Reductionistic fallacy, among other errors. "understanding" is best defined operationally. (Note that teachers and educational institutions test understanding operationally.)
1,524 karma · joined November 17, 2010
Like today. I asked Gemini for the longest state names with an even number of letters and it gave me North Carolina and South Carolina. When I complained that they are odd, it gave me North Dakota and South Dakota, which are both odd and not the longest. When I noted that, it went back to the Carolinas. Finally it appeared to switch to a different model that actually did counting and found Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
> So it seems the people whose job it is to study these things do have reason to think it might exist.
"reason to think it might" is not at all the same as "reason to think it does". Basically it says that they don't think it's impossible. (The heading is "Could Life Really Exist on Enceladus?", and the experiment showed that the simulated environment didn't kill an existing microorganism. They acknowledge "that doesn’t mean that there is life on Saturn’s moon" and reiterate that if there is, they've shown that future space missions "might have a good chance of finding traces".)
And people are making whacked out inferences, like the first utterly insane comment:
> If life really exists there, it implies that life is everywhere in the universe. That was absolutely terrifying.
Er, no, what implies that life is "everywhere" in the universe is the plain mechanics that make microorganic life on Enceladus plausible and the vast numbers ... it's not like the solar system is super special and rare; in the ~ 10^26 planets and moons in the observable universe (and why limit it to that? The actual number might be unbounded), there is certain to be a vast number that are similar, and a sizeable number of them will have some sort of microorganisms. Are such microorganisms terrifying? No remotely rational person would think so. Do they imply higher lifeforms that might be dangerous to us? Not at all ... surely such lifeforms do exist, again by the vastness of the numbers, but physics prevents any interaction with them.
Detecting microorganisms on Enceladus won't change any of the probabilities ... it would effectively be neutral in a Bayesian calculation, swamped by the knowledge we already have. It would produce a cultural change, but many factors will mute even that. Even the increased motivation to explore will be swallowed up by the impending end of human civilization due to global warming.
But there's no reason to think that it does.
This is false.
> all of his Meta advertising
You don't appear to have any understanding of how Cambridge Analytica affected the election.
In statically typed languages, variables and expressions have a compile-time type and values have a run-time type.
> Mutability is a property of variable, not of a value.
In which languages?
In D, mutability is a property of a type. And variables and expressions have a compile-time type and values have a run-time type, so mutability is also a property of variables, expressions, and values.
(Immutability is also transitive in D, so an immutable value cannot have mutable parts, including mutable references, and a variable with an immutable type cannot contain a value or reference with any mutable parts.)
"your first 2 extensions (5 and 6 bytes) were clearly envisioned. the standard (up to 4 bytes) was created to cover the size of unicode. i thought any more description would be a waste of paper. i think your extension from 7 to 8 bytes is a little hoaky. i requires reading the whole string rather than "knowing" the number of follow on bytes. so, i think the only thing new is the 7 byte version.
i appreciate the mail, but i really dont think it is useful. it is like replacing ipv6 with ipv50."
If you had read the link above, you would have seen
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
which I have added to my comment.
I won't pursue further discussion when it's at such a shallow level of thinking as "we are not different" despite numerous clear differences.
P.S. nor with flaggable vituperation that only reflects extremely badly on the person who responded to me
— Daniel Dennett
https://now.tufts.edu/2020/09/02/our-brains-our-selves
"One of the problems with defining consciousness is that it’s several different things—and it means different things to different people. There is a sense of consciousness in which starfish are conscious. Worms are conscious. Even trees, even bacteria are conscious. But there’s one dividing line between the amoeba and the professor in the consciousness department, which really marks off a huge difference: language.
It’s language that enables us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on our own experience. Frogs notice all kinds of things in their world, but I don’t think they can notice their noticings. I don’t think they can dwell on them. That whole sort of stairway of curiosity that we have built-in doesn’t exist for any species but us, and that makes a huge difference. Human consciousness is to animal consciousness roughly as language is to bird song. Birdsong communicates, but not much."
"Consciousness is not a part of the brain. It’s what brains can do. Particularly it’s what human brains can do when they are mature and well-designed, and a lot of that design is not innate. It’s not in your genes—in the same way German or English isn’t in your genes. Many of the features of consciousness are things that basically get installed culturally and at mother’s knee. It’s part of your rearing, your upbringing, your learning languages. It’s what you learn language in, and you learn a lot of consciousness, too."
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
“I think that one of the hardest tasks a human mind can face is reserving judgment about a conviction that has always seemed to you obvious and thinking about how maybe that might not be right"
No, they really don't. The article says
> indicated an inherent, strong maternal attachment to the calf
Yeah, that's not grieving.
Yeah, that's not grieving.
"Hence, we postulate the brain is a composite organ emanating from two lineage-restricted progenitors; these dual progenitors may be evolutionarily conserved across 550 million years from hemichordates to mammals."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7
Title: "Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain".
"Hence, we postulate the brain is a composite organ emanating from two lineage-restricted progenitors; these dual progenitors may be evolutionarily conserved across 550 million years from hemichordates to mammals."
My immediate reaction to the comment about Jaynes's book and the split brain was that it's not relevant to the article, and it conflates three very different things. The comment omits the crucial fact that the split brain research was on people whose corpus collosum had been cut -- no surprise that "these two parts of the brain function independently" since they were no longer attached to each other (which is the complete opposite of what TFA is about). Jaynes's hypothesis was not related in any way to that research, and neither are related in any way to TFA. As someone else noted: "Okay but this article is about evolution hundreds of millions of years ago." -- the clear implication being that Jaynes and split brains aren't relevant. But if anyone actually dares say so, here comes the too hot overzealous comment section policeman to project his own attributes onto them.
And this is completely aside from whether Jaynes's argument is valid ... you saying multiple times that you disagree with it is also utterly irrelevant and reflects one of several fundamental errors in logic in your comments. But criticisms of your comments is not "comment section policing" -- how absurd ... and dinobones didn't even do that in simply saying that a comment wasn't relevant to the article ... only in your head was "and therefore you are not allowed to post it here". Presumably the comment was made in good faith. I can even grant the same about yours, with a bit of straining and extraordinary charity.
I won't respond further.
I won't put any more time into this ... good luck in figuring out what it is you really want to claim and presenting a coherent and cogent argument for it.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
But this is grossly intellectually dishonest. You know very well how this will be read and responded to here ... and you keep saying that you're just talking about vibe-coding oh but you have serious criticisms of the specific effort. You write passive-aggressive stuff like
> For all I know they did make an informed decision regarding the tradeoffs (which I would consider to be a poor decision).
which contradicts your base assertion that their decisions were not informed. And
> My critiques of the language itself are not the main point, although I do still think that it's a very bad design ...
You claim
> The developer has built an entire language around a field seemingly without realising that said field exists.
but that is severely factually wrong, which along with a lot else suggests that you have very bad judgment. As the author writes,
> Bend proofs being verbose has nothing to do with me not knowing that inference, unification, or program search exists.
IOW, you have made a serious error in logic.
> To be fair to Bend, I completely vibe-coded this
Some advice: DBAD
You trashed the author and his work without bothering to learn anything about either one first (which is quite ironic).
I won't respond further.
You can't find actual reasoning in a brain either. (Note that you can't tell the difference between a conscious brain and a comatose brain by examining them.) This is the same as Leibniz's mill argument ... it's a fallacy of composition.
> Re-reinforcement is not magical process that builds conscience or emotions.
They aren't the result of magic at all, but we are nowhere near the point of identifying what processes do or don't produce consciousness (or a conscience) or can be characterized as having emotions.
> Stop humanizing LLMs.
That's a clearly dishonest mischaracterization of the GP.
I've read some of your other comments about LLMs and I find them unreasonably reductionistic, whereas I think the word "just" should be banned from ontological discussion, so I don't think further engagement would be beneficial and I won't be engaging in it. (And I'm actually quite conservative in ascribing cognitive traits to LLMs or other "AI".)
As a matter of basic logic, there will never be a time when it will be known that there are no bugs.