I’ve been away from web posting for a while between one thing and another. Mostly, it’s been the focused task of editing the manuscript of the book, working title: Deciding Better: A Journey Through Biotech, Neuroscience, and the Experience of Being a Brain. I’m about two-thirds through my flow revision, where I’m working to the core arguments and flow of the book to work right. A lot of it is reverse engineering how a book works.
The nice thing is that I’ve gotten better at exposition of these complicated ideas by writing the more tightly written posts here, cross-posted to Substack. And it’s going well. A few more weeks, and that should be done. Then, it’s on to a final polish of the flow, and I think it’s good enough to have others read it.
My idea at this point is to try to solicit agents once again with this version in hand. At the same time, I think I’ll provide a “Readers Edition” to Substack subscribers and anyone who emails me through the blog here. It’s about time I get some real feedback on the ideas and the writing. Then, depending on how the universe responds, it will be off to a publisher or down the self-publishing path. Either way, the book is asking to be out in the world.
In the meantime, a new post follows about LLMs and AGI. I continue to be fascinated by what we’ve achieved with these Deep Neural Networks. But can we see into what processes like ChatGPT are doing? How much intelligence we can really credit them with compared to real human brains. As always, I try to look at the data rather than the hype.
