What We Are Reading Today: The Self-Assembling Brain

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Updated 17 January 2023
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What We Are Reading Today: The Self-Assembling Brain

Author: Peter Robin Hiesinger

How does a neural network become a brain? While neurobiologists investigate how nature accomplishes this feat, computer scientists interested in artificial intelligence strive to achieve this through technology.

“The Self-Assembling Brain” tells the stories of both fields, exploring the historical and modern approaches taken by the scientists pursuing answers to the quandary: what information is necessary to make an intelligent neural network?

As Peter Robin Hiesinger argues, “the information problem” underlies both fields, motivating the questions driving forward the frontiers of research.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘On Pedantry’ by Arnoud S. Q. Visser

Updated 13 January 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘On Pedantry’ by Arnoud S. Q. Visser

Intellectuals have long provoked scorn and irritation, even downright aggression. Many learned individuals have cast such hostility as a badge of honor, a sign of envy, or a form of resistance to inconvenient truths.

“On Pedantry” offers an altogether different perspective, revealing how the excessive use of learning has been a vice in Western culture since the days of Socrates.

Taking readers  from the academies of ancient Greece to today’s culture wars, Arnoud Visser explains why pretentious and punctilious learning has always annoyed us.