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Comment by julianeon | Hacker News Reader

Great article. I'm often surprised by how indifferent people seem to the answers to this. From the intro:

When it comes to understanding the fabric of the universe, most of what scientists think exists is consigned to a dark, murky domain. Ordinary matter, the stuff we can see and touch, accounts for just 5% of the cosmos. The rest, cosmologists say, is dark energy and dark matter, mysterious substances that are labeled “dark” partly to reflect our ignorance about their true nature.

How can you be interested in science, and yet not curious about that?

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I have recently been baffled to find that there’s a certain type of “smart person” who will become annoyed if you bring up dark matter, dark energy, or consciousness as a philosophical question. The idea that there are things that we still don’t know, potentially important and paradigm shifting things, is a kind of affront to their sense of comfort. It’s like they think just by bringing these topics up you are somehow undermining Science.

I understand the frustration. When you bring up a possibility one can't disprove, such as dark matter/energy, or life-after-death, we get stuck - there's no way to move forward without something that can give us a model with some predictive power.

Intelligence and consciousness (in the context of AGI or LLMs) is one such thing. When someone starts saying that LLMs can't possibly be conscious, at first I tended to politely point out we don't have a good, testable, definition of what conscious is and, therefore, we can't claim an LLM can't be conscious. Nowadays I just avoid the discussion altogether. I'll let them bring me back from the dead when we have a usable definition for "intelligence" or "consciousness" we can test.

I'm sure it'll be a machine waking me up.

Presumably an LLM's evidence of consciousness is how it would complete a sentence starting with "I…".

But I think the question is like asking if the Broca's area in a human brain is conscious.

An interesting question - how much of a brain needs to be operating for us to say a human is conscious. The legal implications would be very relevant.

Something really fun is the fact that the ratio of matter to dark matter to dark energy is roughly the ratio of greater than 2 std deviations from a mean, one to two std deviations from a mean, and one std deviation around a mean.

No real rhyme or reason why though.

Dark matter by definition doesn’t really do anything interesting.

It doesn't need to do anything interesting. It can just be interesting.

And even if we're completely wrong, or it's a quirk of our models, or whatever else. That is also interesting.

Said people before nearly every discovery in physics led to new technology.

Eh, another in a long series of speculations which generally seem bolted on to existing theory to explain why observations don’t match models. Until we get either some particularly elegant reformulation where everything fits in place… or we get a particularly significant anomaly in particle colliders… I’m not real interested in the latest guess as to where all the mass went.

I’m still in camp “plausible explanation is this is all a big mass accounting error and models for how mass is distributed in galaxies are wrong by a couple orders of magnitude”.

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