201–210 of 271 posts
The mind of the neuro-materialist is a radio so impressed with its own receiver that it's convinced it is the broadcasting tower
The mind of the dualist is a radio so uncomfortable with its own circuitry that it invents a broadcasting tower to explain the music.
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Baggini is the source of the quote he just references the concept was from Adams at the end. I copy/pasted this from the book.
This is the third time in the same week I observed an HHGG quote going whoosh in an age where reading books is long dead as the tech industry twitches to dying anytime soon from the moment Jeff sold godelescherbach online
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I think the closest would be: if anyone involved ever complains to authorities at all, everyone involved gets in trouble. If no one ever complains, no trouble. Everyone involved is forever at the mercy of everyone else involved.
Or...at the mercy of a scary man with a big wrench. Every single post you've put in this thread is a volatile mix of idealistic, naive, and sociopathic. So, obviously you'll be a tech CEO in 10 years.
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> If we eventually (we're not there yet, I think) create a true intelligent AI it will probably be a long time before people will accept that creating an intelligent being probably means it should have 'rights' as well. In my view, the best LLMs clearly pass the bar for intelligence. I highly doubt they have consciousness. So the revelation of LLMs is that consciousness is not necessary for intelligence.
But how do you know it's not conscious? It's a very poorly defined concept. I know various people that to this day say that fish do not feel pain (because they want to catch them with a hook through their mouth without feeling guilty). That seems a ridiculous notion to me, as pain is extremely evolutionary useful and a fish displays all sorts of pain-like behaviour when hooked. But still, since we can't really look i…
Biological computers are inevitable. We are the most compelling proof of concept of this that we have. Our entire civilization may be a prototype of one already. From my perspective, I belive things will happen in the following order; 1. AI will eventually take over all silicon chip design. Human designs pale in comparison. Moores Law, which currently indicates that humans are reaching the practical limitations of th…
> The new law, "Claude's Law" dictates that processing speed will increase by a factor of 10 every year. Is the limit of currently in silico mainly the cleverness of the design or is it physics? While there will be scope for better designs I'm not sure it's at the level of a factor of 10 every year for 10 years. But perhaps moving fully into 3D chips designs might give a significant boost if the cooling problem can b…
To my limited understanding we have started with layering techniques but its still pretty early days.
The reason we dont do that more is both because of difficulty in design but also manufacturing.
I read an interesting book about consciousness recently: The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms. Solms argues, I think convincingly, that consciousness fundamentally has to do with emotions and not cognition. Consciousness is not produced by the cortex but rather by the brainstem, where signals from all over the body converge (e.g. pain, hunger, itchiness, etc). If that argument is true then a petri-dish of neurons is unlik…
People having been saying for aeons that consciousness originates in the (mammalian) cortex and not in the brainstem. To justify killing all sorts of animals ;-) The whole thing makes one thing extremely clear: people are very good at moving goalposts. We've blasted past the 'turing test' for all practical purposes, but we moved the definition of 'true intelligence'. Consciousness and intelligence have long seen as h…
Some philosophers (one modern example being Kastrup) point out that the only thing we really know is our own conscious experience. We don't go full-on solipsist because other people appear to be built the same way as ourselves, so it's a small jump to think they're conscious as well. Over the past few decades scientists have found that other animals' brains are quite similar to our own in important ways, mammals especially, and are more willing to credit them with consciousness.
But AIs run on completely different hardware with different algorithms. It's entirely possible that they're philosophical zombies. It's a bigger leap to say they're conscious like us, because they're more different from us.
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I'm totally fine with consensual human experimentation that somehow threads the needle around exploitation of the poor - just not sure how we do the latter part short of requiring experimentees to pass a minimum net-worth threshold?
I think the closest would be: if anyone involved ever complains to authorities at all, everyone involved gets in trouble. If no one ever complains, no trouble. Everyone involved is forever at the mercy of everyone else involved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm totally fine with consensual human experimentation that somehow threads the needle around exploitation of the poor - just not sure how we do the latter part short of requiring experimentees to pass a minimum net-worth threshold?
I think the closest would be: if anyone involved ever complains to authorities at all, everyone involved gets in trouble. If no one ever complains, no trouble. Everyone involved is forever at the mercy of everyone else involved.
Be careful about how you interpret that paper. It looks really impressive -- real neurons in a petri dish seem to successfully (if amateurishly) murk a few imps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE But there's more to the setup than you might assume from a casual reading. Here's the code used for that demo: https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron So there is an entire pytorch stack wrapped around the myster…
All opinions are my own: The whole point of the CNNs is to act like a auto encoder for input and an auto decoder for output. The only reason why this is done in the first place is because the number of electrodes in the dish is pitiful and has no chance of describing something as complex as Doom. They are there to create a latent space that can be fed through 60 odd electrodes and decode the neuron latent space into…
Torture, so casually mentioned. For what, I wonder.
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This sounds nightmarish. Maybe we build a human centipede if we can get the VC funding next?
Or a Torment Nexus!!