3,239 karma · joined June 12, 2016
It was a surprise for me as a reader. When I came to this sentence I assumed that 0f ff would become #1 and 0fb9 -- #2. But no, Intel counts from zero, so there is a third ud.
I don't like arguments like this, because instead of attacking the core premise they attack defenders of the idea. There are different points of view, and picking one for a sake of an argument doesn't make a sociopath from anyone.
I agree, that he misses one thing: to claim that someone/something is conscious we need to believe that they have abilities to feel, maybe to reflect, maybe something else. The exact list of abilities to have is not known for me and different people would propose different lists, but still we can't claim rock to be consciousness just because we care about it.
Still I forgive him for it, because he is talking about LLMs, not about rocks. They have some abilities, and he claims that they are enough, what is missing is us caring for LLMs enough.
> If he meant "we sometimes don't act like others are conscious", he should have written that.
No, I don't think he meant to say this. I believe he talked about how society forms social conventions who is conscious and who is not. You see, I don't know the cashier you talk about, but I believe they possess consciousness. Why? Because they are human, and our social conventions say that every (non-sleeping) human is conscious. It is a simple rule of thumb at work, no deep philosophy or psychology involved. But were those social conventions came from? Who and how decided that every human is conscious? Why? But the story didn't just end at that decision, because now people debate about consciousness of animals and LLMs. And these debates make me (and the author of the article) think that "consciousness" in these debates is a buzzword like phlogiston was in thermodynamics before thermodynamics was invented.
Yes, he says exactly that explicitly, that in his view we should look backwards.
> We (at least, most people) avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on animals because they are conscious beings that can feel pain.
I can agree that we say that we care because of consciousness, but still I'm not convinced, to me it looks very much like a rationalization.
Some people care about animals and to that end they claim that animals possess consciousness, because if they do everyone should care about animal welfare. These animal welfare activists do not start with some insight about animal consciousness, they start with caring about animals, and then they invent an argument that can persuade others. It is exactly as the author of the article says: caring comes first, declaration of consciousness comes second.
Honestly, I do not know what consciousness is, I'm in doubt, but playing a devil's advocate, it looks very much like a concept that was invented to prove that Homo Sapience is something special, more than a mere animal. To demarcate animals and humans, so when we denied animals any rights we had a great sounding excuse for that: "people possess consciousness, mere animals don't".
> Is this guy really, truly, seriously arguing that we first decide to care for an animal, and then because we care about it, we believe that it's conscious, able to feel pain and other emotions?
Exactly. Animal welfare activists care about animals' feelings and emotions and therefore they claim that animals possess consciousness. Meat eaters don't want to be inconvenienced by thoughts of suffering animals, so they claim that animals do not possess consciousness. Both claims have little to do with actual consciousness, it is just a political game. I care about my pets, and it doesn't matter whether they possess consciousness or not, I would care about them in any case. I don't need any great sounding excuses to care about them. But at the same time I don't need to talk others into caring about my pets, if I needed it, probably I'd start talking about animal consciousness too.
> This is so intuitively obvious that I am stunned that someone would argue the opposite.
That guy may be wrong, but if I'm allowed to give advice, I'd suggest you to stop and try to understand what he says. I'm really worried a bit about how consciousness debates unfold sometimes. They tend to slip into a political side and people mostly don't notice it. People saying "consciousness" while implying "human/animal rights" or obligations. It is just muddying the water.
If we want these debates to progress constructively, we have to be very careful with references to consciousness, maybe just forbid them completely in these debates. One can't measure consciousness, one can't even state clearly what consciousness is, but still they say "consciousness" to make their words sound more objective. And the worst part of it: it often works.
When I moved from DOS to Linux, I chuck away TUI file managers and switched to pure CLI and never looked back. I could use GUI file manager, there you can really use mouse, without that jumpy-movements it has in TUI apps. But I wouldn't touch Midnight Commander or whatever.
I tried to run emacs in a terminal. Emacs' support of GUI toolkits is very cumbersome thing. But guess what forced me to abandon this experiment? Emacs is keyboard-driven, and terminals have issues with some keys, while GUI apps can deal with virtually anything.
> If we had a cross-platform usable GUI framework, and more consistency across OSes, the story would be different.
Try egui. I really like it. I'm not sure how much it is cross-platform though, hadn't tried it outside of Linux, but it is really nice. Or if you are an elm-purist then iced might be your choice. Iced lacks on widgets, it has just some basic ones, and if you need something to render a 2d-plot, then you are on your own.
Pity. I laid great hopes on that particular phrase.
It surprises me, that you don't know. But if you wanted to know you'd ask LLM, not me, right? So I'd rather spare myself from explaining it.
> I think it's totally fine (and even good) to talk about the flaws in stuff.
To talk about the flaws and public shame are different thing, don't you think?
People already tried to cancel others because they didn't agree with them. Eventually the most of people came to a conclusion that it is no good. I think at least that the most did just that. So I'm proposing another solution, just ignore what you don't like. No one is forcing you to read a blog that uses AI generated images or uses a wrong color for its background.
Can you elaborate how it may work? I mean if I create a function:
fn fail_silently(txn: Transaction) {}
then the calling code would pass the compiler, but this function presumably isn't, ok. But what can make these functions to pass:
impl Transaction { pub fn commit(self) { ... } pub fn rollback(self) { ... } }
Would you need to destructure self or what?
In any case it gives me ideas how to check the hypothesis. If the Reality has a limited horizon for planning for new laws, scientists can trick it into inventing new laws that eventually (after some more research and even more laws observed) would start contradicting to each other, and at that point the Reality would snap into a different set of rules.
If it is true, then the plan is like this: we need to wipe all the scientific knowledge from this world and start again, and trick the the Reality into devising better laws of nature. Ah, wait, we have no evidence that the Reality can abandon laws that were introduced already. Pity, the plan is brilliant, but how to check if the Reality can abandon its laws? If laws are local... we can do something like Stephenson described in his Anathem: establish maths doing independent research and comparing their results once in 1000 years.
But if you are writing Lisp, and that hashtable is a global, then good luck ensuring that no one except the designated entity talks with hashtable directly. In particular, you can't force the user at REPL prompt to not do it.
The mutability lament in the same ballpark. Dynamic nature of LISP makes it hard to ensure that some code paths can't change values they deal with. Statically typed languages do it all the time: just pass a const reference into a function and you can be sure that it wouldn't change the value, or anything referenced from it. In LISP the easiest way is to make a deep copy of a value. Other ways would probably need some changes introduced into lisp-machine itself. So you are choosing between two alternatives: either copy everything, or to believe other code to behave like values are immutable. The former is slow, the latter just doesn't work generally.
Take Rust for example: if I have a mutable HashMap that needs a concurrent access, I'd hide it. It would be accessible directly in one module only, and the module would export safe API that you can't use to achieve data race. Technically I can make this HashMap to be global, but then Rust would rebels and force me to wrap my HashTable into a Mutex. If I added REPL to the mix, then REPL would need to lock Mutex as any other thread.
Lisp just an ancient language that doesn't have these guardrails, so you need to think things through and ofc you will be overwhelmed in any real case by all these things, and then you write that you can't have concurrency, interactivity and mutability at the same time. To have them, you have to limit yourself in how you write your program, and while you can use LISP to limit yourself, you still need to do the decision and invest some work into it. It doesn't happen magically all by itself. For magic you'd better try rust, though its "magic" requires months of fighting with borrow checker until it succeeds at conditioning you into right practices.
It is your interpretation of it. My proposed explanation for their behavior is not stupidity, but dogmatism of their worldview.
> I am obviously not on any one side of this issue
It doesn't seem obvious for me at all. You are talking emotionally, trying to trigger my emotions with all kinds of tricks. I infer that you are emotionally invested into the topic.
> After all, while you call the pro-lifers "anti-abortion", you aren't calling the pro-choices "anti-life", are you?
Yes. The problem is with abortions. And "pro-lifers" if you look at them closely, are not fighting for life, they are fighting against abortion. They do not fight against wars, against anti-vaccine people, they do not fight about automobiles. There is a lot of opportunities to fight for life, but they fight against abortions, which is not even close to a top cause of deaths among humans.
They name themselves "pro-life" but it is a sneaky way to frame a discourse.
> You are merely slinging mud.
I'm asking for alternative explanations for anti-abortion activists behavior. Anything beyond dogmatism would be welcome. You are talking about me instead.
> Did you notice that you entire argument is based around calling people names and/or attributing malice intent to their position?
I do not attribute malice. Though I allow myself to express opinions about what is going on in their head, but it is the whole premise of it. I'm interested in what is going on in their heads. I have one explanation, you fail to provide another.
> You didn't even try to make an argument.
You don't seem to be interested about my arguments. You never asked about my reasoning that allows me to jump from the observed behavior to dogmatism. So why would I spend my breath explaining you things that you are not interested in?
> If it makes you feel any better about yourself, then sure. Believe that.
It is not about me, it is about you. I'm interested in what is going on in minds of others, and I don't see any other explanation for you claim than LLM. You see, I've learned about tu quoque specifically for that post. I felt that "whataboutism" is something close to what you did, but not exactly that, so I visited wikipedia and looked around to find this article. And then you state that you see it all the time. I'm very interested in rhetoric tricks, if I noticed a link to that article before, I'd remember it. But I don't.
But you somehow generated the claim that this link used all the time. How?
I can agree that I was not too polite, I should have asked you, where you've learned that, instead of voicing my hypothesis, but still I've asked. And I ask again. But you never answer questions, so I shouldn't hope for an answer, should I?
Ok, I get it. Either expressiveness or completeness, but the question arises: did mathematicians explore systems with limits on expressiveness? In a field of computer programming there is Rust with limited expressiveness that doesn't solve all the problems, but still makes things much simpler. How about a mathematics with limited expressiveness and some unsafe blocks here and there?
Argue rationally about what? I invite you to stop for a moment, reread our converstaion while asking a question: what about are we supposedly arguing. There was no rational arguments, you've changed topic from peculiarities of anti-abortion mind works to peculiarities of pro-abortion minds, which I'm not interested in, how you can imagine. It is not a rational debate, it is a rhetorical trick to lure me into a discussion I don't want to be a part of.
> Your link is frequently posted by people who have no wish to argue rationally.
I suppose it was LLM who told you that? I personally never saw that link posted. In these situations people mostly invoke "whataboutism", but I just thought it was not right, before we established beyond reasonable doubt that you are fighting a political debate. I mean, we see demagogy used, check. But your motives are still not clear enough to claim with certainty that you are caught up in political partisanship and it is the reason behind your behavior.
Tu quoque[1]
You see, they block, then they notice that blocks do not work, they try harder. And still harder, till the situation comes to impasse, when to try harder means to shut off the Internet. It stops there, everyone is using some kind of DPI resistant VPN, paying more for internet access, and ISP spending more to block what politicians deem worthy of blocks. A pure waste of money. Though datacenters are happy, because they host a ton of VPNs.
The only way is to make access easy. If you make it hard, then demand for black market drugs will drive supply. Which in turn would drive a repressive machine. Sites blocked, people convicted and so on.
I don't know why anti-abortion activists are unable to understand it. The only working hypothesis they are actively resist any understanding. A dogmatic worldview can lead to such behavior.
Maybe they are free of charge, idk, but they doesn't seem to be free of judgement. From the article:
Even if an abortion seeker is within the 12 week gestational limit and has access to a local hospital, a doctor can turn them away on the basis of conscientious objection, which legally allows any doctor to deny a patient an abortion on moral grounds. In 2019, it was reported that 67% of Italian gynecologists were registered as conscientious objectors and multiple hospitals reported having a 100% conscientious objection rate.
Even finding a doctor seem to be an issue, because most of them would tell you that they are more moral than you think and wouldn't do an abortion.
If a care seeker can find a doctor who is willing to perform an abortion, they must endure a 7-day waiting period between their initial request for an abortion and the procedure (which can push care seekers past the 12 week gestational limit).
So they believe that women are probably mistaken and don't know what they want, don't they? Or maybe they just want to make it harder to fit abortion in the 12 week limit?
In April 2024, the Italian parliament passed a measure allowing anti-abortion activists to enter abortion consultation clinics.
These activists I'm sure wouldn't judge. No way. Would they?
It is even more interesting: we cannot be certain that other people have the subjective experience like we imagine it to be like. It seems to me that the rest of author's arguments implicitly assume that we can be certain about other people's subjective experiences, but if you take this assumption away the arguments can't explain why digital consciousness hypothesis is any different from the hypothesis that the Universe contains at least one person besides me.
I mean I see no point in proving that LLM is not conscious if your methods do not enable us to prove that there are at least two people who is conscious.
This research is science, you've said it is waste of money,... well, I see now, that it is not the same as "science is waste of money", you argue that this particular research project is a waste of money?
But my objections still stand: the research allow us to get new data, and it is pretty interesting data. There is a lot of talk of going hypersonic for various reasons, and there are issues that no one knows how exactly things break up when burning at hypersonic speeds. So there is a gap in our knowledge and this "plasma tunnel" can help to fill it. Why do you think it is a waste of money?
> It is the same daft shit as trying to colonise Mars.
I don't see any similarities. To colonize Mars is a practical endeavor, and if we wanted to justify it we would refer to some practical benefits we could reap from colonizing. The research of how things burn in atmosphere is a theoretical research, the goal is to gain new knowledge. To argue that it is a waste of money, we need to show that there is no new knowledge to look for.
Money spent on science is not a waste of money, even if science come with a negative answer. If you want to find ways to slash wasteful spending, I'd urge you to look at wars: these are really eat a lot of money and give nothing back.
I'm not going to explain my full understanding of this piece of wisdom, it would be a wall of text, I want just mention that this behavior is addictive: it is much easier to start justifying your means than to stop it. And over time those justifications become more and more flexible.
I'm ready to agree that there are situations in which ends justify the means, but if you are not aware of downsides in your particular case, and if it doesn't seem controversial to you, you are most likely mistaken and the ends do not justify the means.
I think you can benefit from reading Franz de Waal works. He was a primatologist and he had a similar ideas. Though according to him intelligence was (is) not just a useless "peacock feather", he adds one more block in your feedback loop: hierarchy. Intelligence is used by males to play political games to raise their social status. Social status influences frequency of reproduction for males, so there is a natural (?) selection for political success which depends on good looks, physical fitness and intelligence.
It works for a lot of species but higher primates somehow got enough intelligence to make it dominate good looks and physical fitness and then the positive feedback loop led to evolution of Homo Sapience.
I especially like this theory because it explain why people lose all their pretense to be rational when it comes to politics: human mind is political first. Language, logic, rational discourse are later inventions on top of a political mind. They can work in a neutral environment but when it comes to politics Nature gets the upper hand, and the cultural intellectual sediments of rational thought are wiped instantly, and people's intelligence drops to levels of chimpanzee's: keep alliance with the strongest alpha if you can, rational discourse be damned. One needs a very strong mental discipline to resist it.
> Humans become more intelligent on the scale of mere millenia because more intelligence does improve the judgement of the females.
This idea doesn't explain how intelligence became so important for females. Your idea is like chicken-and-egg problem, you can explain how chickens and eggs let each other to exist, but not where did the first chicked (or egg) come from. And the idea relies on the assumption that female's opinion matters. It matters for some species and doesn't matter for others. It matters in some societies and doesn't matter in others.
> It is well established that evolution is driven not only by fitness in the trivial sense of "survival or death", but in large part by mate selection.
When I read this I thought you'd go about role of sexual dimorphism in evolution and Vigen Geodakyan evolutionary theory of sex[1], but no. Still you may be interested, though I want to note, I don't know if the theory is "scientific" or not. I'm not a biologist to judge, and I didn't have luck to find some kind of a scientific debate about it. Some objections to the theory, but not full-blown attempts to dismantle it. And I think the theory is not politically correct: it implies that roles of males and females in evolution are different. It is not bad per se, but you know how (most of) people think (with their political mind borrowed from chimpanzee): if roles are different in evolution, then you can argue for a society change that would mirror it and would give you some privileges and raise your social status against some others, and then you would get new kind of Nazis trying to genocide half the population of Homo Sapience.
If you treat evidence as in the law of excluded middle, then yes. But if you are ready for a probabilistic evidence, then the article is a piece of evidence.
It chains Fermi Paradox, and our lack of knowledge how to do metallurgy in space. They both combined raise probability of impossibility of Von Neumann probes. It is not a proof that rules out Von Neumann probes, but it raises doubts about them.
Technically, it is just a text editor. It was created to be a text editor, so you are right, but up to a point.
Emacs is written in lisp, what it means? It means that the only part of emacs written in C is a lisp machine. And even not the whole lisp machine is written in C: there is a rudimentary read-eval-print loop (REPL), and maybe a bytecode interpreted. This REPL I believe is just to boot up purposes and is replaced with proper lisp implementation on later boot up stages. It is not lisp added to a text editor, it is a text editor added to lisp. It means, in particular, you can add to that lisp not just text editor but anything else too, like mspaint for example.
And people do just that. They write software in emacs. In particular they wrote IDE in emacs, so while emacs by itself is not an IDE, you can turn it into one.
> some general purpose automation harness
Oh, it is. It is more general than any other automation harness you know. It is a lisp machine, you can automate anything in it. Well, technically you can, in practice it can take take too much time to be practical. In practice when choosing automation harness, you'd prefer not the most general, but the most specific harness for your task.