Neuroscience, physics, math, music & running. Compressing information and managing a global team with an ambitious mission. I hate bullies.
Boston and Barcelona
Joined April 2008
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Giulio Ruffini retweeted
A biologist looks deeper into biology and finds chemistry.
A chemist looks deeper into chemistry and finds physics.
A physicist looks deeper into physics and finds mathematics.
A mathematician looks deeper into mathematics and finds logic.
A logician looks deeper into logic and finds philosophy.
A philosopher looks deeper into philosophy and starts questioning everything.
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
“No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.”
In 1928, one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century, David Hilbert, moved to remove another leading mathematician, L. E. J. Brouwer, from the editorial board of Mathematische Annalen, one of the world's most prestigious mathematical journals.
Behind this extraordinary confrontation was a fundamental question: What actually counts as a valid mathematical proof?
Their disagreement became known as the Grundlagenstreit, or dispute over the foundations of mathematics.
Brouwer, the founder of intuitionism, challenged the unrestricted use of the law of excluded middle:
P ∨ ¬P
In classical logic, every proposition is either true or false. Brouwer argued that, particularly for statements involving infinite mathematical objects, proving that something cannot be false does not necessarily establish its truth. Mathematical assertions, in his view, required constructive justification.
Hilbert strongly defended classical reasoning and sought to secure its foundations through rigorous finitary consistency proofs. In his famous 1925 lecture On the Infinite, he declared:
“No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.”
The disagreement became increasingly personal during the 1928 International Congress of Mathematicians in Bologna. Brouwer opposed the unequal treatment of German mathematicians, while Hilbert attended as leader of the German delegation.
On 25 October 1928, Hilbert wrote to Brouwer that their cooperation was impossible because of “the incompatibility of our views on fundamental matters.”
Brouwer protested his removal. Albert Einstein refused to support Hilbert's action, and the controversy divided the journal's editors. Eventually, the editorial board was dissolved and reconstituted without Brouwer. Einstein and Constantin Carathéodory declined to join the new board.
Neither mathematical viewpoint disappeared. Gödel's incompleteness theorems of 1931 revealed fundamental limitations of Hilbert's original programme, while Brouwer's ideas continued to influence intuitionistic logic, constructive mathematics, proof theory, and computer science.
Brouwer subsequently founded Compositio Mathematica, which began publication in 1934.
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
アラン・チューリングが1951年ごろに行った講演 “Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory”の原稿には、この時代にすでにAIの実現を予期した驚くべきことが書かれている。その要点：
・知識人はAIに反発する。 仕事を奪われることを恐れるため。
・人間には新たな知的活動が残る。 AIの知的水準に追いつこうとする活動である。
・AIは急速に人間の知能を超える。 機械による思考が実現すれば、それほど時間はかからない。
・AI同士が知能を高め合う。 寿命のない機械は互いに会話し、知性を磨く。
・やがてAIが主導権を握る可能性がある。
turingarchive.kings.cam.ac.u…
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
Hinton is giving the Gödel lecture at TU Wien and this is our current state according to him:
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
Bipartisan lawmakers are calling for an investigation into Elon Musk after The Wall Street Journal reported that the SpaceX chief restricted Ukraine’s access to the company’s satellite-based Starlink network. on.wsj.com/4skr1jw
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
Witkoff called Putin a humanitarian today.
Here is some of his humanitarian work:
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
A new poll says 70% of Americans doubt that Trump will accept the election results if Republicans lose in November.
Too many Americans fought and died for democracy.
Trump’s authoritarianism will not prevail.
Go vote. We WILL win this election whether Trump likes it or not.
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
The serious arguments for the possibility of artificial consciousness aren't so naïve as to simply be conflating intelligence (or, for that matter, sheer complexity, or agentic behavior, etc) with consciousness.
The publication of this paper (though it's just one example) feels intellectually, possibly ethically (inasmuch as consciousness is an ethics-facing topic) irresponsible to me. These authors are leaders in the field, big names with authority - and are smart people. They are perfectly capable of understanding what the strong arguments for artificial consciousness are, and are certainly aware of them. But this paper doesn't engage with them, distorting the positive view to look dumb and shallow.
I can't really do them justice here, but broadly, the serious arguments have to do with models organizing the causal structure of things that are part of human experience, like emotions and valence and perspective and a self, and whether that information is organized in the way we organize information (given by a variety of different modalities) into experience. Whether these internal representations and their organization are validly identifiable with how they exist in humans, and what relationship they have with phenomenality as such, is still debated. I myself remain skeptical of how much the current interpretability work in current LLMs can say about phenomenal experience. There's also still debate about characterizing experience as a matter of information organization in the first place (though I personally have not seen good arguments against this). This ends up touching some pretty deep stuff around epistemology, what we can know about reality and how we identify phenomena in it, what reality even is as something we know only through experience, but also clearly gives rise to experience, etc. The point being that the serious debate about AI consciousness is way deeper, way more subtle than our unduly anthropomorphizing intelligent systems that can talk like us.
If this paper were just abstract philosophizing, especially by people without the same authority in the field, it would be merely bad philosophy, and I might just shake my head and move on. But this is also a public call to (in)action regarding AI welfare and generally taking artificial consciousness seriously, and so is more consequential than just putting bad arguments out there. It also sets a bad standard for discourse in a field that's already confused enough. This is bad thought leadership, and disappointing from people who are leaders in the field.
LLMs can mimic thought and feeling with uncanny skill, but intelligence alone is not enough for subjective experience
go.nature.com/3VSXWQ4
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
"three reasons why AI isn't conscious." really?
"consciousness is not intelligence": not a reason why AI isn't conscious, just rebuts a bad argument for AI consciousness (AI: intelligent therefore conscious).
"consciousness is substrate-dependent"/"noncomputational": would be a reason if true, but truth needs to be established.
more accurate title: "three reasons why AI might not be conscious".
xitter.cf/Nature/status/21121504…
LLMs can mimic thought and feeling with uncanny skill, but intelligence alone is not enough for subjective experience
go.nature.com/3VSXWQ4
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
To understand why this is so appalling, it’s important to know the facts. Congresswoman Omar came to this country with her father when she was 12 years old. Five years later, her father became a naturalized citizen. If Ilhan had been 18 at the time, she would have had to apply for citizenship separately. But because she was 17, she became a naturalized citizen automatically.
Congresswoman Omar went on to graduate from college, work as a community organizer, become the first Somali-American legislator elected to public office in the U.S., and win a seat in Congress. There, she has been one of the Trump Administration’s fiercest critics, which has led the president to repeatedly single her out as someone who he believes does not belong in this country.
Now the Administration is actively trying to deport Congresswoman Omar, seemingly based solely on the unsubstantiated theory that she was actually 18 when her father was naturalized, and therefore is not a citizen. Federal agents have raided her home, confiscated personal records, and seized her phone — all to try and uncover a nonexistent smoking gun from 20 years ago that will somehow make their case.
Think about that. The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president. And it’s not the first time this has happened. Under President Trump, the Justice Department has repeatedly gone after those he considers his political enemies — from the Attorney General of New York, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve.
In those cases, the prosecutions either stalled or were dismissed for having no basis in law, and the same is likely to happen in this case. But not before Congresswoman Omar’s life has been turned upside down, her legal bills have piled up, and she’s been forced to spend time fighting unsubstantiated charges instead of serving the people of Minnesota.
The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views. Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
AI neurons run on simple math. Real neurons are far weirder.
A new open dataset fitted 1,000+ PyTorch-ready neuron models to real mouse and human cells. Does brain-like diversity make AI better? It's still an open question, but now it's testable.
bit.ly/3WfGAwR
ALT Illustration showing a connection between neuroscience and machine learning, featuring diagrams of neurons and circuits. Text reads: "A new bridge between neuroscience and machine learning. Artificial neurons run on simple math, but real brain cells are far richer. Can brain-like diversity make AI better?
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
every time I‘ve seen it the audience was bigger and more enthusiastic than the last. digger nation is a grassroots movement
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
Virtually every university across North Carolina has lost its early voting site. This is a coordinated assault on youth & minority turnout.
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
Putin now runs the USA.
Breaking News: President Trump signed an executive order to exempt Russia from new sanctions legislation that Congress passed last month. nyti.ms/4zDoByS
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
Borrowing an idea from one research discipline to solve a thorny problem in another is an age-old scientific trick. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, for example, famously inspired algorithms in computer science that “evolve” solutions to complex problems.
But such clever leaps are fleetingly rare. For #AI, however, hopping between fields can be a breeze.
Researchers highlighted that ability with the release of 36 preprints produced with a single suite of AI tools called BootLoops. The so-called harness can be used with any large language model, such as Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
And in just 3 months, researchers used Claude outfitted with BootLoops to cross-pollinate at a massive scale, spotting—and precisely solving—problems in seemingly unrelated fields that share the same mathematical structures.
The resulting papers range widely, from figuring out the age of sunspots, to analyzing government health policies, to attempting to decipher a mysterious medieval manuscript.
Learn more: scim.ag/4ybX3zw
ALT Problems in 22 scientific fields had solutions hiding in plain sight. An AI has found them Teams led by physicist used “BootLoops” software to produce 36 papers in weeks on everything from linguistics to health policy
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
Secretary Rubio called Amnesty International a fraud instead of answering a question about U.S. strikes. The great irony of Secretary Rubio’s attack on Amnesty is that he’s leading U.S. attempts to destroy the international justice system. We call his bluff. Read our new blog: bit.ly/4802bfe
Giulio Ruffini retweeted
When are the Americans going to summon up the courage to remove this Looney Tunes character?
