Viewing profile — tananan

I generally work on internal-use Python codebases. I would much rather do some basic validation and fail loudly if anything I didn’t account for happens. One of the issues I run in…

If OP said the important thing is to be appropriately generous with your blamelessly earned wealth as you safeguard it against future perils, I would not have replied.

A society where the only people with stability are those who parasitize on a increasingly emaciated wealth-producing population surely doesn't seem like a stable society, nor one t…

Thanks for sharing. It is especially interesting to hear the factors that contributed to the decline of fish sauce use in the west. One thing I am “stealing” from SEA is fish sauce…

Forgive me if I ramble for too long. I've been seeing a lot of comments in this vein and the thoughts have accumulated. Tacit in your question is the notion that the inquiries that…

If the question is what is there about us that's not covered by the body, we can mention things like: feelings, intentions, perceptions, acts of consciousness. Or however else you …

How are we machines?

I don’t hold to that view. If I did, I might have that problem.

> Which leads me to conclude that it wouldn't necessarily matter whether an AI like SkyNet has subjective awareness or not. What matters is what kind of long-term plans it could pu…

In discussions like this, we're always going to bottom out at certain assumptions we bring with us, so I agree. One reason I like bringing up examples like this (the xkcd in sister…

Well, then we both assume very different views on the matter, and that’s fine.

When we speak of the “despair vectors”, we speak of patterns in the algorithm we can tweak that correspond to output that we recognize as despairing language . You could implement …

Fortunately, as you mention in your last sentence, stress is introspectable. How exactly stress corresponds to biomarkers doesn’t matter if your desire is to lower it. The issue is…

It would be really cool if it could highlight the parts of the speech that gave you away your accent. It guesses mine correctly most of the time (though not the first time I tried)…

What strikes me as interesting about the idea that there is a class of computations that, however implemented, would result in consciousness, is that is is in some way really ideal…

I like this post. What I find a practical, related advice is “If you want to get good at something, you have to make yourself glad that you’re doing it.” This involves reminding yo…

> That ‘glorious hope’ was quickly dashed, however. In Anaxagoras’s account, it seemed to Socrates, Mind had no agency other than initially setting things in motion, and no moralit…

You don't write something like this without being enchanted thoroughly by the language.

There actually is a “The Nag’s Head” in the Balkans - it’s in Montenegro

You are reading into something that isn't there. The study doesn't have to do with music making you more capable of socializing. The hypothesis being tested is that in the absence …

Study finds you enjoy doing things you like. If there's something you particularly like, you seem to enjoy it even more. If you are missing on some form of pleasure in your life, s…

Ime it's not just being blindsided but also simply preferring to do research in other areas.

The whole thing with Chalmer's hard problem is pointing out that reduction doesn't get you very far. But here he formulates a reductive panpsychist proposal (though only "in theory…

This kind of panpsychistic talk to me ends up feeling more closer to a reductive materialism than what I would firstly associate Chalmers with ("hey, did you forget you can experie…