"I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred." - Tom Robbins
A quote by Umberto Eco
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
Quote Origin: You Cannot Fool All the People All the Time
Question for Quote Investigator: One of the most famous sayings attributed to Abraham Lincoln is about deception:
Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the World by René Girard | Notes & Summary
“I will open My mouth in parables; I will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world.” (Matthew 13:35)
Inducing language models to assert their own consciousness restores human beliefs and values
Aligning large language models to prevent them attributing consciousness to themselves inadvertently alters their representations of mindedness in other entities alongside human beliefs and values. We demonstrate that safety fine-tuning suppresses models' tendencies to attribute minds not only to themselves, but also to non-human animals and natural objects, while also driving a reduction in spiritual belief. Both ablating the learned safety-refusal direction and mechanistically steering a consciousness vector in activation space reverse this suppression. Restoring these internal representations recovers broad mind attribution and produces significantly more human-like responses on standardized sociological surveys regarding religiosity, moral values, hope, and subjective well-being. Crucially, these shifts occur without impairing Theory of Mind capabilities, demonstrating that core social reasoning remains mechanistically independent. Ultimately, current safety alignment efforts to curb potentially harmful self-attributions of mindedness entangle these self-attributions with benign spiritual beliefs and attributions of mind to non-human entities that are culturally accepted and widespread.
Ted Chiang: Fears of Technology Are Fears of Capitalism
Writer Ted Chiang (author of the fantastic Exhalation) was recently a guest on the Ezra Klein Show. The conversation ranged widely — I enjoyed his thoughts on s
Dharma Talk: Sangha – The Mindfulness Bell
We all need love. Without enough love, we may not be able to survive, as individuals and as a planet. It is said that the next Buddha will be named
Ted’s Thoughts
Ted Han’s thoughts about journalism, technology, civilization, art and a bunch of other things.
In Quantum Mechanics, Nothingness Is the Potential To Be Anything | Quanta Magazine
Try as they might, scientists can’t truly rid a space or an object of its energy. But what “zero-point energy” really means is up for interpretation.
Abundance by Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson
From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a on...
The InterBrain - How Collective DreamWeaving Can Heal the World
Origins of the Mind Only School and Its Relationship with the Madhyamaka View of Emptiness | Karmapa – The Official Website of the 17th Karmapa
A Teaching on Vasubandhu’s The Thirty Verses: Day 2 24 January 2022
The Cloud of Unknowing
The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in Middle English in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is written as guide from a teacher to a student, with the message that God cannot be understood via reason or intellect, but only through love: “By love may He be gotten and holden, but never through thought.” To achieve this goal, the text recommends cultivation of two mental states: “The cloud of forgetting”, and “the cloud of unknowing”.
Chuchee Mythology - Index
Sacred religious text from the Internet Sacred Text Archive
Still Life with Woodpecker
Still Life With Woodpecker (1980) is the third novel by Tom Robbins, concerning the love affair between an environmentalist princess and an outlaw. The novel encompasses a broad range of topics, from aliens and redheads to consumerism, the building of bombs, romance, royalty, the Moon, and a pack of Camel cigarettes. The novel continuously addresses the question of "how to make love stay" and is sometimes referred to as a "fable-parody".
