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19 Aug 2023
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What Socrates Can Teach Us About AI

If Socrates was the wisest person in Ancient Greece, then large language models must be the most foolish systems in the modern world.

In his Apology, Plato tells the story of how Socrates’s friend Chaerephon goes to visit the oracle at Delphi. Chaerephon asks the oracle whether there is anyone wiser than Socrates. The priestess responds that there isn’t: Socrates is the wisest of them all.

At first, Socrates seems puzzled. How could he be the wisest, when there were so many other people who were well known for their knowledge and wisdom, and yet Socrates claims that he lacks both?

He makes it his mission to solve the mystery. He goes around interrogating a series of politicians, poets, and artisans (as philosophers do). And what does he find? Socrates’ investigation reveals that those who claim to have knowledge either do not really know what they think they know, or else know far less than they proclaim to know.

Socrates is the wisest, then, because he is aware of the limits of his own knowledge. He doesn’t think he knows more than he does, and he doesn’t claim to know more than he does.

How does that compare with large language models like ChatGPT4?

In contrast to Socrates, large language models don’t know what they don’t know. These systems are not built to be truth-tracking. They are not based on empirical evidence or logic. They make statistical guesses that are very often wrong.

Large language models don’t inform users that they are making statistical guesses. They present incorrect guesses with the same confidence as they present facts. Whatever you ask, they will come up with a convincing response, and it’s never “I don’t know,” even though it should be. If you ask ChatGPT about current events, it will remind you that it only has access to information up to September 2021 and it can’t browse the internet. For almost any other kind of question, it will venture a response that will often mix facts with confabulations.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously argued that bullshit is speech that is typically persuasive but is detached from a concern with the truth. Large language models are the ultimate bullshitters because they are designed to be plausible (and therefore convincing) with no regard for the truth. Bullshit doesn’t need to be false. Sometimes bullshitters describe things as they are, but if they are not aiming for the truth, what they say is still bullshit.

And bullshit is dangerous, warned Frankfurt. Bullshit is a greater threat to the truth than lies. The person who lies thinks she knows what the truth is, and is therefore concerned with the truth. She can be challenged and held accountable; her agenda can be inferred. The truth-teller and the liar play on opposite sides of the same game, as Frankfurt puts it. The bullshitter pays no attention to the game. Truth doesn’t even get confronted; it gets ignored; it becomes irrelevant.

Bullshit is more dangerous the more persuasive it is, and large language models are persuasive by design on two counts. First, they have analysed enormous amounts of text, which allows them to make a statistical guess as to what is a likely appropriate response to the prompt given. In other words, it mimics the patterns that it has picked up in the texts it has gone through. Second, these systems are refined through a process of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The reward model has been trained directly from human feedback. Humans taught it what kinds of responses they prefer. Through numerous iterations, the system learns how to satisfy human beings’ preferences, thereby becoming more and more persuasive.

As the proliferation of fake news has taught us, human beings don’t always prefer truth. Falsity is often much more attractive than bland truths. We like good, exciting stories much more than we like truth. Large language models are analogous to a nightmare student, professor, or journalist; those who, instead of acknowledging the limits of their knowledge, try to wing it by bullshitting you.

Plato’s Apology suggests that we should build AI to be more like Socrates and less like bullshitters. We shouldn’t expect tech companies to design ethically out of their own good will. Silicon Valley is well known for its bullshitting abilities, and companies can even feel compelled to bullshit to stay competitive in that environment. That companies working in a corporate bullshitting environment create bullshitting products should hardly be surprising. One of the things that the past two decades have taught us is that tech needs as much regulation as any other industry, and no industry can regulate itself. We regulate food, drugs, telecommunications, finance, transport; why wouldn’t tech be next?

Plato leaves us with a final warning. One of the lessons of his work is to beware the flaws of democracy. Athenian democracy killed Socrates. It condemned its most committed citizen, its most valuable teacher, while it allowed sophists—the bullshitters of that time—to thrive. Our democracies seem likewise vulnerable to bullshitters. In the recent past, we have made them prime ministers and presidents. And now we are fueling the power of large language models, considering using them in all walks of life—even in contexts like journalism, politics, and medicine, in which truth is vital to the health of our institutions. Is that wise?

Original article here

15 Aug 2023
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3 Simple Habits That Can Protect Your Brain from Cognitive Decline

You might think that the impact of aging on the brain is something you can’t do much about. After all, isn’t it an inevitability?

To an extent, as we may not be able to rewind the clock and change our levels of higher education or intelligence (both factors that delay the onset of symptoms of aging). But adopting specific lifestyle behaviors–whether you’re in your thirties or late forties–can have a tangible effect on how well you age. Even in your fifties and beyond, activities like learning a new language or musical instrument, taking part in aerobic exercise, and developing meaningful social relationships can do wonders for your brain. There’s no question that when we compromise on looking after ourselves, our aging minds pick up the tab.

THE AGING PROCESS AND COGNITIVE DECLINE

Over time, there is a build-up of toxins such as tau proteins and beta-amyloid plaques in the brain that correlate to the aging process and associated cognitive decline. Although this is a natural part of growing older, many factors can exacerbate it. Stress, neurotoxins such as alcohol and lack of (quality and quantity) sleep can speed up the process.

Neuroplasticity–the function that allows the brain to change and develop in our lifetime–has three mechanisms: synaptic connection, myelination, and neurogenesis. The key to resilient aging is improving neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons. Neurogenesis happens far more in babies and children than adults. A 2018 study by researchers at Columbia University shows that in adults, this type of neuroplastic activity occurs in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that lays down memories. This makes sense as we respond to and store new experiences every day, and cement them during sleep. The more we can experience new things, activities, people, places, and emotions, the more likely we are to encourage neurogenesis.

With all this in mind, we can come up with a three-point plan to encourage “resilient aging” by activating neurogenesis in the brain:

GET YOUR HEART RATE UP

Aerobic exercise such as running or brisk walking has a potentially massive impact on neurogenesis. A 2016 rat study found that endurance exercise was most effective in increasing neurogenesis. It wins out over HIIT sessions and resistance training, although doing a variety of exercise also has its benefits.

Aim to do aerobic exercise for 150 minutes per week, and choose the gym, the park, or natural landscape over busy roads to avoid compromising brain-derived neurotrophic factor production (BDNF), a growth factor that encourages neurogenesis that aerobic exercise can boost. However, exercising in polluted areas decreases production.

If exercising alone isn’t your thing, consider taking up a team sport or one with a social element like table tennis. Exposure to social interaction can also increase the neurogenesis, and in many instances, doing so lets you practice your hand-eye coordination, which research has suggested leads to structural changes in the brain that may relate to a range of cognitive benefit. This combination of coordination and socializing has been shown to increase brain thickness in the parts of the cortex related to social/emotional welfare, which is crucial as we age.

CHANGE YOUR EATING PATTERNS

Evidence shows that calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, and time-restricted eating encourage neurogenesis in humans. In rodent studies, intermittent fasting has been found to improve cognitive function and brain structure, and reduce symptoms of metabolic disorders such as diabetes. Reducing refined sugar will help reduce oxidative damage to brain cells, too, and we know that increased oxidative damage has been linked with a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Twenty-four hour water-only fasts have also been proven to increase longevity and encourage neurogenesis.

Try any of the following, after checking with your doctor:

24-hour water-only fast once a month
Reducing your calorie intake by 50%-60% on two non-consecutive days of the week for two to three months or on an ongoing basis
Reducing calories by 20% every day for two weeks. You can do this three to four times a year
Eating only between 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., or 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. as a general rule

PRIORITIZE SLEEP

Sleep helps promote the brain’s neural “cleaning” glymphatic system, which flushes out the build-up of age-related toxins in the brain (the tau proteins and beta amyloid plaques mentioned above). When people are sleep-deprived, we see evidence of memory deficits, and if you miss a whole night of sleep, research proves that it impacts IQ. Aim for seven to nine hours, and nap if it suits you. Our need to sleep decreases as we age.

Of course, there are individual exceptions, but having consistent sleep times and making sure you’re getting sufficient quality and length of sleep supports brain resilience over time. So how do you know if you’re getting enough? If you naturally wake up at the same time on weekends that you have to during the week, you probably are. If you need to lie-in or take long naps, you’re probably not. Try practicing mindfulness or yoga nidra before bed at night, a guided breath-based meditation that has been shown in studies to improve sleep quality. There are plenty of recordings online if you want to experience it.

Pick any of the above that work for you and build it up until it becomes a habit, then move onto the next one and so on. You might find that by the end of the year, you’ll feel even healthier, more energized, and motivated than you do now, even as you turn another year older.

Original article here

11 Aug 2023
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5 Amazing New Discoveries About Light

You might think that after centuries of studying light, we know pretty much everything about it. It’s true we’ve had breakthrough after breakthrough in using it, from illumination to communication, from examining the micro- and macro-universes to scanning our own bodies. We understand that light is an electromagnetic wave, thanks to James Clerk Maxwell, whose equations established that in 1865; and that it also appears as quantum packets of electromagnetic energy called photons, as Albert Einstein recognized in 1905. But the more we look into light, the more we see and the more we learn. The classical view of light as a wave still produces new science as light waves interact with artificial “metamaterials”; and we are still exploring light as a quantum particle. Both approaches provide ways to manipulate light that were once only science fiction. Here are five recent marvels.

Bending Light for Invisibility

The magical invisibility rings and cloaks featured in fantasy stories reflect the ancient human dream of hiding things and people from sight. Invisibility shows up in science fiction too, like Star Trek, where hostile Romulan spacecraft conceal themselves with a cloaking device. This uses an idea from relativity, that strongly distorted spacetime makes light curve around the spacecraft as if it didn’t exist.

Physicists don’t yet know how to do that, but the classical optics of light waves and light rays points to another solution. We see an object as it interacts with incoming light. In principle, an invisibility cloak could intercept those incoming rays and bend or refract them into itself so they travel inside the cloak and emerge along their original paths. An observer, seeing what looks like undisturbed light, would think nothing is there, just as flowing water smoothly splitting around a rock and then recombining gives no downstream indication of the rock. But to make light follow this complex path, the cloak needs to be made from a metamaterial.

Researchers first tested this idea in 2006 with a rigid metamaterial cloak, a hollow cylinder whose wall held thousands of small structures that made microwaves traverse suitable paths within the wall. Placed around an opaque metal object, the cloak made the object nearly completely vanish under microwave radiation. Since then, researchers have made small inanimate objects and a fish, a cat, and a hand vanish under ordinary visible light, but only as seen over a narrow angle of view. Others have developed a flexible cloak that wraps around a small object to make it vanish, but only at one wavelength. Science can’t yet make a cloak that completely hides a person in ordinary light; but invisibility research is thriving and we’re approaching Harry Potter’s wondrous cloak.

Light Pushes and Pulls Things

Like thrown rocks, photons carry momentum that they transfer to an object on impact. This radiation pressure is why sunlight pushes comet tails away from the sun, and why it can propel a spacecraft. In 2010, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun, honoring Icarus who flew near the sun in myth). Its thin, tennis court-sized polymer sail gathered solar photons, which collectively exerted a small force that steadily accelerated IKAROS. Six months and 300 million miles later, it arrived on target near Venus without using any fuel for propulsion. Now JAXA and other space agencies are considering longer missions using bigger, more effective solar sails.

We’re approaching Harry Potter’s wondrous cloak.

Remarkably, a light source can also pull an object toward itself, against the direction that the light propagates. Physicists have shown that within a specially shaped laser beam, the forward push of photons on a particle is dominated by a backward force due to the particle’s own electromagnetic response. The effect is strong enough to pull a microscopic object like a biological cell backward toward the laser. In 2023, however, a related experiment showed that a low-power laser could pull a comparatively big macroscopic object, 0.2 inch x 0.1 inch. This is hardly a powerful sci-fi “tractor beam” that can reel in an entire spacecraft, but it could provide a new way to remotely sample the atmosphere on Earth and other planets, and phenomena like comet’s tails.

Ghost Imaging: Pictures in the Dark

Suppose you want to form an image of something like a living cell that could be changed or harmed by the light energy that illuminates it. Ghost imaging uses the phenomenon of photon entanglement to produce an excellent image of a barely illuminated object. Entangled photon pairs, which are formed by certain optical processes, are quantum-correlated, such that measuring the properties of one immediately reveals the properties of the other, no matter how distant.

In ghost imaging, one of each of a swarm of entangled photon pairs interacts with the object and encounters a detector that simply registers its arrival. A second beam of the corresponding entangled partners never touches the object but goes straight to a sensitive multi-pixel detector. Computer analysis of the correlations between the two detector results creates a high-quality image of the object, even with weak illumination. This approach has uses such as converting images covertly taken by invisible infrared light to visible images detected by a high-resolution camera; or obtaining good quality X-ray images from a patient exposed to a low, relatively safe X-ray dose.

Quantum Slits in Time

In the famous double-slit experiment, first done in 1801, a light beam splits as it passes through two narrow slits in an opaque barrier. On the far side, the beams spread and overlap to form a pattern of bright and dark areas on a screen, showing that light consists of waves that can interfere with each other. But a modern version of the experiment where just one photon at a time is aimed at the slits still produces a wave-like interference pattern. According to Richard Feynman, this striking, still unexplained example of wave-particle duality “has in it the heart of quantum mechanics … it contains the only mystery.”

Light was slowed to 38 mph, which a fit cyclist could match.

Now physicists have reproduced this experiment with slits in time rather than space. They used a thin film of indium tin oxide (ITO), which is transparent to infrared light but quickly becomes reflective within 10-15 sec when excited by a laser. In the experiment, the researchers shot infrared light at the ITO. When the ITO became a mirror for a short time, the reflected infrared light remained in its original form. But when the ITO mirror was very briefly turned on and off twice in rapid succession, the reflected infrared light showed definitively that it had interfered with itself as a result of passing through not one but two time portals or slits.

One observer has commented that this work could become a classic like the original double-slit experiment. By extending that into time rather than space, the research offers a new way to explore “the only mystery.” The work also shows the feasibility of using metamaterials like ITO to control light in optical systems and quantum computers at ultra-fast speeds.

Overtaking Light on a Bicycle

If there is one physics fact that people know, it’s that light is the fastest thing in the universe, traveling at 186,000 miles/sec in vacuum. The speed is reduced somewhat when light interacts with ordinary matter, dropping, for instance, to 124,000 miles/sec in optical fiber and plain glass. This is still fast enough to circle the Earth in a fraction of a second; and so it was big news in 1999 when Harvard researcher Lene Hau enormously slowed light to the human-scale speed of 38 mph, which a fit cyclist could match. This was accomplished in an exotic medium, a dense gas of sodium atoms cooled to nearly absolute zero. The result was a quantum medium called a Bose-Einstein condensate. Light interacts with this more strongly than with any ordinary medium and so it was hugely slowed. Later, Hau topped this achievement by bringing light to a screeching halt, then later recovering it and sending it on its way.

These results are breakthroughs in fundamental physics and could be useful as well, except for the need to work at temperatures near absolute zero. But since the original work, other researchers have slowed light in gases and solids at room temperature, making it possible to use slowed and stopped light in practical devices. These are currently being developed, for example, to synchronize signals in fiber optic networks and to store digital data in computers. Both applications are important steps toward developing advanced telecommunications networks and quantum computers based entirely on light rather than conventional electronic chips.

Original article here

08 Aug 2023
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How to connect with your future self

Need to know

In February 1969, around 10 in the morning, a young Jorge Luis Borges sat down next to an elderly Jorge Luis Borges on a bench by the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Or so it happened in the Borges short story ‘The Other’. The two Borgeses talk about writing, family and history – while puzzling over how a past self is confronting a future self. At one point, the younger Borges asks the older: ‘How’s your memory?’

‘I realised that for a mere boy not yet 20, a man of 70 some-odd years was practically a corpse,’ Borges wrote.

Outside of fiction, our past and future selves don’t encounter each other so directly. These selves are separated by time, and a future version of you can seem like a distant stranger. But your relationship with that future self could have a big impact on the decisions you make today.

You might think that the one person you can rely on to make decisions in your best interests would be yourself. Yet, people frequently make choices that they later suffer from, in part because the future feels far away. Maybe you’ve woken up after having one too many drinks the night before and thought: ‘Why did I do that?’ The Saturday-night version of you didn’t have the Sunday-morning self in mind. These choices aren’t trivial, or related only to hangovers. They can include not saving enough money for retirement, or not making enough time to exercise, rest, eat well or nurture relationships. What happens in the present catches up to us but, oddly enough, it’s difficult to remember that.

We may think of our future selves as more like strangers

Upon closer examination, it’s not unreasonable to feel detached from your future self. Any number of aspects of your life and physical self might transform over time: where you live, who you spend time with, your job, your hair colour, and even the cells in your body all change as the years pass by.

‘We can be estranged from our future selves,’ says Hal Hershfield, a psychologist at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and the author of Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today (2023). ‘That can help explain why we may prioritise today over the future.’

Many of us actually think of our future selves the way we think of other people. This has been demonstrated experimentally: when people are asked to imagine their own birthdays in the distant future, they do so from a third-person viewpoint; think ahead to your future self blowing out birthday candles, and you’re likely to picture yourself the way you would a character in a film, rather than seeing it through your own eyes. Research led by Emily Pronin at Princeton University has shown that people sometimes make similar decisions for their future selves and for others. For example, they sign up their future selves and other people to drink larger amounts of a disgusting liquid (for a science experiment) than they volunteer their present selves to drink. Studies even suggest that, for some people, parts of the brain activate in similar ways in response to thinking of the future self as they do when thinking of other people – and that this tendency is associated with choosing smaller rewards in the present over waiting for larger rewards in the future.

‘If we think about our future selves as if they are other people, then it makes sense why we sometimes treat them so poorly,’ Hershfield writes in his book. ‘It’s understandable to not diet, save or exercise for those temporally distant strangers, especially when we have this very vivid present self who is hungry and lazy and really wants that new iPhone.’

If you think your future self will be significantly different from who you are today, you are more likely to make choices that honour short-term desires, rather than longer-term needs. After all, if your future self seems barely connected to your current one, what do you owe them? What this means, however, is that getting a better understanding of how you think about your future self – and strengthening your connection to that self – could help you tend to your future health, wellbeing and bank account. In the rest of this Guide, I’ll share some practical approaches, informed by psychologists who study how people relate to future selves, for becoming more aligned to future versions of yourself – and making better choices as a result.

What to do

Focus on what will stay the same

Take a moment to think about your future self, the ‘you’ that lives five, 10 or 20 years into the future. How familiar do they seem? Research has found that people who feel more similar to their future self seem to make decisions that are more future-oriented, such as accumulating greater savings. Daniel Bartels and Oleg Urminsky at the University of Chicago found that, when college students were told that they would still be the same person after graduating, they were more likely to wait to receive a financial reward.

But you don’t have to commit to your future self being virtually identical to your present self in order to feel as though there’s continuity between who you are now and who you will be. Instead, try to home in on what some of the similarities between your present self and your future self might be.

We all expect – and might hope – to change in some ways, such as by developing skills, taking up new hobbies, or forming new relationships. There are likely certain characteristics, however, that you consider more fundamental to your sense of self, such as a particular talent you have or your most valued personal traits. Research on what people consider their ‘true selves’ suggests that one’s morality is typically seen as an essential component of the self.

People also have some characteristics that they consider ‘causally central’, meaning they underlie other events, relationships or situations in their lives. Let’s say Jack and Mack both had few friends as children and spent most of their time alone. Jack may think that this experience caused him to be a shy adult, whereas Mack could believe that it was because he was shy that he had few friends. According to Bartels, this means that ‘shyness will be more defining of Mack’s self-concept than Jack’s because it is causally linked to both his preferences and his memories.’

With all this in mind, think about which elements of your self have had an effect on various other aspects of your life, such as your job, your relationships or your hobbies. Additionally, what do you consider core features of your morality – what are your key values? Reflect on how your most central characteristics and values are likely to persist and show up in your life years or even decades from now. Naming these parts of you – the ones that seem key to your identity – can be helpful for maintaining a connection to the future self that shares those qualities. In ‘The Other’, Borges noticed, with affection, the qualities of his younger self that had remained the same, and that related to the defining passion in his life: ‘We haven’t changed a bit, I thought. Always referring back to books.’

Write a letter to your future self

If you’ve ever written yourself a reminder note or recorded your thoughts in a journal, you have, in a sense, written to your future self. But writing a detailed message to a self who exists even further in the future has been shown to make people feel more connected to that version of themselves.

In Hershfield’s research, people have been prompted to write a letter to their self who lives decades in the future: ‘Think about who you will be 20 years from now, and write about the person you are now, which topics are important and dear to you, and how you see your life.’ After doing so, study participants said it improved their sense of connection to their future self. They even exercised more, in the days after they wrote the letter, than participants who wrote to a version of themselves just three months in the future.

In another study, Anne Wilson, a psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, and her colleagues found that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, people who wrote letters to themselves one year into the future felt a drop in negative emotions.

It might help to direct your letter to your hoped-for or best-possible future self. This connects back to the core values you may have reflected on before – thinking about a best future self that maintains your sense of identity without too much disruption can help you feel more tied to that self.

Wilson has also had study participants write a letter back, from their future self in response to their present self. ‘Thinking about the perspective of the future self was actually more effective than just thinking about it from one perspective alone,’ Wilson says. The dialogue between future and present made the relationship stronger.

During the process of writing a letter, you can also spend time vividly picturing your future self. In a series of studies published in 2011, Hershfield and colleagues used virtual reality to show people digitally created, ‘older’ versions of themselves. In one study, the researchers found that the people who interacted with their virtual future selves were more likely to take a later monetary reward over a smaller immediate one. In a similar experiment, when people saw age-progressed images of themselves, they promised more money to a long-term savings account, compared with those who saw a current picture of themselves. Other experiments showed increased retirement-account contributions after people saw a picture of their older selves.

You could upload a current photo into an ‘ageing’ app, or use a filter that makes you look older. But it may be enough to simply imagine yourself as older, to envision the facial features that might remain similar over time and, importantly, to keep in mind that your future self ‘is a living, breathing individual who is dependent on the choices of the current self’, as Hershfield says.

Redraw, or erase, the boundary line between the present and the future

The American psychologist William James called the present moment the ‘specious present’, arguing that there was no such thing as ‘right now’ – it’s a subjective experience. So, when do you feel like the present ends? This is a question that Hershfield and his colleague Sam J Maglio have asked study participants. Five years is far enough away that it probably seems like ‘the future’, but what about five seconds from now? Five minutes? Five days?

People vary on when they think the present ends and the future begins – and, according to Hershfield, those who generally believe that the future starts sooner rather than later are more likely to make future-oriented choices. When people believe the present moment lasts longer, they feel less emotion about the future. But if the future seems closer, or if the start of the future seems closer, then there may be more motivation to ensure that the self on the other side of the present/future border is taken care of.

It could be helpful to think less rigidly about the boundaries between the present and the future, to blur the lines between the you that exists now and the one that has yet to be. In their study, Hershfield and Maglio used messaging that emphasised that the future was imminent in advertising a financial wellbeing course. One flyer said: ‘The present is short and the future starts sooner: acquire better financial habits today!’ (while a contrasting one said: ‘The present is long and the future starts later: acquire better financial habits today!’) Students who were exposed to the notion that the future was starting soon were more eager to sign up.

It may take some simple reminders of this sort to feel more tethered to the future. Hershfield has suggested an ‘elevated perspective’ on time: instead of dwelling only in the present, with the future far off, consider that ‘the past, present, and future are equally visible and subjectively relevant.’ Thinking about time in this way could help you appreciate the present moment while also recognising that the future is closer than it might seem, and intimately tied to the present. Like Annie Dillard put it in The Writing Life (1989): ‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.’

Think of your future self as a close loved one

In L A Paul’s book, Transformative Experience (2014), she argues that we simply can’t know what it’s like to live through certain moments until we experience them. You can try to imagine or anticipate what it might be like to have a child, say, or to live in a new place – but there’s a pool of knowledge that you can’t access until you’ve undergone the transformation and really lived it.

‘It can be hard to project ourselves into the future and really imagine: what is the right decision to make for this future self, down the road?’ Wilson says. The future is, by definition, hypothetical, she says. You should try to feel more connected to your future self. But also, there could be some version of your future self that’s just always going to be unknowable until you arrive at it.

To help you allow for these unknowns, you can try to think of your future self as you would a close loved one, such as a child, spouse or parent. You can’t know everything about them, and you expect them to change over time in ways you can’t control, but you’re still committed to that person. You can care about and feel a sense of responsibility and duty towards your future self in the way you care about those closest to you.

‘The reality is that they change and we change over time, too,’ Hershfield says. ‘And in the best relationships, we’re still committed to them.’ He advises us to ‘own the fact that we can never truly know our future selves’, but notes that ‘it would be irrational to not try to plan in some way.’

We do eventually turn into our future selves, which makes the relationship unlike any other. One day, you will wake up and be your future self. In a sense, you do this every day – becoming the self of tomorrow, from yesterday’s perspective. This perpetual becoming could make it the closest relationship you have to foster. When he met his past self, Borges wrote: ‘I, who have never been a father, felt a wave of love for that poor young man who was dearer to me than a child of my own flesh and blood.’

Original article here

What Socrates Can Teach Us About AI

3 Simple Habits That Can Protect Your Brain from Cognitive Decline

5 Amazing New Discoveries About Light

How to connect with your future self

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