Two Minds Blog

It’s a popular sci-fi trope : The human consciousness now residing in a computer, trading physical life for machine-based immortality. In The Matrix this works both ways: You can not only upload your consciousness to a vast multiplayer online world, but also instantly download digitized knowledge from the cloud to your brain (“ I know kung fu! ”). A digitized consciousness might have some acknowledged limitations, sure – you don’t eat anymore, and you can’t smell the flowers. Even that seems ridiculous by modern technology standards, though: Couldn’t we design appropriate sensors, or simply simulate those experiences? Indeed, there’s a school of thought that claims we are already living in some type of simulated reality , whether computer-generated or otherwise. Let’s confine ourselves to currently existing digital technologies, and examine the question of whether it really might be possible to upload our consciousness to the cloud. China is investing a lot in brain-computer interf...

In this post, I will take a look at the Behavior Change Wheel (BCW), a newer framework for understanding health behavior. The model has been around for a decade, but it became much better-known after the book Engaged   featured it in 2020. The BCW model is sometimes called by the name of one of its components, like "the COM-B model." Technically COM-B is just part of the full model diagram, shown above (the green inner circle), so I'm going to refer to the full framework as "the BCW" in this post. As you will see, it might be possible to utilize or accept just one of the BCW's components without necessarily buying into the whole thing. I'm also going to call the BCW a "framework" or "model" instead of a theory. That part comes directly from its creators, who describe the BCW as "a synthesis of 19 frameworks of behavior change found in the research literature" ( Mitchie, Atkins, & West , p. 11). The 19 frameworks are als...

  The scientific environment has changed over the past year, with government agencies canceling previously awarded grants (something that would have been unheard-of before 2025) based on whether they addressed topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Leaving aside the buzzwords for a minute, the focus of these projects was on understanding the experiences of people with a wide range of different life experiences, including some who may not have been well-represented in prior studies. Among my colleagues, some of the targeted grants investigated topics like the mental health of transgender adolescents, the acceptance of HIV prevention interventions, the best ways to promote health among Latino/Latina people, and smoking cessation among people from various gender groups. Researchers have been warned to avoid using certain words in their grant proposals going forward. Now, I recognize that there's political viewpoint diversity in society, and that some people just don'...

I have written previously about how the Intuitive Mind affects type 1 diabetes (T1D) self-management, for example based on people's  situational awareness of changes in their own blood sugar as they occur. In one prior study, our team found that Intuitive-level variables such as motivation and social perception (based on a daily survey) were related to successful daily blood sugar control (based on time-in-range [TIR], a commonly used metric from continuous glucose monitoring [CGM]) among adolescents with T1D. I also wrote about my own experience trying a CGM for 2 weeks, which did seem to result in increased situational awareness. In another study, we found that adolescents' proactive  use of a hybrid closed-loop system (pictured above), which incorporates an insulin pump and a dosing algorithm together with a CGM, resulted in better TIR results than when people waited for the technology to tell them what to do. Specifically, adolescents who looked at their CGM readout l...

I've tackled this question on occasion before, but it keeps coming up -- largely due to AI models that create human-like outputs and can effectively pass the Turing Test . Despite their complexity, modern large-language models (LLMs) are wholly deterministic and can therefore be understood in terms of mechanistic cause and effect: Put in this exact input, put it through these steps, and you get that specific output, 100% of the time. For the last couple of years, people have been talking about "generative AI" as though it was non-deterministic , but researchers at Cornell University in 2025 proved that this was false . You can in fact work backwards from an AI output to the prompt that was used to generate it. The idea at one time was that generative AI was "creative" because it assigned probability-based weights to various outputs and selected the most likely one. But the new research shows that if you tightly control inputs, you do always get the same output, ...

  I'm on record endorsing the use of AI by students to improve the quality of their writing and their thinking, but also expressing concern about the potential for autonomous AI to end civilization! So what's the deal here? Am I for AI or against it? As in many areas of life, the answer is "it depends ...". In this blog post, I will look at some things that AI probably should not  be doing for us, which might help to delineate the areas in which it can be more beneficial. Let's start with ethics. Although some techno-futurists have argued that AI will eventually be better at knowing what's good for us than we are ourselves, a recent report showed that a "robo-ethicist" using large language models (LLM) showed notable flaws in its reasoning. LLMs' ethics were consistently more influenced by utilitarian thinking (do what causes the least harm or the most benefit in this specific situation) than by reasoning from first principles (Kant's id...