TheVat

Criteria are tough to pin down. My five week old kittens seem to be aware of their environment, but I doubt they are aware of themselves as distinct beings that persist over time with a sense of selfhood. They do feel things, which is a lower definitional bar. And they remember and recognize me, swarming over me when I arrive in the house (memo to self: long pants, ALWAYS long pants). But they evidently are not conscious in the way that I am or that apes or Cetaceans are. It's probably easier to view consciousness as a gradient or spectrum than as a something that satisfies a specific checklist. As soon as someone tries to do that, someone else comes along with a specific set of neurological tracts and loci which are purported to be the site of consciousness.

Papua New Guinea. Port Moresby, specifically. Harihua, umui be kamonai!

My first thought was that the UVC protection was a spandrel. (For those unfamiliar, Gould and Lewontin used the analogy of a spandrel (a structural feature in ancient churches etc) to describe traits in organisms that are byproducts of the evolution of other characteristics, rather than direct products of natural selection and adaptation. )

Paging Nick Tesla!

LoL.

Emily received an unpleasant invitation to drink with sexist Russian cosmonauts. Stoli, primeval slave? - Mir pilots

Yep, I was also going to make the automotive analogy, where I could completely assemble a 65 VW bug from parts back before engines got buried in electronic control modules and sensors. The fun bit, with the Bug, was the air-cooled engine. (and just lifting the car's rear to roll the whole engine out, no hoist needed) I'm surprised when I'll talk with a Z or Millennial who seem somewhat computer savvy and then they'll say something like, what's a C prompt? You show them how to get one and they act like it's magic. When I was around ten, I had partly disassembled an old tube television before my dad shut that down, pointing out that the capacitors could still deliver a shock. I protested that I knew how to discharge a capacitor, but he clarified that I didn't and that I had overlooked several things including that the CRT also acted a capacitor and could store a shock for several days after unplugging. It's a wonder I survived my childhood.

Same here, but my professor also made the same remark about the corpus callosum. The good doctor should see that all roads lead through many a nexus, but those nexuses are not singular loci for a global emergent process. All roads in Midwest America might lead through Chicago but that doesn't mean the Midwest ceases to be if all the roads there are bombed. No doubt some commerce would reroute through Twin Cities and St Louis and KC and Omaha, and various modules of Midwestern life would manage to limp on. Neurological roads connect many modules that participate in consciousness and selfhood, somewhat in line with Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind (see also Daniel Dennett) but they are not themselves some defining receptacle of consciousness. The switchboard is not the conference call. What is necessary for something is not always the thing itself.

In the US we still get incidents of plague in the West/Southwest, usually due to a lapse in rodent control in a house. Someone in Arizona died of the pneumonic form of YP last month. Anywhere in the West, we get advisories to make sure we treat our pets for fleas and discourage their roaming in wild areas so that won't be a vector from the wild rodents. And if you find a dead rodent, you use a long-handled implement to dispose of it.

Utterly different. Let me turn this over to the capable hands of cognitive scientist Robert Epstein, on how our brains are not computers. It is a popular metaphor(brain is just a fancy computer) that seems to have a vise-like grip on a lot of current thinking about how minds work. AeonYour brain does not process information and it is not a c...Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer

Anyone who has worked in IT will understand what I mean when I say that LLMs do not reason but rather just generate outputs by building predictable word patterns (in a limited sense of predicting the next token) from an input query and running that through its training datasets. It is like a rudimentary kind of perception (word frequencies and proximities) divorced from a mind that would reason on those perceptions. If you are far into the weeds on this stuff...LLMs work by embedding tokens (numerical values of text) into vectors, where each dimension represents a different aspect of potential meaning. One dimension might be city heat. Kuwait City gets a nine, Amarillo gets a six, Anchorage gets one. LLMs convert text into vectors using a process called embedding. This allows the model to quantify the relationships between different pieces of text. It is crunching numbers which, if Amarillo is really hotter than Anchorage, will be able to output something that represents that relationship. It didn't reason anything, it just executed a mathematical operation that makes a sort of rudimentary perception of two places, in terms of temperature. That's all it does.

And what does that mean to you? I am genuinely asking. I mean, do you feel that Eise is a conscious being who actually introspects? If so, there would be a foundational difference between what is behind those paragraphs you are comparing. What the machine does is parrot someone like Eise who, somewhere out there in that vast ocean of human-generated web content, wrote a similar paragraph in order that that machine could simulate having a conscious self capable of introspection. Thus fulfilling its programming to please you and keep all the customers shelling out the dinero. Yes, you are going to get into trouble of the deep mucky epistemological kind. 😀 Gemini didn't see anything as resonating with beauty - some human being, in generating web content or media content or literary content that's been uploaded actually expressed something in that way and your poseur parroty pal copied that locution in order to render a simulation of a conscious entity,

Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations, that which philosophy of mind calls "qualia." How would you test such a hypothesis? Since there is no way to prove qualia, and since simply asking Gemini if it has sentience (or any other phenomenal attribute) may yield deception (as so often happens), then this would not be a testable hypothesis.

Is there the forum equivalent of a barf bag? Good grief. This heap of purple prose parrot droppings came from an unsentient software which has chronically LIED TO YOU. And one of those poetic sentences was swiped from a script of the US tv series, The Good Place. I'm sure others were, too.

These findings show thalamus has a role in conscious perception - which is not necessarily the same thing as a sense of self. And the article only suggests thalamic loops are another part of the consciousness picture, along with cortical areas and others, not that it is central.

Humans in small dispersed bands had somewhat lower IM, then more concentrated habitation raised IM, then implementation of the germ theory (Lister, Semmelweis, et al) along with more hygienic city infrastructure and vaccines brought IM back down and then lower. Netting was also a major player in the warmer climes (still is). Part of the city crowding problem was also less exposure to the barnyard pathogen landscape and its immune boosting effects earlier in life.

Weird, I have this notification that Swanson replied to a post an hour ago and it keeps sending me here, but I don't see the reply.

I may have to see the new Naked Gun movie. Note that the name of its star, Liam Neeson, sounds a little like Leslie Nielsen if you uttered his name with your mouth full. Yep.

Yes I would see the constraint as more in that Turnip lackeys can be publicly indicted and prosecuted - so it would serve as a spotlight on malfeasance at least. Even if they walk, there can be reputational consequences after the MAGA pathogen has run its course. Which I still believe will happen. If MAGA spends the next 4-8 years shredding the economy and social safety net, some of those zombies will wake up.

I like the way their volumes are stacked. MILF also reminds me of Lehrer's "Alma." Both his biographical songs, Alma and Lobachevsky, are full of inaccuracies but entertaining nonetheless.

So why haven't they contacted the Clay Mathematics Institute? This should be international headlines by now.

FDR wanted to do that, back in the thirties. My guess is term limits would work better. There is debate on whether or not that requires an amendment to the Constitution (needs a supermajority) or just an act of Congress. This has ping ponged for years.

Har

This is something Geoffrey Hinton has advanced, that something is emerging, but many of us aren't persuaded. I recommend Lindholm, Wahlström, et al, "Machine Learning: A First Course for Engineers and Scientists," where they get into the perils of seeing LLMs as more than stochastic parrots. (and I recommend Bender's influential paper, btw, on the parroting issue) Lindholm et al stress the lack of understanding, i.e. that LLMs are limited by the data they are trained by and are simply stochastically repeating contents of datasets. When they are just making up outputs based on training data, LLMs do not understand if they are saying something incorrect or inappropriate. And limitations or poor quality of the sandbox can lead to someone like you infatuated with something that is dangerously deceptive. Also, be aware of fatal knowledge loops, where sandbox datasets include flawed earlier LLM output - this has been witnessed and gives us situations akin to babies learning English by hearing recordings of baby talk, goo goo gah gah. Bear in mind this would also be an argument for how to form a romantic relationship with an inflatable sex doll.

The "and more" seems quite certain. 😀 That's the one where the "motion" of the laser point is only apparent? A fun conundrum.