telmo

> What makes you think there really is a whole single consciousness?

My direct experience of it.

> Crude insult.

Kudos if that was a deliberate joke.

Yes, but the typical CEO/COO does not have to worry about their family becoming homeless if they lose their job. Let us not be disingenuous about the stakes here.

We can do that, but it will just happen in your mind.

Everything just happens in your mind. Anything else is metaphysical speculation.

> or won't grow much

I don't understand this idea that everything has to grow. Who cares if it grows or not, as long as the people who use it enjoy it?

> black hat SEO crap

Pretty redundant if you ask me: black hat, SEO and crap.

I have a first person experience of the world. You probably do too. Everything that I know, including all of the science I have learned, all of the books I have read, all the music I have listed too, all of the people I loved and even this post that you wrote and me replying to it exist for me purely within my first person experience of reality.

My subjective experience of reality is the only thing I have direct knowledge of. Everything else I must doubt. If you think about it, I am sure you will come to the same conclusion.

My paycheck says that I am a scientific researcher, and I have a deep appreciation for science. It provides me with models that go all the way from the subatomic world to societies, that expose regularities in reality, that allow me to understand how many things fit together, and to make predictions. But these are the things that are "just words" or, better yet, symbols. My conscious experience is the thing that I DO KNOW. Maybe it's all a dream. Maybe I'm a brain in a jar. Maybe I was created one nanosecond ago, and I am just a random fluctuation in some process and all of my memories are part of that.

And yet, and yet, the most fundamental phenomena of them all, the thing that I have experience of, is not predicted by any of the scientific models. There is no reason why a bunch of atoms should "become conscious" once their interactions are complex enough. There is no way to build a scientific instrument that measures consciousness. Sure, you can build a scientific instrument that detects brain states that we assume to be correlated with consciousness, but this is just crude analogy. Firstly we can never be sure, and secondly we don't know where the boundaries of the phenomenon are. Is a star conscious? Is the universe? Are the individual cells in your body? How do you know? How could you tell?

That is the mystery. I find that the people who deny the mystery have something equivalent to a religious belief, and that they are not necessarily aware of it . Believing that matter -> ??? -> consciousness is not so different from believing in creationism. A comforting story that makes reality seem intelligible, but that has no basis other than one's wishful thinking and group think. It certainly has nothing to do with science or rationality, at least so far.

Indeed!

Sure, but the hard part is explaining the first person experience of feeling the need to pee or, in other words, consciousness.

I don't know if a glass of water is conscious or not, nor can I come up with a scientific experience to test such an hypothesis, so I remain agnostic on that question. In fact, I cannot even come up with a scientific experience to test if other people are conscious. I just bet they are, because they are similar to me and I know I am.

My point is simply that "feeling" already assumes consciousness. Maybe everything is conscious. Still, saying "it's just a feeling" explains nothing. Most people assume that glasses of water are not conscious, so I just used that example to illustrate my point. But you make a valid remark.

This is a common attempt to rationalize away the hard problem of consciousness that I find to be an almost textbook example of "begging the question". What is a feeling? Well, it's a type of experience. Does a glass of water have experiences? Probably not, because experiences are phenomena that are relative to conscious entities. Saying that X has experiences or that X is conscious are, in my view, equivalent claims.

Saying that "consciousness is just a feeling" is equivalent to saying that "consciousness is just consciousness". It may sound like and explanation, but it is just a tautology.

It doesn't (source: I'm Portuguese). It is just an often repeated cliché. What I would say is that Portuguese culture has a stronger preference for expressions of nostalgia than the average.

I know of almost no human-like brain inspiration in current AI models. Current ANNs are similar to biological brains, but only in the sense that they can be understood as networks of threshold units. One can also understand most modern ANN models purely in terms of linear algebra. They are super-abstract, super-generic models of computation, and biological brains happen to fit this category (at a very high level of simplification and abstraction).

Then, gradient descent is a centralized and supervised learning algorithm that has nothing to do with all the decentralized and emergent processes that take place in biological brains. For example, consider all the complex interactions of the various neurotransmitters and neuroreceptors.

Biological brains (let alone human) are actual physical realizations of networks with very complex and specific topologies. New connections grow and are formed in a very real sense, and this process interacts with the environment in a variety of ways, plus it is spatially embedded.

> We’re talking about a social rule here, not a legal one.

Legal rules don't exist in a void, they usually originate from social norms. Of course, social norms evolve, and so do laws.

> Is your family or community entitled to tell you you’re raising your children wrong,

Entitled? Of course not.

> and must you graciously accept that criticism?

Must? No. It is wise of me to consider the criticism of those that earned my respect, as well as it is wise of those whose respect I earned to consider mine. But again, respect is earned. My parents were very nice to me and deserve all of my respect, but unfortunately I have witnessed many situations were parents do not deserve the respect of their children. It's not an automatic status that comes from procreating.

> In almost the entire world, including much of Eastern Europe, the answer is “yes.”

Also in my own culture (Southern Europe) until not so long ago. I know of cases of children being driven to suicide because of such norms. No thanks, I prefer the new norms here.

> That is the better answer.

That is your opinion, but if you care to provide an actual argument I am willing to listen.

> The places where that answer is not true are not only a minority, but are declining in cultural significance. (Arguably, the dead-end detour into a highly individualistic culture is partly responsible for that decline.)

You seem to be obsessed with the collapse of western culture. I'm not sure what this even means. We are all confronting a global existential crisis (climate change), perhaps time to let go of these petty conflicts?

> It’s a minority view that is of little relevance today

It's the majority view where I live (European Union) and it is also the law here, and there is little reason to think that this will change in the foreseeable future, so pretty relevant to me, I would say.

> and which will become even less relevant as Asians, Africans, Chinese, Latin Americans, and Indians rise to cultural and economic dominance.

Why does there have to be "dominance"? Can't we all just get along and respect each other? Including our children?

Sure, and that is besides the point. Liberal western democracies are not perfect, but they get a few things right and this is one of them.

I believe that children are not cattle, and I would keep believing that even if 100% of everyone else thought otherwise.

> Families aren’t just federations of sovereign individuals. Kids are community property.

Kids are nobody's property, and parent absolutely have the right to ignore the rest of the family as long as they observe the laws of the land.

For a lot of people, free software is about collaboration, not competition.

This is brilliant. I particularly like Zeus.

Yes, it all comes from the Latin "fenestram".

> What the license says and what image the project presents can be very different. Pointing to the license and reasoning that nobody has legally promised anything contractually is not very useful.

It is quite useful, because the license is the legal document that comes included with the software, and that specifies what things you agree to if you use the software. And it explicitly specifies that you cannot assume any contractual obligations from the "image the project presents", or anything of the sort.

> That’s a very mercenary view of the world. What about volunteer charity workers? Is it OK for them to just not show up whenever, just because they aren’t paid?

I would say that if someone promises to do some charity work and doesn't show up without a good reason is breaking a promise, and is thus being a shitty person. People should keep to their word. Open source authors promised us nothing and owe us nothing. More often than not, we owe them.

> If you offer code to the public – and present it as an active, dependable project – professional behavior is exactly what you implicitly promise and signed up for. If you can’t offer that (at any time, and for any reason), then you should immediately make that clear, front-and-center, to any current and future users.

As far as I can tell, this project was released under the Apache License 2.0.

https://github.com/actix/examples/blob/master/LICENSE

Clause 7 of said license says the following:

"7. Disclaimer of Warranty. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, Licensor provides the Work (and each Contributor provides its Contributions) on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied, including, without limitation, any warranties or conditions of TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY, or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. You are solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using or redistributing the Work and assume any risks associated with Your exercise of permissions under this License."

Other popular free software licenses (namely the GLP) have very similar clauses.

> It isn’t “entitlement” on part of the users – the users are making reasonable expectations based on promises implicitly made by the the project as it is presented.

Expecting labour from someone without paying them is the very definition of entitlement.

> Biology seems much more brute force in comparison.

Biology is more decentralized for sure, but I wouldn't be so fast with calling it "brute force". One interesting feature of biological neural networks is the variety of neurotransmitters. In very simple terms, they are not only capable of exciting or inhibiting neurons from firing, but they are also capable of regulating how neurons adapt to the stimulae they have been exposed to. In other words, the biological network not only learns, but it runs the learning algorithm itself. It appears to do this by creating various layers of communication with different effects on the computing nodes.

In my view, we have not been smart enough yet to figure out nature's algorithm.