The Ship of Theseus is one of those paradoxes everyone has heard of, and I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it before. But last night I actually sat down to read about it properly, and I went way deeper than I planned to ..

The setup is simple. You have a ship. Over the years you replace every part of it, one at a time, until none of the original pieces are left. Is it still the same ship?

Then it gets better. Say someone kept all the old parts and built a second ship out of them. Now there are two ships, and both have a decent claim to being the original. They can't both be it.

What got me is that this was never really about ships. It's asking what makes anything the same thing over time when everything about it has changed.

Which obviously gets uncomfortable fast when you turn it on yourself. My cells have been replaced. My beliefs have changed. Half my memories are gone or rewritten. So what exactly is doing the work of making me the same person as the kid in my old photos?

I did a a bit research reading abt identity, the self, and the different answers philosophers have given. Some of them dissolve the question entirely by arguing there is no ship, only planks arranged ship-wise. There's a lot more here than I expected.

This is Day 1 .... I was hoping for vm but not today lol

Will share the Resources I used also

Epigenetics
Every cell in your body has essentially the same DNA.

A neuron and a liver cell are working with the same genetic information, but they look and behave completely differently. So something has to determine which instructions each cell actually reads.

epigenome comes ...and

chemical modifications and changes in how DNA is packaged that help regulate which genes are active, without changing the underlying DNA sequence itself.

And this is where I started wondering about lifestyle... sooooo
Things like diet, exercise, stress, sleep, smoking, environmental exposures, and even aging can create signals inside the body that influence how cells function, and some of those processes can involve epigenetic changes.
So it’s not really.... From what I've read lol

lifestyle → rewrites your DNA

It’s more like:

environment/lifestyle → signals in your cells → changes in gene regulation → changes in which genes are expressed → changes in how cells function

Which is actually way more interesting to me.
Your DNA isn’t just a fixed script that runs exactly the same way your entire life. The way your cells use that script can change....
I went into this expecting to learn how your grandmother’s hardships get written into your DNA….Everyone repeats that one. I assumed I’d spend the night reading about the mechanism.
Instead, I ended up finding geneticists taking some of those studies apart…😭
No biology related stuff Fr so confused I've read not 5 pages but so many paper lol 😂 and videos Fr will drop it [ me still confused )love it

Attention in Transformers

Quick version:

each word gets turned into a vector, a long list of numbers, where different directions in the space can carry meaning. But at the start, the representation is mostly about the token itself. “Mole” is the same token whether you’re talking about the animal, the chemistry unit, or the thing on your skin.

Attention is what lets that representation become contextual. Every token sends out a query what am I looking for? and a key what information do I offer? Match them up, softmax the scores into weights, and each token pulls in a weighted mix of everyone else’s values. So the representation of a token can change depending on what’s around it.

Sooo cool part attention has no idea what order the words are in. It’s basically doing weighted combinations, and addition doesn’t care about sequence. “The dog bit the man” and “the man bit the dog” would look the same to attention if you gave it the same token representations without any positional information. Position has to be added separately so the model knows where things are. I’d read about transformers plenty of times and somehow never registered that.

Also, the title is kinda wrong. Attention isn’t all you need. In GPT-3, roughly a third of the parameters are in the attention mechanism; a lot of the rest sits in the layers between the attention blocks. And apparently those layers are doing a lot more than I initially thought including storing some of the model’s learned knowledge. Attention moves information around. Something else is doing a lot of the processing.

I haven’t implemented it yet, which means I only half know this.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem

Gödel proved that sufficiently strong, consistent mathematical systems contain true statements they can’t prove within that system.

The trick is basically encoding. He turned symbols and statements into numbers, which let arithmetic talk about statements themselves. He then constructed a sentence that essentially says:

“This statement is not provable in this system.”
Sooo...

If the system proves it, there’s a problem. If it doesn’t, the statement is true but unprovable

in that system

.

Ngl I initially confused myself. I wrote “there are truths that can’t be proved” and also “it’s wrong to say Gödel proved there are truths that can’t be proved.”
They’re not actually opposites.

Unprovable always means unprovable in a particular system.

A stronger system can prove something the original one couldn’t.

So Gödel isn’t really saying “truth is unknowable.” He’s showing that no sufficiently powerful formal system can capture all mathematical truth from within itself.

And apparently this is closely
related to the halting problem. Different proofs, but the same weird family of ideas around self-reference and limits.

how weird it is that

a system becoming capable of talking about itself is also what exposes its limits.

Let me tell u how this site has been helpful https://plato.stanford.edu