Please Use AI

> And why did you decide the AI makes you a better speaker than talking and getting feedback from your fellow humans?

You've just demonstrated a lack of reading comprehension. The choice that I made wasn't humans, OR AI. It was humans, OR humans+AI. All else being equal, more feedback is better.

> It seems to me a sort of "productivity death cult". Productivity for what?

Are you having a discussion with me, or a strawman that you're projecting onto me? Right now it looks like you're debating a strawman. Who doesn't look anything like me.

I said that I had personal reasons to become better at connecting with an audience. A big source of those personal reasons is that I and my family have been through a mental health nightmare since COVID. I've learned a lot from the experience that I'd like to be able to talk about.

To give but one example, what I've shared with my local Toastmasters club has helped it become both the largest, and the fastest growing, community Toastmasters club in Orange County. People are joining because we're really good at helping them overcome social anxiety.

I care about helping people. I'd like to be able to help more than just the few dozen people that I've talked to already.

Do you really think that my desire to have a positive impact in more lives makes me part of a "productivity death cult"? If so, then we're going to have to disagree on what makes something a productivity death cult.

My position is this. Each of us should figure out what we really care about. (In healthy humans, human connection tends to be a big part of that.) After figuring out that, we should set priorities for ourselves. To the extent that AI is honestly helpful, we should use AI.

> You've just demonstrated a lack of reading comprehension

Why are you escalating this? I didn't personally attack you or question your comprehension, I'm challenging some of what you said. Not even all.

> Are you having a discussion with me, or a strawman that you're projecting onto me? Right now it looks like you're debating a strawman. Who doesn't look anything like me.

Not a strawman. I'm addressing a broader context than just you, while relating it to what you said about the AI being "available" when humans weren't. I didn't mean to imply you personally were engaged in a productivity cult, and if I came across that way, I apologize. (Don't tell me you haven't seen the productivity obsession being brought up frequently on HN, either criticizing it or embracing it)

> A big source of those personal reasons is that I and my family have been through a mental health nightmare since COVID. I've learned a lot from the experience that I'd like to be able to talk about.

None of this was in your initial comment, how could I guess? This is additional context that does, indeed, change some of our conversation.

> To the extent that AI is honestly helpful, we should use AI

Yes, but let's be honest about what "helpful" means here, and to what end. Perfecting a speech (or helping you perfect it) doesn't seem to me a particularly necessary use of AI. That's essentially what TFA (poem) is about.

Can you explain what is contradictory in the view you oppose? You lump a few of these opinions into one and they're pretty different from one another, but the essence of it seems to be disagreeing that humans can be explained with enough knowledge. You say that this is contradicted through natural human experience so much that you think the other side refuses to admit that there's a huge gash in their view. Basically that they're lying to themselves and everyone knows 'the truth'. What is that contradictory experience?

To me, the contradictory view is the one assuming that everything in the world can be explained, except for humans. So far, people found that, given enough time and core knowledge, they could understand anything about the natural world, and we've been refining that process ever since. Since humans are a part of that world, are created in it and live in it, why would I think we're any different? There's a difference between thinking that humans are unique (in a way that makes us have immensely interesting properties) and thinking that humans are special (not subject to natural laws or constraints).

The troubling view for me is the alternative - the one that always tries to draw a hard line between humans and the 'explainable' rest of nature, like we must be different, alien and special to be worthy of interest and appreciation.

Im not being condescending when I say genuinely thanks for engaging in good faith and without being rude! This topic can make people quite rude, in my experience. I guess because it's talking about people's deepest beliefs of themselves and the world.

I think you've distilled it well: I don't believe that human consciousness can be explained.

Obviously, we find neural mechanisms for aspects of it: of cognition, learning, language, movement, etc. And obviously there are the effects of drugs, e.g. anesthesia, psychedelics, anti-anxiety, etc.

But these are all effects on consciousness, they are not an explanation for the very existence of the observer, so to speak. And I don't believe that can be touched rigorously. The best we'll ever be able to do is gesture at it broadly and say "well, it certainly seems like everything has a physical cause and explanation." Whereas I take a different view: it certainly seems as though there is something special about consciousness.

It is certainly of the universe, and obviously interacts with the physical. But it also seems to go beyond it. The experience itself exists. And I do believe that this is intuitively obvious - we know we exist, we know we have a type of free will (obviously imperfect, affected by various circumstances, but nevertheless we exist).

But because we want to feel that everything has an explanation, and physical science has been so powerful and effective in every other domain, there's a tendency to say - "well, that stuff must be an illusion. Human perception is fallible."