The Machine in the Ghost

The Machine in the Ghost is the third book contained in the ebook Rationality: From AI to Zombies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky. It covers topics related to cognition, concepts, and the general notion of goal-oriented behavior.

The Machine in the Ghost contains three sequences of thematically connected essays, plus the stand-alone essay An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes's Theorem. These are all collected in the Rationality: From AI to Zombies ebook, but the essay names below also link to the original blog posts.

The previous book in the series is How to Actually Change Your Mind, and the next book is Mere Reality.

 

 

L. The Simple Math of Evolution

131. An Alien God

132. The Wonder of Evolution

133. Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyway)

134. No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices

135. Evolving to Extinction

136. The Tragedy of Group Selectionism

137. Fake Optimization Criteria

138. Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers

139. Evolutionary Psychology

140. An Especially Elegant Evolutionary Psychology Experiment

141. Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization

142. Thou Art Godshatter

M. Fragile Purposes

143. Belief in Intelligence

144. Humans in Funny Suits

145. Optimization and the Intelligence Explosion

146. Ghosts in the Machine

147. Artificial Addition

148. Terminal Values and Instrumental Values

149. Leaky Generalizations

150. The Hidden Complexity of Wishes

151. Anthropomorphic Optimism

152. Lost Purposes

N. A Human's Guide to Words

153. The Parable of the Dagger

154. The Parable of Hemlock

155. Words as Hidden Inferences

156. Extensions and Intensions

157. Similarity Clusters

158. Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity

159. The Cluster Structure of Thingspace

160. Disguised Queries

161. Neural Categories

162. How An Algorithm Feels From Inside

163. Disputing Definitions

164. Feel the Meaning

165. The Argument From Common Usage

166. Empty Labels

167. Taboo Your Words

168. Replace the Symbol with the Substance

169. Fallacies of Compression

170. Categorizing Has Consequences

171. Sneaking in Connotations

172. Arguing "By Definition"

173. Where to Draw the Boundary?

174. Entropy, and Short Codes

175. Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace

176. Superexponential Conceptspace, and Simple Words

177. Conditional Independence, and Naive Bayes

178. Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles

179. Variable Question Fallacies

180. 37 Ways That Suboptimal Use Of Categories Can Have Negative Side Effects On Your Cognition