burrows

Then you are arguing that these surveys would abridge free speech?

The first amendment places limits on the conditions that a state government can attach to university funding?

The state (thru taxes) is funding the universities, right? Speaking for myself, if I was funding a university I would do things to encourage intellectual diversity.

I’m more sympathetic to the more general view that education is not the business of state governments, period.

The taunting tone of the article strikes me as un-empirical in some sense. If the thing sucks and no one likes it, then it sucks and no one likes it.

Maybe. Once a month or so someone will tell me about a tunneling or multi world QM in a way that I assume is completely wrong.

> This sounds a bit “fuck it, why bother trying to make anything better, something bad will always happen”.

I agree.

I don’t understand “asking a fish a question”.

But maybe the question you are proposing is the following, “Is it possible to identify a sensation that is always present?”.

Maybe this question is coherent? I’m not sure.

Suppose it isn’t possible to identify a sensation that is always present. Then wouldn’t that mean the state of having no sensations is identical to the state of only having sensations that are always present?

I think the real problem is pretending that the phrase “what it feels like to be something” is going to act like a key in my dict of feelings.

A: You know, the feeling of what it is like to be something.

B: sits quietly, looks at ceiling Right, yeah, that feeling.

From a different angle, if OP wants to define “consciousness” as some feeling it sounds like he’s basically done. He’s labeled one of his feelings with the word “consciousness”. I’m not sure what point of contention remains.

Let’s play a language game where we use language in a representative way. Specifically the language can only represent parts of sense-impressions.

Where is consciousness in one of my sense-impressions? Tell me a procedure that will allow me to locate the thing you want to call “consciousness” in one of my sense-impressions.

Maybe OP wants to ask, “What are sense impressions made of?”. But that’s incoherent in this language game because sense impressions are themselves not objects in sense impressions.

What does it even mean to say that vim is 30 years old? The vim program I use is compiled from source code that is completely different from the vim people used 5 or 10 or 20 years ago.

How are you defining “bad idea”?

Professor sent out the grad students. Some of them didn’t come back (died?).

Those are all the facts. Any pontificating about whether it is Good or Bad is just nonsense.

> hoarding is owning way more than you need to the detriment of other people.

So hoarding is owning plus the opinion of a Good Person such as Doxina that the owning is BAD because of its size. What if another Good Person thinks the owning is not excessive, then is it both hoarding and not hoarding? Maybe Schrodinger knows.

> Generally using life-or-death situations to run a huge profit is at best considered impolite. Zosima is not alone in thinking so.

“Do what Zosima and Doxin and the other Good People say with your stuff, otherwise you’re BAD!”

> There are many things in this world which you can't observe with your senses but which nevertheless exist.

Such as?

> So "want" in this context would be about conflicting goals.

Do tell, how can I observe a goal with my senses?

> I think this is the difference in general this article glosses over. It's not about doing a little good vs doing a lot of good, it's about not wanting to do more than a certain amount of good, even if you could.

What is the word “wanting” naming? Can you tell me how to observe this phenomena with one of my senses?

If not, then in what way is that sentence meaningful?

> One reason, is that the lack of necessities in times of crisis is often due to hoarding.

Is “hoarding” just a synonym for “owning”?

> Second, they may have goods that can mean the difference between life and death. And they choose to use that situation for turning a huge profit. There isn't really anything commendable in that.

Sounds like, “Do what zosima says with your stuff, otherwise you’re BAD!”

Because I’ve seen “I wish I had worked less.” on a gravestone?

Is this just you defining “average person” as someone chosen randomly?

Damn dude, having seen anything this insightful since that last Malcolm Gladwell book. Thanks!

“genuinely be wondering”

Of course this account won’t participate coherently in this conversation.

Yes, of course, ‘intentionality’, that clears everything up.

> The "response" you select is a step in a plan to achieve a goal.

Is it? Or are you just a bird trying to explain how flying works by dropping poop on my head?

> If the plan is to utter a sentence, the way you generate the sentence is NOT to emit the most likely token to fit all of the speech input you ever heard before.

This is completely incoherent to me.

> I am trying to convey an idea that I believe with the goal of helping others to understand something.

Irrefutable psuedo-facts.

You’re a fabric of stitched together organic molecules that selects the best response to electromagnetic and auditory stimulus.

Reads as satire to me.

> To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; LaMDA simply isn’t.

Attempts to clarify the usage of “sentient” by invoking “awareness” and “the world”. Lol, right, now I get it.

> What these systems do, no more and no less, is to put together sequences of words, but without any coherent understanding of the world behind them, like foreign language Scrabble players who use English words as point-scoring tools, without any clue about what that mean.

Just swinging around this midwit assumption that “words have meaning”.

> We in the AI community have our differences, but pretty much all of find the notion that LaMDA might be sentient completely ridiculous.

“Don’t be like the weird low status guy who wants to fuck the algorithm.”

> How do you think that people think? If there is nothing beyond the physical world, then the way people think is just physical interactions between microscopic particles. Those can be simulated by a powerful-enough computer.

I believe nearly all propositions about people thinking are unintelligible.

I also believe propositions about going beyond the physical world are unintelligible.

If you’re taking about parts of software, I fail to see how you are not talking about algorithms. The use of the word “simulation” seems completely irrelevant to me.

> So, no, "know" and "think" are not labels for an algorithm, but labels for things that can happen inside brains,

Or are using the word “think” to identify some phenomena I can observe with a brain and a microscope?

How do I determine if someone is an average citizen?

And if there is no way for me to determine such, in what way is the phrase “average citizen” meaningful?

Send them an email.

> I think to some degree it's a mystery. One analogy that can partially get there, is consider if we built a really powerful computer and simulated an AI person and world inside (assuming there's no soul, this seems plausibly possible). That person would just know the simulated space and time, and would think nothing else exists, but yet we exist.

How are the words “person”, “know” and “think” being used here? Are they labels for algorithms?

There is no “Washington”. Just a bunch of other humans that Gates may or may not be aligned with.

Right, God and his talking dirt.