TheVat

I posted on this a week ago in the neighboring free will thread, with an article comparing Sapolsky book to another book, which was compatibilist. (I'm not rejoining the discussion, just adding a bit of background reading) The floating quote function has removed the quoted portion within that quote, sorry.

Humility would serve you well. If someone can't understand you, putting the onus entirely on them is unreasonable when you possess the intelligence to meet them halfway with your own clarification and employment of the common parlance. As it is, you come across as cute but a bit solipsistic.

I remain highly skeptical that LLMs can skirt the symbol grounding problem. They are handling semantically empty signifiers and this won't change unless their deepest architecture could somehow become self-renovating and reactive to the world in a manner that....well then they would not really still be LLMs in any meaningful sense. I am not saying an artificial semantics is flat out impossible, but it seems to me something that arises when an entity must survive and adapt to the world (though not necessarily in our particular human ways of doing so) and exist in an evolutionary relationship to other entities. But I'll read Bajohr's paper, beyond the intro, and see what is meant by "dumb meaning." It sounds pretty fuzzy. Thanks for keeping the thread going btw.

Jinx!

1971. From an easily searched online source, which took me about 30 seconds to find: Hall thrusters have been flying in space since December 1971, when the Soviet Union launched an SPT-50 on a Meteor satellite. Over 240 thrusters have flown in space since that time, with a 100% success rate. Hall thrusters are now routinely flown on commercial LEO and GEO communications satellites, where they are used for orbital insertion and stationkeeping... 🙄

For those following, I thought it might be useful to define the acronym RCP 8.5 which is being used here. RCP 8.5 is one several scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways) that yields a particular concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. RCP 8.5 is the concentration of carbon that delivers global warming at an average of 8.5 watts per square meter across the planet. (at the surface, at noon on a summer day in the temperate zone, we get about 1000 w/m2 total insolation - I got this figure from Woods Hole) The RCP 8.5 pathway delivers a temperature increase of about 4.3˚C by 2100, relative to pre-industrial temperatures. RCP 8.5 is often contrasted with RCP 2.6, which would deliver a total warming of about 1.8˚C by 2100. @Ken Fabian has neatly summarized all the political and market forces that are smoothing the path for renewables and decreasing the chances of the dystopian RCP 8.5 scenario. I would only add that the driver of an alternative like wind is its fundamental simplicity and ease of construction once production of components is scaled up. There's something almost surreal about looking back at the history of power generation and seeing how humanity breezed (npi) right past a 19th century technology that ran on free fuel.

Quite serious vulnerability. If LLM bots are trained on personal information, breaches of their training data could reveal bank logins, home addresses, embarrassing images, etc. There could be lawsuits ahead if training data is not properly anonymized.

Hopeful there won't be too many pissing contests in the humidity thread. Comfort does seem very subjective, based on my experience living on a high arid steppe. Ms Vat and I have gotten so acclimated that when we travel east to someplace like Omaha it feels like driving into a Lousiana swamp. The thread has prompted me to think more about getting a humidifier, for the sake of skin and mucous membranes in the winter. Piano hygrometer was at 20 this morning. Came up to 22 after we boiled water for oats and made coffee, so kitchen activity doesn't make a big difference.

Melting all polar ice and glaciers would involve an enormous volume - estimates I've seen are around 70m further sea level rise. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-glaciers-melted Clearly this would be an extreme scenario involving a runaway feedback effect made of various specific effects of reduced ice cover, e.g. albedo drop, release and dissociation of methane hydrates, particulates (both microbial and inorganic) blowing out of ancient bogs and other thawed permafrost, methane from thawed organic material decomposing, and others. As for tectonic processes that @studiot mentioned, yes, lots of unknowns there. I will try to dig a bit more into that USGS estimate, given that it's a little higher than some.

GAZA = BAKERSFIELD Was curious how small Gaza is, given the frequent and quite credible use of the word crammed to describe conditions of the people there. 140 square miles. So it is the size of Bakersfield CA. Bakersfield has 400,000 people, who can come and go from there, and is surrounded by accessible open land and a nation which it is part of. Gaza has 2.2 million people, penned in like animals. And they are currently confined to about half of that land area, due to the wholesale destruction of North Gaza. So it is currently a state with about ten times the population density of Bakersfield. In its better days, it was five times. Its largest city, Gaza City, was more tightly packed than New York City, with more than 650,000 people living within its 18 square miles. Gaza City had triple the population density of Washington DC, twice the density of San Francisco. These other cities, of course, have orders of magnitude more wealth and infrastructure tailored to handling a dense population and robust supply chains bringing in food and amenities. So this leads me to wonder, as bombing has now resumed by Israel, of the southern part of Gaza, where are all these civilians supposed to flee to while the war continues.

https://undark.org/2023/11/17/book-review-free-will/ Offers some good summary of the discursive issues so far. Looks at books by two authors who reach quite different conclusions about free will. Here's a snippet that I found amusing.

Let me guess, the House members who have been strongly supporting a well-known fat pathological liar the past few years were the ones reluctant to cast a vote against this fat pathological liar.

For many that's counterintuitive. But it makes sense, where the amount of water in the air, in absolute terms, is so small. I suspect some of that folk belief about cold relates to the situations like walking through a heavy mist or drizzle where cold moisture is reaching your skin in larger quantities and drawing more heat from it. And you are then, as the article notes, not getting any warming from direct sun, adding even more chill.

Omnibus cauliflower poltroon strabismus pecan-prestidigitate recirculator furzen-fenster. I freely wrote that sentence. Was it entirely determined as a the result of antecedent conditions crafted in the Big Bang? Could I have willed to compose some other sentence? (i.e. if we ran the universe back to the BB, and then let things play out again, would I type the same sentence?)

That seems true for when it's hot. But it seems like humidity also heightens chill when temps are below a comfortable room temp. I notice this visiting children in another state where it's far more humid. 10 C there feels colder than 10 C does here. And in summer 30 feels hotter there than it does here.

It's semiarid here, near the Wyoming border, so it's never all that humid and, going by the hygrometer I've got on the piano, the transition is fairly gradual. It's 18 C atm, in that room, and 22% humidity. So raising that would be a plus. Some here opt for humidification built into their furnace. Though, as pointed out, that can increase perceived chill. I think Americans overheat their homes and buildings, by European/UK standards. The numbers people are giving here as norms would strike many of my compatriots as on the chilly side.

I think humid air has two benefits in the cool season, one is comfort for skin and upper respiratory tract, the other is that humider air would have a bit more thermal capacity and reduce the number of heating cycles (I think most systems work more efficiently with longer spaced out cycles). That's a guess, needs fact checking. And I'm writing from a locale with distressingly dry winter air, where upping humidity is always desirable.

Seems like one of the cost factors with GSHPs in very cold places will be digging through frozen layers of soil and then having tubing robust enough to handle instability in the ground from expansion/contraction.

The information exclusion weakness is one of many to be found in IIT. Cerullo does a good job showing the lack of empirical support for the theory. I occasionally follow Scott Aaronson, a foremost theoretical computer scientist, who has a really good blog, and he does a robust critique of IIT. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799

Published in Nature today. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06692-3 Simpler language version from NASA news site: https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1771/discovery-alert-watch-the-synchronized-dance-of-a-6-planet-system/ The discovery: Six planets orbit their central star in a rhythmic beat, a rare case of an “in sync” gravitational lockstep that could offer deep insight into planet formation and evolution. Key facts: A star smaller and cooler than our Sun hosts a truly strange family of planets: six “sub-Neptunes” – possibly smaller versions of our own Neptune – moving in a cyclic rhythm. This orbital waltz repeats itself so precisely it can be readily set to music.

What?

Stopped feeding them - seriously? You make them sound like stray cats. If you didn't intend a racist slur on these people, then perhaps you should learn some of their history. These people owned and ran farms and grew olives and dates and other cash crops. They sustained themselves for generations and then were driven off their lands and shoved into a tiny space without consent or due process of law. They didn't go there because Israel "made it nice." The Naqba ravaged their lives and means of economic autonomy and created a misery and anger that comes from that genuine condition and is amped up by each new round of brutality and heavy civilian casualties that Israel's many attacks have brought, and the ongoing degradation of being shoved into horrible conditions of overcrowding and restricted rights and various embargos. It's rather like someone knocking you down, putting their boot on your face and whenever you punch at their leg they cry, Look! Look how awful a person he is! He is a vicious leg puncher! No wonder I have to keep this boot here! Oy!

Analysis is breaking down something into its elements and then making a detailed examination of those elements. Analysis as such seems too abstract and complex a process to be achieved by a single neuron. (and because analysis breaks down a whole into parts, it doesn't seem like the optimal path to a holistic sense of an aware self) I wonder if the process that is more relevant to consciousness (see Godel Escher Bach, by Hofstadter) is recursion, another one that seems to require a network of neurons. Our awareness of self seems to have a recursive quality. We are aware of our perceptions. We are aware that we are aware. We are aware that we are aware that we are aware. And so on. The mind is thus involving a process of self-reflexivity or recursion.

If you put a word in quotation marks, you are changing its meaning. So I then don't know what you mean by "analyze." Also, it would help if you define "system" in this context. Cells have more than one system that regulates their various activities.

Analysis is a high-order cognitive process that, so far as we know from this planet, only one or two species with large brain/body ratios can manage. So, no, an individual neuron cannot analyze anything. It can no more analyze than it can compose a symphony. You might want to find a basic introduction to neurosciences. Your Brain, Explained by Marc Dingman is an example. Another neuroscientist, V S Ramachandran, has several accessible books out on the topic that have been quite popular.