jjaredsimpson

Subjective personal experience is a side effect of an long running information process located inside a meat computer. Why is occurs and what is "really is" are scientific questions that are incompatible with materialism.

Presupposing a second substance is magical thinking.

There's an enormous quantity of correct, novel and insightful content. So I filter harshly and don't bother with it.

Title of the article led me to believe that it would be a essay about what the present generation of researchers of consciousness are doing differently than previous generations. That I would be presented with a new strategy to attack the problem of consciousness.

I personally don't believe there is a "problem of consciousness". But I still was willing to give the article a chance.

I became dubious when I read

> for while any spectrometer can register blue precisely on a dial, few of us would say that it is conscious. A spectrometer does not perceive blue.

Already the author is starting to set up a contrast between inanimate systems and animate ones. Which I reject. A complicated response to stimulus isn't a different thing from a response which is simple to causally explain.

Eventually I read

>physicalism contains a logical flaw ... something more is needed, beyond the laws of nature, to account for conscious subjective experience

And I stopped because I don't agree and have no need to read the inferior versions arguments for dualism when I've already reject the better versions.

What model does dualism provide and how can I use it to make predictions about how consciousness is embodied in physical beings. Why is it useful to presuppose the existence of a complete separate substance to explain consciousness.

To be brief dualism is woo woo.

>I think everyone intuitively knows that consciousness can't come from material things, but we convince ourselves otherwise.

Ok, I'll make a sweeping unsupported statement too. Dualists have limited imagination and flawed understanding of the nature of information and computation as well as a penchant for magical thinking.

> to just 178 gallons per person each day.

which would be ~21000 gallons per month for her family of four. Has to be an error right? Either she is a total idiot or the Times can't do math and it's not per person per day.

That's what the money is for

Top comment here whines that math is hard.

Of course they will. Just like people do things we don't understand. What is the alternative? Technology can't be stopped.

Expressing a wish for caution is pointless because no one will heed that wish, there is almost no rational actor who would not choose to invent machine intelligence knowing that others are pursuing the same technology.

At root, your comment just seems alarmist but not persuasive. How should I change my beliefs even if I concede that yes: machine intelligences will be dangerous and unpredictable.

With lg(9) bits of information needed to identify the odd coin, and a scale with only three possible outcomes (< > =), we can show the best sequence of weighings must reveal lg(3) + lg(3) bits of information by yielding a uniform distribution on the outcomes.

The nickname of a tool doesn't matter, so minimizing potential conflicts makes sense.

But if your dataset fits in an NVDIMM of xpoint maybe you might want it and take the simplicity of developing against persistent memory thats good enough for your access patterns.

His tooling is so far behind anything all other languages have that I would never bother to learn this language, because it was "for games."

If I wanted to make a game I would learn any engine using any number of language bindings.

I don't think I can be convinced that correct-by-construction methods are wrongheaded. I am convinced that humans aren't very good at wrangling precise and complex and large ideas without failure.

I think zero based is "prettier" because of half open intervals, but it really doesn't matter.

Given two points in time t,u they have progress exp t and exp u and relative rates of progress exp u / exp t = exp (u-t). So of course the relative rate of progress between 2 points in time is fixed and so we can scale our y-axis to make any 2 points have the characteristic "elbow" of an exponential.

But if we consider absolute difference between 2 points on the scale of a human lifetime over different periods of time we can see that absolute difference doesn't have the same property as relative rate of progress.

exp u - exp (t-u+u) = exp u - exp u (exp(t-u)) = exp u (1- exp (t-u))

Which I guess I'll interpret as saying that the absolute difference of progress between 2 points in time is proportional to an exponential. So for most of history that exponential was very close to zero and humans did not experience must change in a lifetime. Now however we live in a time where the exponential can be said to be nearing an "elbow."

So while over time relative rates of progress between 2 points do not vary, absolute progress between 2 points certainly does vary can be described as an elbow when measured against a human lifetime.

I'm not really interested in what some random tv show has to say about AGI. Why would that be relevant?

Any physical system can be simulated/approximated given enough computational resources. The brain is purely physical and is the sole cause of mind.

AGI is inevitable outcome of some bulk of matter being designed to solve novel problems efficiently.

I honestly couldn't imagine a future that wouldn't contain these beings.