epic poem written by the poet Lucan, detailing the civil war between Julius Caesar and the forces of the Roman Senate led by Pompey the Great. The poem's title is a reference to the Battle of Pharsalus, which occurred in 48 BC, near Pharsalus, Thessaly, in northern Greece. Caesar decisively defeated Pompey in this battle.

Pharsalia was unfinished when Lucan died:

It was still in progress when Lucan was forced to commit suicide for conspiracy to kill Emperor Nero. This gave it the mother of all Classical cliffhangers, with Caesar in the midst of a sword fight with Ganymede, a partisan of Cleopatra's brother Ptolemy.

Zarmanochegas - Wikipedia

Zarmanochegas was a monk of the Sramana tradition (possibly, but not necessarily a Buddhist) who, according to ancient historians such as Strabo and Dio Cassius, met Nicholas of Damascus in Antioch around 22 BC and burnt himself to death in Athens shortly thereafter.

The most famous such Indian philosopher is Kalanos

Kalanos, also spelled Calanus (Ancient Greek: Καλανὸς) (c. 398 – 323 BCE), was a gymnosophist, and philosopher from Taxila who accompanied Alexander the Great to Persis and later self-immolated himself by entering into a Holy Pyre, in front of Alexander and his army.

Sulla was a general that won a civil war in the Roman Republic. He had a lot of enemies.

For others, they chose cremation so that their enemies cannot dig out their corpse later and insult it.

Heraclitus proposed that everything was created from fire.

Heraclitus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The standard view of Heraclitus’ ontology since Aristotle is that he is a material monist who holds that fire is the ultimate reality; all things are just manifestations of fire. According to Aristotle the Milesians in general were material monists who advocated other kinds of ultimate matter: Thales water, Anaximander the boundless, Anaximenes air (Metaphysics 983b6–984a8). So Heraclitus’ theory was just another version of a common background theory.

end (conclude) your life in giving up (relenting) the solid shape and becoming liquid (moist)

Poppaea Sabina - Wikipedia

Ollia, better known as Poppaea Sabina (known as Poppaea Sabina the Younger to differentiate her from her mother, and, after AD 63, as Poppaea Augusta Sabina; AD 30 – 65) was a Roman Empress as the second wife of the Emperor Nero. She had also been wife to the future emperor Otho. The historians of antiquity describe her as a beautiful woman who used intrigues to become empress.

When Poppaea died in 65, Nero went into deep mourning... Tacitus writes that Poppaea was embalmed by having her body filled with various herbs and spices and was buried in the Tomb of the Julii, but her actual burial spot is unknown. Nero supposedly burned a year's worth of Arabia's incense production at her funeral.

Sulla - Wikipedia

Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix (/ˈsʌlə/; 138–78 BC), commonly known as Sulla, was a Roman general and statesman. He won the first large-scale civil war in Roman history, and became the first man of the republic to seize power through force.

See https://www.google.com/maps/place/Crostwick,+Norwich,+UK

"Pompey's sons are covered by the soils of Asia and Europe; Pompey himself by that of Africa."

Crostwick is a village and civil parish in the district of Broadland, Norfolk, England. At the time of 2011 Census the population remained less than 100

"Here's what I'm five inches away from" Meaning, death is always near.

which is more than the number of days in the history of the universe (5 trillion)

All Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics are crazy, because many QM phenomena are bizarre (and thus any interpretation of it must also be bizarre, as it must reproduce the bizarre phenomena), and there is so far no good reason to believe in one over the other, as we have no way to decide between QM interpretations that are consistent with evidence.

Why is this intuitive? It's not intuitive to me. It seems to say that bettors who bet on Horse A to win are trying to actually make Horse A to win, when they really are just predicting that Horse A will win with a sufficient probability.

If Nate Silver really wanted Obama to win, he wouldn't bet on it, but would have donated to Obama's campaign.

If bettors really wanted Horse A to win, they wouldn't have betted on it, but would have fed it steroids or something.

When life insurances first came out, pretty much the exact argument was used against it, that it's "gambling on death". Eventually culture absorbed it, and even though life insurance is still gambling on death, it no longer feels like it.

Similarly, shorting stocks of a medical company that's developing a breakthrough cancer treatment, is, in an indirect sense, rooting for the cancer treatment to fail, and thus more people to die.

Betting on people dying is not a dealbreaker, even if human psychology never evolves. Just add enough cultural excuses and decorations around it, and it will no longer irritate the mind. Imagine a clam covering up an irritating sand until it becomes a smooth pearl.

Historically:

1. AI researchers have often tried to build knowledge into their agents,
2. this always helps in the short term, and is personally satisfying to the researcher, but
3. in the long run it plateaus and even inhibits further progress, and
4. breakthrough progress eventually arrives by an opposing approach based on scaling computation by search and learning.

Sutton says that, to learn from the bitter lesson, researchers should focus on:

• Algorithms that can scale with dataset size (preferably linearly), to take on larger datasets.
• General searching and learning algorithms, which has always done better than handcoded algorithms if given enough compute and data.
• Large and varied datasets, to allow algorithms to learn from them, rather than attempt to handcode the algorithms;
• Long-term impact -- how an algorithm might do in ten years, when larger datasets and faster computers would be available. Don't try to beat the SOAT today, rather, try to become the SOAT in a decade.
• Making hardware and software go faster and cheaper.

AKA the dance dance revolution reward

This is a legitimate concern, since such attempts to quickly scale the computing power of current AI models is just making future AI models unable to scale the computing power quickly.

To future-proof scalability, we should train AI models on hardware that is designed to be scalable and versatile, to prevent a hardware lock-in that can harm future scalability.

This, however, in no way contradicts Sutton's bitter lesson. It merely extends its application to the hardware level. Don't just use scalable algorithms. Also use scalable hardware! And keep it simple and versatile, not overly specialized and human-engineered!

If the market is not broken, then carbon footprint is not an issue. Just carbon-tax electricity and use the tax money to mitigate carbon emission.

We are not running AI projects in a planned economy, after all. Who cares if Google's AI team wants to burn a billion dollars of electricity on their next giant AI model, if they can afford it?

Humans contain a lot of inductive bias from a billion years of metalearning (aka evolution) which used a lot of compute.

It's quite possible that using a lot of compute would create a model that has similar few-shot learning performance. GPT-3 already exhibits emergent few-shot learning ability.

The first AGI model (say, GPT-6) would be very expensive to train, but it can then be copied, distilled, downsized to more manageable sizes for special applications.

Besides, it can't be more expensive than ITER, or the Manhattan project, or the LHC... it only requires the will to throw more compute at it.

There is already enough data. It remains to use scalable self-supervised learning techniques on the data, and use more compute.

This and point 3 can be partially solved with meta-learning architecture, and more compute. Even fully connected neural networks seem to work pretty well once they have enough compute.

or perhaps vampires against men, AI against men, men against men... The point: in this posthuman world, you don't have to be human even if you were born human.

It's more romantic to become no longer human! Posthumanism also opens the vast freedom to become more than, less than, or simply different from, human!

In short, "Free will and choice are magic tricks."

Source-talk trumps choice-talk when there is a simple source to identify, such as when in a sunstroke. We can very easily deal with a sunstroked person by moving them into the shade, rather than giving a peptalk about how they should "stop choosing to be lazy and get going".

For ancient humans, some kinds of social situations can both be dealt with by choice-talk and source-talk, such as head injuries, seizures (aka "demonic possessions"), etc. Generally, these are inherently low-dimensional social situations, allowing source-talk to handle social situations that normally requires choice-talk.

In situations like that, since source-talk is more adaptive than choice-talk due to being more accurate, evolution selected for an extra trait: "When both choice-talk and source-talk applies, use source-talk."

Because humans didn't need to understand the difference between choice-talk and source-talk, they never evolved the understanding that there is a difference, or the understanding that they don't understand it.

It's a metacognitive neglect.

Every moment of consciousness feels new and free from the previous moment, because the causal links from the previous moment to the current moment are not represented.

"I freely choose to eat cake."

"Free? You say you're free because you are extremely unaware of the processes that led you to this moment."

(2011)

What do thoughts, hopes, paintings, words, desires, photographs, traffic signs, and perceptions have in common? They are all about something, are directed, are contentful—in a way chairs and trees, for example, are not. This book inquires into the source of this power of directedness that some items exhibit while others do not. An approach to this issue prevalent in the philosophy of the past half-century seeks to explain the power of directedness in terms of certain items' ability to reliably track things in their environment. A very different approach, with a venerable history and enjoying a recent resurgence, seeks to explain the power of directedness rather in terms of an intrinsic ability of conscious experience to direct itself. This book attempts a synthesis of both approaches, developing an account of the sources of such directedness that grounds it both in reliable tracking and in conscious experience.

We sketch a framework for building a unified science of cognition. This unification is achieved by showing how functional analyses of cognitive capacities can be integrated with the multilevel mechanistic explanations of neural systems. The core idea is that functional analyses are sketches of mechanisms, in which some structural aspects of a mechanistic explanation are omitted. Once the missing aspects are filled in, a functional analysis turns into a full-blown mechanistic explanation. By this process, functional analyses are seamlessly integrated with multilevel mechanistic explanations.

The received view is that functional analysis is autonomous and thus distinct from mechanistic explanation... As we argue, though, functional and mechanistic explanations are not distinct and autonomous from one another precisely because functional analysis, properly constrained, is a kind of mechanistic explanation—an elliptical mechanistic explanation. Thus, a correct understanding of functional analysis undermines the influential claim that explanation in psychology is distinct and autonomous from explanation in neuroscience

Review of The Eliminativistic Implicit I

When we talk and think and feel, we don't merely talk and think and feel what we can speak of, but also imply what we can't speak of. This is the question of the implicit. People have been trying to figure out how the implicit works: What are the hidden assumptions in an argument? What are the hidden motivations in a murder? Etc.

One particular question of the implicit is very deep and is the question investigated by the author. The question of "What are the implicit assumptions and motivations in an explanation?"

In other words, try to explain how we explain. Explicate how we explicate.

There are four main methods for explaining how we explain.

1. The Everyday Implicit: Folk psychology, using concepts like "hope", "desire", "memories", etc, and adapted to solve various practical problems involving humans (and animals).

2. The Philosophical Implicit: Theories about how humans are intentional agents, and use that to explain how humans (and intentional agents in general) work, including their explaining-behavior.

3. The Psychological Implicit: Theories using things like cognitive psychology to describe the function and behavior of humans (and perhaps explainable AI), including their explaining-behavior.

4. The Mechanical Implicit: Using neurobiology and physics to describe how humans work, including their explaining-behavior.

Bakker proposes that the mechanical implicit is the most successful and powerful way to understand how we explain.

The everyday implicit is a bag of heuristic tools sharpened by evolution for talking with other people (and thus it is easily broken and inconsistent when applied to situations never seen before in human evolution).

The philosophical implicit is largely an artifact of theoretical misapplications of those heuristic tools,

The psychological implicit is an empirical approximation using behavioural evidence. Basically, they model what goes on inside the brain by studying what humans (and animals) do. It will only be an approximation like how classical thermodynamics is an approximation of statistical mechanics.

"You can't say that! It's against rule X."

"What's the problem?"

"It's against the rule-rule to go against rule X!"

"What's the problem?"

"It's against the rule-rule-rule to go against rule-rule!"

...

In epistemology, the Münchhausen trilemma is a thought experiment used to demonstrate the impossibility of proving any truth, even in the fields of logic and mathematics. If it is asked how any given proposition is known to be true, proof may be provided. Yet that same question can be asked of the proof, and any subsequent proof. The Münchhausen trilemma is that there are only three options when providing further proof in response to further questioning:

• The circular argument, in which the proof of some proposition is supported only by that proposition
• The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum
• The dogmatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts which are merely asserted rather than defended

"Okay, so I did this and that..."

"How did you do it?"

"Uhh... it's a black box function!"

Brandom didn't give his own second-order explanation. He reviewed the history of second-order explanations.

"I'm trying to explain how we explain things."

"Oh?"

"So, you know how we explain this and that? I call those first-order explanations. I'm trying to do a second-order explanation: an explanation for how we can do first-order explanation."

"Ambitious. Nobody has done it before despite 2000 years of trying. What makes you think you can succeed?"

<silence>

"I did it."

"Explain how you did it."

<explanation>

"Explain how you could explain."

<silence>

Suppose we manage to finally explain how to explain (a "second-order explanation"), then we would be "done" with explaining. We don't need to explain how we did our second-order explanation, because the second-order explanation is an explanation itself.

That is, a second-order explanation is self-explaining, and our work is finally done. No more second-order or higher-order explanation necessary.

What would something unlike us—a chimpanzee, say, or a computer—have to be able to do to qualify as a possible knower, like us? To answer this question at the very heart of our sense of ourselves, philosophers have long focused on intentionality and have looked to language as a key to this condition. Making It Explicit is an investigation into the nature of language—the social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures—that revises the very terms of this inquiry. Where accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language. Making It Explicit is the first attempt to work out in detail a theory that renders linguistic meaning in terms of use—in short, to explain how semantic content can be conferred on expressions and attitudes that are suitably caught up in social practices.

At the center of this enterprise is a notion of discursive commitment. Being able to talk—and so in the fullest sense being able to think—is a matter of mastering the practices that govern such commitments, being able to keep track of one’s own commitments and those of others. Assessing the pragmatic significance of speech acts is a matter of explaining the explicit in terms of the implicit. As he traces the inferential structure of the social practices within which things can be made conceptually explicit, the author defines the distinctively expressive role of logical vocabulary. This expressive account of language, mind, and logic is, finally, an account of who we are.

Common cognitive biases and cognitive neglects usually don't fuck us up in daily life, because evolution would have weeded them out otherwise. Therefore, any experiment that tricks us into bad cognitive behavior (such as taking a losing bet) is likely to be very different from daily life in some regard, and so people often simply dismiss them as "unrealistic", drawing a jagged boundary to separate "real life conditions" from "unrealistic lab conditions".

Similarly, even though moral biases fuck us up in thought experiments (like in the trolley problem), those biases remain functional enough in real world, that we can draw a jagged boundary to separate "real life morality" from "unrealistic thought experiment morality".

Similarly, experiments about free will that clearly reveals the problems with the everyday understanding of free will are not everyday conditions, allowing us to draw a jagged boundary between "real free will" and "unrealistic lab un-free-will".

interpretative, rather than directly experienced. It is possible to be wrong about what you willed about. That is very important. You could be wrong about the color of the shoe, you could be wrong about willing. Perhaps you could even be wrong about feeling like you willed. There is very little that you can take for granted, even your own thoughts.

When a normal try to explain social rules to someone with very few social intuitions (such as some autistic people), they feel the difficulty in turning the Everyday Implicit into words. What really does it mean to hate, or to love, or to feel jealousy?

Perhaps if consciousness is evolved only for understanding what we see, it would have been parallel.

Because introspection does not allow us to observe what caused us to think "this caused that", it is impossible for us to, using our bare introspection, make a causal theory for how we come to think "this caused that".

We can say "this caused that" but cannot say "this caused me to think that 'this caused that'". Not unless we wield brain science.

Bakker will start explaining how the mechanism for creating sense of efficacy is implicit: inscrutable, effective, retrospectively accessible, inferentially accessible.

brain mechanisms that we can't talk about. Brain science research is turning implicit brain mechanisms into explicit words that describe these mechanisms.

Compared to brain science, philosophy has been remarkably useless at turning the implicit brain mechanisms into explicit words.

intentionality itself is an error, a wrong theory about how brains work.

The author is trying to say that:

Rational agents are rational because they follow rules (they have "normative behavior") of rationality (such as "law of excluded middle", "law of noncontradiction", etc). This rule-following behavior implies that these agents are agents, rather than just piles of meat and bones, because piles of meat and bones cannot follow rules.

Or can they?? Bakker is about to argue that we don't actually behave rationally by following normative rules at all. Rather, we behave rationally because we are programmed by evolution and structures to do so, as blindly as rocks follow the law of gravity. We only appear to use normative rules due to our blindness to our own operations. Turns out rule-following behavior can be done by sufficiently complex piles of meat and bones, without any necessity of using an atom of normativity.

A man in Manchester may have made legal history in the UK after being acquitted of murdering his father because he was sleepwalking at the time. He was found not guilty due to insanity and sent to a psychiatric hospital for an indefinite period of time.

But it is clear that "A believes that p", "A thinks p", "A says p", are of the form "`p' says p": and here we have no co-ordination of a fact and an object, but a co-ordination of facts by means of a co-ordination of their objects.

This shows that there is no such thing as the soul -- the subject, etc. -- as it is conceived in superficial psychology. A composite soul would not be a soul any longer.

The more biology we know, the more we see the human body as a machine made of little parts that can break, be replaced, be taken apart, be upgraded, downgraded, swapped for parts...

This kind of bits-and-parts image of the human is so different from the subjective feeling of being human. The subjective feeling of being a whole, indivisible person -- that feeling is illusionary.

Measuring and Interpreting World Economic Performance 1500-2001

At the 2011 census, 59.8% of all London residents were white.

One must note many hypotheses on invisible phenomena that succeeded. The allusion that the invisible phenomena of modern science are motivated by such psychological desire for spiritual stuff is just the author guessing.

Consider the atomic theory in 18-19th century. Atoms remained highly contentious until Einstein's explanation of Brownian matter, and unseen until around

Or the discovery of Neptune.

Or the imaginary numbers. Nothing in real life ever has a complex number of them, and yet they proved very useful.

Or the zero, something that is literally invisible and nonexistent.

As long as something is in principle observable, it is scientific. If it is not, but mathematically convenient, it is still useful.

Wrong. This sum diverges if and only if the "response ratio" is at least 1.

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history…

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.

These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

This chapter is very similar to Gilbert, Scott F., Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber, ‘A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 87.4 (2012), 325–41 https://doi.org/10/gfz64k

In contrast to the "immune self" in clonal selection theory, which is defined by the absence of immune response

The immune system contains some autoantibodies (antibodies that attach to proteins inside one's own body). This is the immune system's representation of the body itself, the "immune homunculus".

The notion of the immunological homunculus arose from the observations (1) that the healthy adaptive immune system is inclined to respond (T cell reactivity and autoantibodies) to particular sets of body molecules (self-antigens) and (2) that autoimmune diseases are characterized by sets of autoimmune reactivity to some of the very same self-antigens recognized by healthy subjects -- with an obvious difference in outcome. I termed this natural autoimmune structuring of the immune system, the immunological homunculus -- the immune system’s representation of the body.

\(X_i\) or some descendent

As early as 1962, Horridge demonstrated that the ventral ganglia (loosely equivalent to the spinal cord) of cockroaches and locust are sufficient to associate leg positions with an electric shock punishment [1]. In vertebrates and invertebrates, removal of the brain has little impact on the execution of basic motor patterns, even though the resulting behaviors often lack coordination 2, 3. Providing that they stay hydrated, decapitated adult flies will happily stand on their six legs and groom spontaneously or upon touching their mechanoreceptor bristles

Is this relevant for sociology? A society of people can have "liquid" or "solid" social communication networks. A communication network is liquid when it is easy and quick to cut old ties, form new ties, especially long-distance ties; the opposite for a solid network.

Liquid network examples: scientist communication, business network, internet friendship...

Solid network examples: feudal economy, caste system, bureaucracy, military command...

Also, Project Cybersyn is socialist.

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory - Wikipedia:

Project MAC would become famous for groundbreaking research in operating systems, artificial intelligence, and the theory of computation.

It led to development of Multics (precursor of Unix).

The problem of "big dumb data", or "data swamp".

"ladder of nature"

Here it denotes the levels of biological organization, from molecular biology to human culture (assumed to be the most complex level of biological organization).

Not true. Molecular machines can be deformed by experience and keep memories in their deformation. This is "conformational memory".

For me, the cicada, exam, and the smell of air conditioning.

Flight envelope protection is a human machine interface extension of an aircraft's control system that prevents the pilot of an aircraft from making control commands that would force the aircraft to exceed its structural and aerodynamic operating limits

It seems rather common sense. It's the same idea as zone of proximal development. Perhaps something else from psychology of learning can be applied to ML too.

Project Cybersyn

In The Will to Power §898, Nietzsche talks about how a greater race of humans should be created so that the future would be greater. However, in order to create such a greater race, the current race of Europeans should be made even blander.

the leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it.

This bland race would bring about the great race:

Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength for beauty, bravery, culture, manners to the highest peak of the spirit; an affirming race that may grant itself every great luxury — strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative, rich enough to have no need of thrift and pedantry, beyond good and evil; a hothouse for strange and choice plants .

As noted before, capitalism "deterritorializes" by kicking things out of their meaningful place and putting a price on them, allowing them to be traded utterly out of their context.

"Decoding" is the same idea. Perhaps a better word is "de-symbolizing". Consider the crucifix. It is a sacred symbol for Christians. Now slap a price tag on it. The symbolism is lost. 1 Crucifix = 1 Subway Sandwich.

Note that this advice was taken up by Khieu Samphan's doctoral thesis "Underdevelopment in Cambodia", and followed through by Khmer Rouge, who withdrew completely from the world, causing disaster.

"On the Question of Free Trade" (Marx, 1848)

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade

Nick Land imagines capitalism to be a big cancerous thing. This is not necessarily how capitalism works in reality, but certainly how Nick Land imagines it to work.

Clicker games are the best metaphor for this idea of capitalism. In a clicker game like cookie clicker, you make cookies not to eat them, but convert them to capital:

In economics, capital consists of assets that can enhance one's power to perform economically useful work.

Cookies in this game loses all of its previous meaning (things to be eaten), but becomes pure capital, made to make more capital, until infinity.

Nick Land imagines our capitalism to become like this cookie-clicker-capitalism: a giant complex of machines that sustains itself and makes more machines, growth for the sake of growth, utterly meaningless in human eyes. Humans would be like their "bootloader", discarded once the machine complex becomes self-sustaining.

"Deterritorialization" is used by D&G to talk about the way capitalism works. Traditional people-things like religion, ethnicity, love, dream, etc, all have their time and place. They have a home and have their meaning-symbols. Capitalism comes and destroys their uniqueness, by giving a price to all of them, allowing them to be exchanged. This essentially makes them no longer fixed to a time, place, or meaning-system. This kicks them off their territories.

Consider for example Tetlock's "forbidden tradeoff", where people resist attempting to give prices to sacred things like human lives, religious beliefs, or national flags. Capitalism breaks their meaning by pricing them.

Doing anything consciously would take too much time, so things happen without enough human thought to their consequences.

The author emphasizes that there isn't much time for thinking through the consequences of accelerationism, because our society is changing much faster than the past, back when there was enough time to think through changes.

The author gives agency to a lot of things, such as an ideology. In other places, he calls such "living" ideologies hyperstition: a collection of ideas that become alive, and protects and grows itself by manipulating people whose brains contain such ideas.

Traditional psychoanalysis is repressive.

Ego is based on a mirror illusion of unity. A human is made of a collection of stuffs, and the mirror only shows one physical object. A human seeing its container in the mirror mistakes it for itself.

Linear time is a human convention.

Schizophrenics loses meaning by not having linear time and not having an ego.

Current consumption-based capitalism found it profitable to make people be a little schizophrenic. Ads and other commercial images make consumers go through a cycle:

1. assume a new identity,
2. buy products to satisfy the identity.
3. make the identity go away (made easier by making the identity contentless).

The Internet and its instant-buy made the cycle go really fast, but it can't possibly get much faster, since humans have a limit to reaction time. If this process is accelerated, capitalism can reach its limit of actual societal schizophrenia, and collapse.

Why? Because schizophrenics don't have an ego, and the cycle of identity-based consumption breaks.

This style of thinking is Accelerationism, wherein people are encouraged to make capitalism faster and more pervasive (often to escape it, but not always).

Think of it as subtracting the low terms in Taylor expansion to see the high terms.

A cultigen is a plant that has been deliberately altered or selected by humans; it is the result of artificial selection.

assuming the assets in the bundle have uncorrelated returns. But in fact they were correlated (in a system), and so the bundles had much more risk than calculated.

Arbitrage Pricing Theory

Claims inside financial system. For example, lending between banks.

a hypothesized cycle of solar radiation

keep Earth in the nice Holocene climate

Yes: there are tipping points.

Not necessarily. It is possible to postulate several AIXI agents interacting, each playing the environment for the others.

One could play "God" as the designer of environments, designing interesting teaching environments and instructive problems, which the other AIXIs deal with.

Compare this with PowerPlay

Robots that can adapt like animals (Nature cover article) - YouTube

Another possible approach is through algorithms that aim for "empowerment", that is, they try to have more choices and increase their ability to determine the future. See for example Entropy | Free Full-Text | Changing the Environment Based on Empowerment as Intrinsic Motivation

Consider the task of teaching computers to see. The strategies, in increasing abstraction, are

-1. Direct programming of computer vision.

1. Applying a hand-written neural network on some hand-picked examples, using hand-picked hyperparameters.
2. Using a learning algorithm to pick a suitable network architecture and learning hyperparameters.
3. Using a learning algorithm to pick informative initializations of the neural network before it encounters particular training sets.
4. Using a teacher algorithm that finds/generates valuable learning environments.

The performance of meta-learning algorithms critically depends on the tasks available for meta-training: in the same way that supervised learning algorithms generalize best to test points drawn from the same distribution as the training points, meta-learning methods generalize best to tasks from the same distribution as the meta-training tasks. In effect, meta-reinforcement learning offloads the design burden from algorithm design to task design. If we can automate the process of task design as well, we can devise a meta-learning algorithm that is truly automated.

training an increasingly general problem solver by continually searching for the simplest still unsolvable problem

Fundamentally, the laws of physics are fixed, and yet evolution is open-ended. So rather than blaming it on the lack of openness in the environment, perhaps blame it on insufficient complexity and abstraction in the environment.

Instead of simulating virtual soccer, imagine simulating a patch of grass, with full biochemical complexity. It would surely be open-ended.

Neuromodulation is the physiological process by which a given neuron uses one or more chemicals to regulate diverse populations of neurons. This is in contrast to synaptic transmission in which an axonal terminal secretes neurotransmitters to target fast-acting receptors of only one particular partner neuron.

Whole brain emulation by molecular-level simulation, if purely extrapolated from Moore's Law, might take another 100 years to achieve. See Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap

Finding useful priors/inductive biases. In evolutionary psychology, this is exemplified by human inductive reasoning biased by evolution to reach conclusions quickly. See for example Adaptive Rationality: An Evolutionary Perspective on Cognitive Bias | Social Cognition

Also, no mention of "seed AI" research, interesting omission.

Experimental xenopsychology. Alien intelligence. A sampling of the distribution of possible minds. However, any intelligence that evolves on earth could be biased in certain earth-bound ways, so the sampling would not be universal. It would still be more than directly asking humans to imagine possible minds, though.

Gould's question about "replaying life's tape" comes to mind.

97% consensus is not a "divided" unless one wishes to make it a controversy.

Manufactured controversy - Wikipedia

Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming - IOPscience

For an update supporting the "97%" figure, see Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming - IOPscience

In the context of United States constitutional interpretation, originalism is a way to interpret the Constitution's meaning as stable from the time of enactment, which can be changed only by the steps set out in Article Five. The term originated in the 1980s.

Originalism - Wikipedia

The collapse of west roman empire had an energy component. See Joseph Tainter's research on collapse and complexity.

Actually, it's Exaptation - Wikipedia.

It means a collection of things (human or not) that relate to each other and do things. For example, guns don't kill people, nor does people kill people. (Gun + people) kill people.

Rifleman's Creed - Wikipedia

Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will ...

My rifle and I know that what counts in war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit ..

See the author's blog post In Defense of Soundbites (2 January 2011)

soundbites have dropped in length for a variety of reasons — economic, political, historical, and professional. What’s more, they’ve been dropping for a long time, as new research suggests that newspaper quotations began shrinking in a similar way in the 1890s.

Instead of soundbites, then, we should worry about the tone and focus of our political discourse. And there’s no doubt that this, too, has evolved.

Elaborated in the story:

Hallin has argued all along that television news in the 1960s and 1970s, which many take to be the genre’s golden age, was never actually that good. Stories were dull and disorganized; those long quotations would be followed by a couple of seconds of dead air. Early newspapers, in their time, were no different. The Boston Globe’s first issue, in 1872, devoted much of its front page to transcriptions of church sermons.

as networks shortened their sound bites, they also changed the substance of their political coverage. They started using more in-house experts, pundits who looked less at what people said than at how they said it. TV news became more about strategy and the parsing of strategy — about buzzwords like “expectations” and “momentum” — than about the issues that presumably lie at the heart of politics. Journalists wanted to turn campaigns into larger narratives, and there was no easier narrative than covering politics as though it were a sport. Indeed, Ryfe found that the same thing happened with 19th-century journalists, who, as they professionalized, also “became handicappers of the political process.”

Ironically, this note is nothing but sound bites!

Not the only narrative, of course, but the easiest one, certainly.

See also the author's own take.

If the Modernists loved revision so much that they kept at it throughout the literary process, including when their work was in proofs — and one of Sullivan’s key points is that these discrete stages actually encouraged revision — then why didn’t their printers and publishers complain? ... changing work in proofs is expensive.

That's because Modernists had the support money to revise and to experiment with the rules of revision.

In her memoir Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Beach recalls Joyce’s publisher warning about “a lot of extra expenses with these proofs. . . . He suggested that I call Joyce’s attention to the danger of going beyond my depth; perhaps his appetite for proofs might be curbed.”

But Beach explains that, for her, the most important thing was that Joyce could work as diligently and obsessively as he wanted to:

I wouldn’t hear of such a thing. Ulysses was to be as Joyce wished, in every respect. I wouldn’t advise ‘real’ publishers to follow my example, nor authors to follow Joyce’s. It would be the death of publishing. My case was different. It seemd natural to me that the efforts and sacrifices on my part should be proportionate to the greatnes of the work I was publishing.

Fear of humans as apex predators has landscape-scale impactsfrom mount ain lions to mice (2019)

Apex predators such as large carnivores can have cascading, landscape-scale impacts across wild-life communities, which could result largely from the fear they inspire, although this has yet to be experimentally demonstrated.

Humans have supplanted large carnivores as apex predators in many systems, and similarly pervasive impacts may now result from fear of the human ‘superpredator’.

We conducted a landscape-scale playback experiment demonstrating that the sound of humans speaking generates a landscape of fear with pervasive effects across wildlife communities.

• Large carnivores avoided human voices and moved more cautiously when hearing humans,
• medium-sized carnivores became more elusive and reduced foraging.
• Small mammals evidently benefited, increasing habitat use and foraging.

Thus, just the sound of a predator can have landscape-scale effects at multiple trophic levels.

Our results indicate that many of the globally observed impacts on wildlife attributed to anthropogenic activity may be explained by fear of humans.

He was the Democratic Party's nominee in the 1968 presidential election, losing to Republican nominee Richard Nixon.