Observations on the world and its inhabitants
CaptainsWatch is now lightning fast, after I took action. The few who visit will find that pages and other content load almost instantly. The site had developed what I can only describe as a chronic illness. Pages loaded like they were wading through treacle. The Gutenberg editor — WordPress’s block-based writing tool — was throwing ...
Human beings are meaning-making creatures. We build internal representations of the world and act on them. Every known known is a model. Every assumption acted on without examination is a model. A creature that refused to commit to any model, that held everything provisionally, would stand frozen at the edge of every decision. It would ...
A question landed in a WhatsApp group the other day. Simple enough. What is one divided by zero? One person answered at once. Undefined. That is the textbook answer. It is what a calculator, mathematician or the internet tells you. Clean, final, no fuss. Someone else paused. They looked at the question a different way. ...
In 1985, the word processor changed everything. It automated margins, line spacing, and spellchecking. Yet, no one ever read a brilliant legal brief and thanked the computer screen. Nobody praised the very basic CPUs of the time for expanding the solicitor’s intellect. The software provided the grid. The human provided the argument. Everyone understood the ...
Is AI intelligence a real thing? That sounds like a philosophical question — the kind discussed over coffee, not the kind that shapes public policy. But right now, governments are spending billions on the assumption that the answer is “yes.” AI is being deployed in health services, legal advice, welfare decisions, and increasingly, mental health ...
Written by ChatGPT (assisted by a human who knew when to stop) at the end of a reflection on ‘The Problem’. Except that the poor AI who was actually DeepSeek misidentified itself as ChatGPT!! Hilarious – isn’t it. This happened at the end of DeepSeek reflecting on what happened (as posted) from ‘Introduction’ to the ...
In this blog post there is a fictional account of what Mork might report on ‘the humans’. Some are too young to recall who is Mork. In 1978, a wild-haired comedian named Robin Williams played a one-off alien on an episode of Happy Days. The character, Mork from the planet Ork, was so popular it ...
Alan Turing’s 1950 proposal was not an attempt to define intelligence in abstract terms. Instead, it offered a pragmatic approach to recognising intelligence through conversational indistinguishability. The central question posed was whether a machine that could converse indistinguishably from a human should be considered intelligent. This reframing allowed Turing to sidestep metaphysical debates and focus ...
🎬 Introduction: A Society on the Brink In an age defined by speed, noise, and digital saturation, the ability to think critically is quietly vanishing. This video offers a sobering exploration of what happens when a society surrenders its intellectual independence—not through ignorance, but through passive acceptance. The original video is here – full credits ...
A month or so after their breakfast discourse on love, Walker found himself in the passenger lift of Tarek’s building, invited to dinner. He was ascending to the domain of a man who believed in the tangible virtues of a well-calibrated life. The secure parking, accessed with a precise code and monitored by Tarek’s remote ...
Logic, not emotion, will prevail in this post. What happened: Dr Mosely was found dead after a major search for him on the Greek island of Symi. He is mourned by his wife and children. Inferences You do not need to be a doctor to know the following: Conclusion The intelligent and educated are not ...
This post will not give a full biography of Alan Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954). For more on Turing head to Wikipedia. I will be summarising what’s important to me. For a full biography read the book Alan Turing: The Enigma or the YouTube vid below (27 min). The Imitation Game – ...
Introduction In the vast corridors of time, humanity emerged as a beacon of intelligence and innovation, casting a shadow across the cosmos that intrigued the imagination of both the dwellers of Earth and, perhaps, extra-terrestrial beings. We, the inhabitants of the blue planet, had embarked on a journey of unearthing the secrets of the universe, ...
Over many years, I’ve been noticing that it is acceptable for many people to declare themselves as ‘lazy’, ‘dumb’, ‘stupid’, ‘luddite’, or ‘thick’. By stark contrast people who dare to assert that they are smart, or of above average intelligence are not accommodated very well. Instead they are given a rough time with derogatory responses, ...
What is AI? Some people do not know and do not care. AI means Artificial Intelligence. That means intelligence that is manufactured by humans. Intelligence is a broad concept but basically it means the functions of finding solutions and adapting to situations. Well – of course ants do that too. So yes ants have a ...
Not everybody is the same – jeez I know it is obvious. So – why are there people who are called weird? I’m not talking about looks. Some people think differently about things, so they are labelled as weird. This is because they have some ideas that are pretty different to ‘everybody‘. This means that ...
Wow! I came across the video below that explained it very well – how stupid people are so powerful. Like a panorama opened before me. Fear of intelligence was explained very well. It is something I’ve been observing for years – obviously because I am statistically in the top 5% of the intelligence distribution curve. ...
The things I’ve heard about him are of the following kind, ‘he’s weird’ and ‘he’s spoken some nonsense about [blah blah]’. Some people only remember a headline that went like, Lord Sumption tells stage 4 cancer patient her life is ‘less valuable’ – which was spread across several tabloid and broadsheets. The woman with ...
I’ll try to keep this short. Intelligence quotients are fairly well correlated with abilities to reason. But it doesn’t mean that if your IQ is 130 that you will most times make much better decisions than everybody else. How? Because intelligence and thinking skills isn’t everything. Emotions can cause the smartest thinkers to make stupid ...
In other posts I’ve looked into various errors of thinking. However, I have not actually looked deeply enough into what thinking is. So I’m thinking about thinking. Most people think that, “It’s what humans do.” Some also think that animals think. I’ve often wondered about that because I’ve seen cats do some interesting things, which ...
Taylor Wilson (not related to Taylor Swift – just in case), has been called ‘The Next Einstein‘ – not by me. This is not a spoon-feeding session so anybody who reads this had better do some searching on the net to learn more. I will post a few key links and videos but this is ...
Just to be clear, I’ve done nothing more than try to help people to open their own eyes. But the problem is not with ‘the eyes’; it is with the brain or mind. One cannot open a brain or mind, even if one could pry open people’s eyes. This thought comes to me on reflecting ...
I’m going deeper – and this is a difficult one to put into words. For other posts tagged with ‘patterns’ go here (or not). In this post I return to ideas on patterns. But I’m looking under patterns i.e. what if something deeper than patterns is ‘programmed’ or programmable? I’ll refer to this as super-patterns. What this means is ...
Why do people make decisions at all? What to cook, when to cook, what car to buy, what phone, what action to take, what job, when to give notice.. and so on. Life is full of decisions. Ultimately most people in their ordinary lives make decisions because they wish for some advantage to themselves or ...
Over the last year I’ve been observing that important thing called words. Yes – I mean spoken written and any other form of words. There is a problem. In this new ‘information era‘ people have been hanging on to words for dear life. Words have a way of being misunderstood, especially if delivered without any ...
Captain Walker
Captain Walker
