"Digital intelligence" seems like an odd choice of terms. Nothing in what you are talking about needs to be digital per se by any of the usual meanings of digital. It would certainly be strange if humans made such an object that wasn't digital but nothing in the definition requires it to be digital.

Thanks for an overview of a current analytical model of how the nurons learn timing and answering our random neuroscience questions.

Let me tell you about my personal experience with testosterone, which may be of some interest. At the age of 21 I was a junior in college majoring in math and physics, a very thin, effeminate, extremely shy nerd who was sometimes mistaken for a 14 year old prodigy. When I finally saw a doctor and it was found that I produced no natural testosterone, I began giving myself injections of the hormone. Anxious to get results, I often gave myself more than the prescribed dose. The results were profound: Within 6 months I had undergone an accelerated puberty which resulted in a bad case of acne, a much better physique and nearly caused me to flunk out of college. I was often overwhelmed, walking around campus among my peers, by the apish nature of my species. Having lost interest in intellectual pursuits, all I really wanted to do was fight, fuck and pick bananas off of trees. I even began shoplifting for no apparent reason other than it seemed like something I could get away with.

I managed to barely graduate, but my life was thrown into disarray from which I have never fully recovered. It became frighteningly clear to me just how much human lives are controlled by chemicals rather than any moralistic narratives. While a high testosterone level certainly gives you energy, ambition and fearlessness, it probably isn’t very helpful in a technological civilization which requires people to sit at computers all day manipulating symbols. My guess is that women are going to rule in such a world, as high testosterone men become increasingly useless and tend to wind up in prison. It may get to the point where testosterone levels will need to be technologically lowered to reduce crime and make men more socially acceptable.

So understand this, all you LessWrong nerds: when you see someone who is like a thug to you, that he is in the grip of an incredibly powerful mind-altering chemical called testosterone which, more than any other, is responsible for the evil that men do.

Primarily I was looking for an exercise in conditioning, any practical benefits are ancillary. If progress continues, I will not sneeze unless a specific trigger is present (staring at a very bright light); so it should be a passive benefit with no long-term upkeep. If you have better ways of control sneezing, I am interested in knowing them.

A friend of mine naturally exhibits exclusively photosensitive sneezing. So I thought it would be interesting to try. This study suggests it is primarily acquired and not inherited so I figured it was worth a shot.

I... I don't even... he Photoshopped the evidence into their actual hiking expedition... but... look, how far does this have to go before your kids are justified in wondering whether the world around them was created by you for the sole purpose of deceiving them?

Imagine that everyone in North America took [a cognitive enhancement pill] before retiring and then woke up the next morning with more memory capacity and processing speed... I believe that there is little likelihood that much would change the next day in terms of human happiness. It is very unlikely that people would be better able to fulfill their wishes and desires the day after taking the pill. In fact, it is quite likely that people would simply go about their usual business - only more efficiently. If given more memory capacity and processing speed, people would, I believe: carry on using the same ineffective medical treatments because of failure to think of alternative causes; keep making the same poor financial decisions because of overconfidence; keep misjudging environmental risks because of vividness; play host to the [tempting bad ideas] of Ponzi and pyramid schemes; [and] be wrongly influenced in their jury decisions by incorrect testimony about probabilities... The only difference would be that they would be able to do all of these things much more quickly!

Keith Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss

Here's a thought experiment for you: Imagine that you've decided to take a short walk to the black hole at the corner 7-11 / Circle-K / 'Kwik-E-Mart'. How long will it take you to reach the event horizon? (The answer, of course, is that you never will.)

As you approach the event horizon of a quantum singularity, time is distorted until it reaches an infinitessimal rate of progression. The Bing Bang states that the entire universe inflated from a single point; a singularity. The same rules, thusly govern -- in reverse; the first instants of the universe took an infinitely long period of time to progress.

It helps if you think of this as a two-dimensional graph, with the history of the universe as a line. As we approach the origin mark, the graph of history curves; the "absolute zero instant" of the Universe is, thusly, shown to be an asymptotic limit; a point that can only ever be approached but never, ever reached.

My guess is that the Copenhagen interpretation isn't supposed to talk about what your beliefs are; it's just supposed to talk about entanglement of waveforms. So Schroedinger's beliefs about whether the cat is alive or dead don't matter.

But I've heard people talk about such situation as if Schroedinger's belief that the cat was alive or dead was important. Especially in connection with the idea that a waveform only truly collapses when an observation is made by a conscious agent.

If you don't say that only conscious agents can collapse waveforms, then you have to agree that something in the box collapses the waveform as seen from inside the box, while it's still uncollapsed to Schroedinger. And Schroedinger's opening the box collapses that waveform for him; but it is still uncollapsed for someone outside the room.

But if you do say that only conscious agents can collapse waveforms, then it's something about their mental processes that does the collapsing. This could mean their beliefs matter. And then, the cat is always dead.

The whole business seems murky and mysterious to me, and I hope for some enlightenment. And if it is not enlightening, it can at least be entertaining.

In short: a method of answering questions should be judged not only on its benefits, but on its costs. So, another basic question of rationality is:

Q: When should we stop thinking about a question?