Patterns that Connect: AI, Management, Metaverse, Quantum, Philosophy, and Physics

  At the Threshold of Consciousness, Computation, and the Questions We’re Afraid to Ask Copyright: Sanjay Basu Here’s a confession that will irritate the techno-utopians and the AI doomers in equal measure. I spent Thanksgiving break not thinking about artificial intelligence. I failed spectacularly. Between books that ostensibly had nothing to do with machine learning, between long walks through autumn leaves that should have cleared my head of tensor operations and attention mechanisms, between conversations with family members who still think “the cloud” is a weather phenomenon, the questions kept surfacing. Not the questions that dominate LinkedIn feeds and venture capital pitch decks. Not “Will AI take my job?” or “When will we achieve AGI?” Those are the wrong questions, asked by people who haven’t yet realized they’re asking the wrong questions. The real questions are older. Much older. They’re the questions philosophers have wrestled with for millennia, now dressed in ...

  Copyright: Sanjay Basu Freud’s Dark Idea That Explains More About Life Than Death Freud had a talent for dropping theoretical grenades into polite conversation. One of his most explosive? “That part of you that wants to die.” Imagine saying that at a dinner party. People would reach for the wine faster than you can say psychoanalysis. But that’s what Freud meant by Thanatos — the death drive. A quiet, persistent whisper inside us pulling toward dissolution, stillness, oblivion. Not in a dramatic gothic way, but in the subtle ways we sabotage progress, repeat bad patterns, and drift toward entropy when nobody’s watching. Thanatos, in Freud’s world, isn’t some spooky shadow lurking in your bedroom at night. It’s the reason you sometimes choose the option that harms you, confuses you, or makes no rational sense. It’s gravity for the psyche. And like gravity, you barely notice it until you trip. ☠️ We’re living in a golden age of self-optimisation. Mindfulness apps nudge us toward se...