Maths Rant

Rants about my love/hate relationship with Mathematics

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consciousness

Can a Machine ever be Conscious?

July 20, 2025August 29, 2025 / Shub Das / Leave a comment

Introduction This post is adapted from a 5000-word essay I wrote for my sixth-form research project discussing whether a machine could ever be conscious.  If you’re curious, a link to the full essay PDF with references is attached at the end of this blog.1 My blog doesn’t intend to dive straight into number crunching or … Continue reading Can a Machine ever be Conscious?

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I have unlocked my phone with my face probably thousands of times. Never have I ever once thought about it. Then, a few weeks ago, I sat in a lecture about something called eigenfaces. And now I cannot stop thinking about my phone May the 4th be with you. Spoiler warning: This short post contains spoilers for Project Hail Mary. If you haven’t watched it yet, go watch it! A lot of maths notes feel like they start on page two. You see a theorem, then a proof, then an example. As I slowly but surely work through catching up on lectures and revision, one of the questions I’ve found myself sitting with is this: I often find it hard to come up with ideas for things, and that probably shows in the spontaneous nature of both the topics and timing of my posts. One of the things I didn’t expect to miss at university was doing school maths challenges. I think my first memory of cooking involves burning pasta. And at the time, I decided cooking simply wasn’t for me. People often say “focus on what you can control” as if it’s that’s simple and isolating variables in life is as easy as it is on a problem sheet. There are so many things behind the phrase “let it go.” History, attachment, hope, ego, fear, unprocessed conversations, futures that only existed in your head. Life isn’t a well posed problem. It’s chaos, entropy, with boundary conditions you didn’t choose. You can’t always cleanly separate the controllable from the uncontrollable when the thing you want sits right at that boundary.
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