Pot Pourri--Chance, Consciousness, AI, Fate, Free Will--Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Roger Penrose, Peter Lynds

Black swans. A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.
Click For black swans.

Human consciousness versus artificial intelligence. Roger Penrose hardly needs an introduction: he is the Rouse Bell Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, one of the leading mathematical physics researchers of our times. In this book, Penrose initiates a heavy attack on the concept known as "Strong AI": the idea that machines can have minds or intelligence. Click

The interesting story of Peter Lynds. Peter Lynds has done work on the subject of time. His particular areas of interest include time and its relation to classical and quantum mechanics, relativity and cosmology, as well as to brain function and consciousness. He also has an interest in the foundations of assertion and truth. Click   Here is Lynds' current site.

Sri Aurobindo on reconciling fate and free will.  A question which has hitherto divided human thought and received no final solution, is the freedom of the human being in his relation to the Power intelligent or unintelligent that rules the world. We strive for freedom in our human relations, to freedom we move as our goal, and every fresh step in our human progress is a further approximation to our ideal. But are we free in ourselves? We seem to be free, to do that which we choose and not that which is chosen for us; but it is possible that the freedom may be illusory and our apparent freedom may be a real and iron bondage. We may be bound by predestination, the will of a Supreme Intelligent Power, or blind inexorable Nature, or the necessity of our own previous development. . . . If we go back to the true Hindu teaching independent of Buddhistic influence, we shall find that it gives us a reconciliation of the dispute by a view of man's psychology in which both Fate and Free-will are recognised. . . . Click