Vegan ML engineer here. In total agreement with you. People are just moving the goal post to keep themselves protected from the obvious conclusion: there is nothing really all that special about us humans. Perhaps subjective experience is simply the internal state of a self supervised continuous learning algorithm and we don't like that conclusion very much.
It's too bad it's so hard to pin down a definition, but in practice I feel like most animals with brains experience degrees of qualia. Some mornings after a night of poor sleep when I wake up super-slow I wonder if that's how animals experience thinking.
My biggest problem with "brains are machines" arguments is that there is a risk there is unknown physics at work that is not representable as a Turing machine. What if there is some quantum field effect powering everything?
Quantum field effects? You don't need these, IMHO, if you look at how highly parallel things seem to work in brains.
Marvin Minsky's theory of a "Society of Mind" describes a (highly) distributed model of the mind. Which BTW, always reminds me of the first Shrek movie, where the donkey jumps up and down, shouting "Take me! Take me!" to Shrek. That's similar to what I observe when I'm undecided but two instances of "sub-processes" (or agents as Minsky calls them) of my mind try to get attention.
Daniel Dennett similarly gives a distributed model of consciousness. Where many parallel "processes" are at work, competing and "observing" each other. And this parallelism is happening with a much, much higher degree than any of our computers parallelism.
Mostly I have a hard time accepting that a Turing machine can experience "consciousness"/awareness. Therefore I also have a hard time with simulatable chemical processes; it feels like there is some missing link there.
I can sympathise with you, but how could a "quantum" effect" doesn't make this easier?
Maybe "Turing machine" is too abstract or simplistic as a concept? Both for real computers and brains?
I can see that a computer is on some level just a lot of sand (silica and metal) but put together in a really complex way, it "suddenly" can add and compare numbers … if we observe the complexity levels from sand to computer and try to see the analogy when comparing cells / neurons to a structure of billions of them somehow interconnected on both a physical and chemical level, evolved during millions of years, I have no problem to accept that brains are still too complex to explain for us.
They know quite a lot about how neurons work to the extent they can replace bits of brains with artificial retinas or cochleas and interface with devices like neuralink. It's unlikely there is a quantum field effect of the type you mention powering things, although of course atoms and the like obey quantum mechanics in the normal way.
I use Niri workspaces that way. I name my spaces (usually after branches) and have a browser, editor and usually a few terminals open on a workspace. It's also great that a workspace has infinite space so that I can never have to think about creating workspaces just because some workspace has run out of room.
Right, not having to leave the terminal is a big one for me too. I live there and every time I start some desktop app, I gotta switch gears, potentially grab the mouse, leave my vim keybinds behind and leave my font and color scheme behind. I just feel more productive on the terminal then on desktop apps.
I think also a big problem of desktop apps is that you have to deal with window management. Now that I am on Niri it is really apparent to me how much I hated juggling windows in pretty much any other window manager that I ever used, except, interestingly enough, tmux.
Almost 40 years of software development and I think you're overlooking the strength of Gradle. Before Gradle if you wanted any kind of build step that was slightly outside of the norm you had to roll your own maven plugin or god forbid try to script something with ant in xml. Using a DSL in a scripting language was a smart move.
What I hated most about Gradle is that groovy is untyped. You'd make a change and wait for your build to complete only to find out minutes later that you made a typo or some other innocuous mistake. Glad they introduced Kotlin DSL.
I didn't notice the breaking changes much when we heavily used gradle. Gradle also comes with gradlew, which bootstraps your gradle project with the exact gradle version that is needed to build that project, so you can take an old gradle project and build it regardless of all those breaking changes that you mention.
Friction made people think if they really need this custom step, now every single gradle project has a lot of poorly thought out custom stuff, often something which doesn't belong there.
A bit shocking to see how low people rate factory farming, place 34. Arguably the worst thing happening on this planet right now, the only thing is: not to humans, but to other sentient beings.
To humans as well. I mean, desertification because of widespread intensive monoculture is an ongoing phenomenon here in Europe. Having dried out soil that can't absorb water (because it's too dry to penetrate except through cracks) isn't exactly just a problem to "other sentient beings".
And don't even get me started on water pollution, the sometimes-lethal green algae, the dead bees, and agriculture workers exposed to cancer-inducing products.
Why does it need to be the average? It seems to me more like it models the manifold of human knowledge. However we often query for the average, because that is often good enough and gives us quick results, but there is nothing fundamentally preventing us from sending AI into the deep end of under-explored territory and perhaps coming back with something new. It is ultimately the exploration vs exploitation trade off.
> but there is nothing fundamentally preventing us from sending AI into the deep end of under-explored territory and perhaps coming back with something new
What's stopping us is that AI works by manipulating tokens and language but has no connection to reality as it exists. Einstein famously conceived of special relativity by imagining what it would be like to fly alongside a light wave[1]. This is a process that integrates spatial reasoning and imagination informed by living in the real universe where you can see objects moving or waves propagating in a pond. The language only comes later as a means of communicating these intuitions to others.
I don't say this, because I know how, but because I see no reason why we will be unable to crack that problem. If our brains can do it, so will AI one day.
I don't think many people are confused on the sentience of fish... nor that telling people this would get them to stop eating fish anyways. It's a pretty important source of protein for much of the world.
I got my BS in Computer Science legally carrying a Glock in every class. I think it's very likely I was the only person doing so; Not because I was fearful, but because I like being prepared. It takes very little long-term effort for people to carry pepper spray, a gun (if able), and a first aid kit everywhere they go. You never know who's life you might save.
There's been exercises where you simulate active shooters with some or none of the people armed. As I remember it the situation with some of the targets were armed ended up with higher casualty numbers in quite a few simulations. The solution to a bad guy with a gun might be a good guy with a gun, but it also might be easier paths to run away and lowering the probability of a bad guy getting access to a gun.
Looking at the non-US stats, it's pretty clear the latter is at least a lot more credible.
I'm actually not surprised. As a conceal carrier, I think that most people that conceal carry a firearm are woefully under-trained and potentially a liability. I still absolutely encourage people willing to put in the effort to do it, given the potential to save lives. Pretty much every single active shooter situation only ends with the suspect shooting themselves, or being shot - I want every chance to end the threat possible.
reply