RobertRies

The question is flawed.

People who do not pay for ChatGPT often have money and prefer not to pay for for a subscription for several reasons including, but not exclusively: 1) They don't use ChatGPT often enough to justify it 2) They use alternatives primarily (a subset of #1) 3) They choose to spend their money on other things

Plot twist, the AI in the article was Amazon Mechanical Turk with a highly sensitive man falling in love.

Erm, I have embarked on this, and I have absolutely not arrived back to panpsychism.

My conclusion is that panpsychism is god of the gaps for consciousness right now.

I genuinely think emergent property of sophisticated brain is much closer to the correct explanation than panpsychism in terms of usefulness, predictive power, etc., and likelihood of getting closer to a satisfying answer. On the other hand, I'm not prepared to defend every aspect of that hypothesis. I am, however, prepared to criticize panpsychism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain

But also, see the rest of my comment. The onus is not on me to arrive with a better explanation just because there's a bad explanation on the table.

If I come home and find a cookie on my counter, and someone said "I think that a space alien teleported the cookie there" and I said "I think that's unlikely to be the correct explanation." And then that person asked "Well, what's a better explanation?" and I said "Maybe someone broke into my apartment, felt guilty, and left a cookie there." and then grilled me on that counter-explanation.

While I don't like the radio analogy, I think we largely agree then.

If interested, the reason I don't like the radio analogy is that it presupposes that the configuration of the brain, and inputs isn't fundamentally the constituents of consciousness.

On the flip side, to fix the analogy: if I cut off the antenna of a radio, I would argue it ceases to become a radio by any reasonable definition (assuming we're talking about a device that receives radio waves and plays them back in the form of sound). You just have something that's very close to a radio. It has nothing to do with whether radio waves exist or don't.

As long as you agree that it's conceivable that there's experimentation (brute force or otherwise), then I think we're on the same page.

Emergent property of a sophisticated brain (with it's own weaknesses).

But even if I didn't have a more compelling explanation, that doesn't mean I can't be highly critical of, or reach a conclusion that panpsychicism is highly unlikely to be approaching a good explanation.

Okay well that's silly and I've not met even one panpsychist who believes this "comparable to human conscious experience" portion

You, yourself, and Philip Goff and others talk about how "we might want to treat trees differently" suggesting (correct me if I'm misunderstanding you) that cutting a tree might "hurt" the tree, or cause "pain" to the tree, which is exactly what I mean by "comparable to human conscious experience."

This isn't true. You can literally cut a brain in half and you appear to get two separate consciousnesses in one skull.

What you're saying doesn't address what I'm saying. I did not say that, exhaustively, all changes to the brain disrupt everything. Rather, I will clarify that there exist a subset of extremely small disruptions you can make to the brain that "turn the lights off" of consciousness in humans. Among them are a fairly tiny dose of anesthetic, or not breathing for about 5 minutes.

Sure... so why are you spending so much breath attacking the obviously weak form of the argument?

Because I'm replying to a comment that suggests we might treat trees differently (if Panpsychicism were true). I would consider a statement like that to be the first category of panpsychist.

... but that doesn't make the endeavor meaningless.

I didn't say the endeavor is meaningless. I'm a strong proponent of prodding anything we can about consciousness, or anything in our universe for that matter. What's "too early for my tastes" is to believe the Panpsychist hypothesis is currently the best explanation.

I don't think we _all_ point at cat's behavior and conclude consciousness. I think its the behaviors you describe plus we see how anatomically similar to humans they are. As someone who believes consciousness is an emergent property of the configuration of matter that makes up our bodies, particularly our brains, it seems plausible that cats have some sort of recognizable version of experience to ours (though I'm very amenable to discovering that actually they don't).

But also jellyfish has goal seeking behavior, and a most of those other characteristics you mention, and my intuition (based on the vastly different neural structure and anatomy), is that they experience probably nothing.

I strongly agree with ergonaught, and disagree with what you're saying.

This tiny interaction I think is the the entire problem with how panpsychists talk about this.

Some panpsychists might try to actually say that there's a potential that trees and rocks have an internal subjective experience that is in some way comparable to human conscious experience (i.e. they feel some kind of "pain," that "hurts" them, and they "suffer". But I contend we have very little reason to believe that, and a lot of reason not to believe that. For example, with very, very little modification to my biology, I can eliminate this experience in myself (painkillers, anesthesia, other drugs, falling into a deep sleep, etc.)

Once you even slightly disrupt the structure of our brains functioning, it all falls apart. We feel nothing.

I think even most panpsychists would not take the above position, and would instead say "oh well, plant consciousness is entirely unrecognizable and might not even have reasonable continuity of consciousnesses. "Pain" wouldn't even make sense to a plant or a rock. We're just saying that the matter that constitutes plants and rocks have a very tiny (relative to humans) kind of "experience" but it's a huge mistake to anthropomorphize that, and you shouldn't feel like you're making grass "suffer" by cutting it.

^and if it's the second case, it's unprovable and uninteresting and "literally meaningless. Irrelevant."

I very much agree with this. It seems to me panpsychists make a redefinition of consciousness as some entirely alien, unrecognizable thing. So, if an atom is conscious, but has no sensory systems, no possibly way to store memory etc. Well the atoms are still "experiencing" something, it's just instantaneously vanishing and there's no continuity and you can't even fathom what the experience of an atom is like per epoch because it's so different from our consciousness.

I think this is a redefinition of consciousness and shifts the problem of explaining when an entity has an experience like we all think about experiences, which was the interesting part in the first place.

"The emerging properties model is not unfeasible, we could test it"

One thing you can do is disrupt the smaller individual components that make up the emergent property, and see if the property continues to exist.

I.e. you can put a motorized egg beater in your brain, and see if you still have the emergent properties of consciousness. My prediction is that the property will suddenly disappear.

Or can cut off blood to the brain for a little while.

The counter-argument will be that the consciousness unrecognizably changes, and once the blood comes back, that configuration of matter generally restores. None of this is convincing to me in any way, and I genuinely desperately want someone (a panpsychist) to explain how I'm thinking about this incorrectly.

My strong personal assessment of this is that panpsychists (in general, if you can pin one down) are not talking about consciousness in a colloquial sense - but I think this is a mistake.

I think the common conceptualization of consciousness is the only definition that is useful, or makes sense. Which is something that can experience things. For many reasons, I don't think these rudimentary behaviors in plants suggest they are capable of experience.

I entirely agree with this, and I likewise think it's quite damning. But panpsychists don't see it this way. This is "the combination problem" and I predict they will never be able to solve this.

Edit: I should elaborate on how it relates. Some would say that the alcohol or foreign substances are disrupting the combination of the consciousness of the matter, disrupting the overall consciously experience that makes up your matter. So, for example, now there's a bunch of little consciousnesses that aren't "combined".

This is compelling and I think many elements of the spirit of this are true. The only thing I would add is that it will be interesting to see if professional, medium/high budget, polished, "produced" content will remain a stable and significant niche that is distinct from user-generated content. And does the high-production-value content directly compete with low-production value user-created content? And what percentage of a user's consumption it will represent in the future? And does the pool of available time for an individual consumer grow to accommodate both? To put it another way, on some level, all content competes for our time, so it's all in competition. On a different level, a Twitch livestream or TikTok feels like an entirely different category of media from a scripted, high-production-value TV series or movie, and I want both in the world.

While traditional publishers may be losing % of daily media consumption - especially in younger age brackets - it's unclear to me where this trend asymptotes. My intuition is that most people will spend some time on "reels" or livestreams (or whatever), some time on blockbuster movies, some on Broadway plays, and some time on scripted produced "TV style" content. Some will expand their denominator of total time to accommodate additional media sources, others will pick one over the other.

It seems there will be a degree of loss of market share as you allude to, but it's unclear how dramatic it will be and where it stabilizes.

One thing is absolutely 100% for sure though in my opinion: media preservation should be deeply prioritized, and this news seems like a blow to that.

I think about it often.

toaster fucker problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362

And maybe they prefer developing in Swift and/or prefer Xcode?

Yes. And also during the Super Bowl festivities in 2016. It oddly wasn't as sensational back then, but made some news.

I think it's pretty fair to make this clarification and I don't fault a company for wanting to squash misinformation about their product. I found it to be a useful comment because I had no sense of the scale of the Tile network, and I did have an intuition that it was much smaller.

I have zero affiliation with Tile and I have never bought any device like this of any sort, but this is useful information to me as someone who has been the target of frequent bicycle theft.

The criticism I will agree with is that it does feel worded a with a bit of a corporate polished tone that does give that vibe. edit: I think it's largely the "supercharge" descriptor.

That sounds oddly terrifying. Like gray goo devouring the world.

The claim is that some day innovations, and checks, and some other technologies will fix this and do all of this automatically, somehow.

That's why it's still early days.

It's not a figure of speech. It's a very deliberate attempt at deeply mischaracterizing the position in an attempt to make it appear absurd. "Oh yeah, that's right, who would ever wake up one day and decide to be homeless? What an idiot who would think that!" That's not how it works. You think you're being funny. You can't keep it together enough here to even genuinely engage. In case anyone else is reading, no, one exposure to Andrew Tate's toxicity is not what causes one to become misogynistic. It's an entire society and repeated exposure to his ideas, and ideas like his that cause it. It is not one exposure to a Tide advertisement that makes somebody sit down and say, "hey I should go buy Tide because of this advertisement!"

Not like feeding them and giving them shelter. Remember, you don't want to give shelter. You, and your ilk, the vocal faction of SF politics, will accept nothing short of housing first.

I obviously believe it is awful to be homeless. You say I straw manned you - tell me, am I wrong? Do you support anything short of housing first?

If, say, the voting public doesn't want to give everyone 1000sqft in the heart of San Francisco, but is in favor of sheltering and forced drug rehabilitation and mental health facilities coupled with enforcing laws. You're telling me that you would not prefer the current state?

My thoughts are your (presumed) preference of status que over a compromise that doesn't cause maximum suffering for all is the worst of all worlds. You're the "Bernie or Bust"er of the unhoused. You're the person who would rather have Trump than Biden, if you can't have Bernie.

"Well, if I can't give everyone a free house in San Francisco, and change the distribution of wealth, I'd rather people suffer and die in the streets (via decriminalizing everything, and being anti-shelter), because then at least the taxpayers will also suffer the consequences of it, and then maybe things will change."

"You honestly, really think all those people just sat down one day and decided to be homesless Because they’d be coddled?!"

Strictly speaking this is simply a straw man via oversimplification (as is nearly the entirety of this post and the others I've seen from bbor in this thread)...

But I've seen this _variety_ of straw man so often that I want to break it out into a specific fallacy on its own.

Not sure what to call it but the "Oh, so you think X decided one day just Y?"

"Oh so you think Elizabeth Holmes just sat down one day and decided _I'm going to scam billions out of investors and risk lives and pretend I made a blood testing machine_"?

"Who sees this advertisement for Tide and just decides _I'm going to buy Tide because I saw this advertisement?"

"Oh so you think I listen to Andrew Tate one day and now suddenly I'm abusing women?"

"Oh, so you think I'm going to do heroin one time and suddenly I'm going to be homeless and addicted?"

No. We're the culmination of dozens, hundreds, thousands of behaviors (with genetic and environmental influences) that create a trend.

So, err, I'll entertain your bad-faith rhetorical question and answer: no, nobody thinks anyone "sat down one day and decided to be homesless [sic] because they'd be coddled." San Francisco (on behalf of the voters, you and I) have created thousands of tiny incentive structures that maximizes the pain people experiencing homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness, while simultaneously maximizing the negative impact to the housed, because you believe everyone who is housed deserves to be the victim of assaults, burglaries and all the other fun because they aren't supporting your policies.

Let me guess: housing-first? Certainly their drug addictions and mental illnesses will instantly vanish with a free house in the most expensive real-estate in the country? Anything short of this, well, they can stay on the street and find comfort in stealing things to fund their heroin/fentanyl self-medication.

Not _shocked_ and/or _appalled_ by people literally dying of overdoses in the streets. Photo-albums strewn in the street when a burglar decided it was worthless and ditched it? A family purely distraught - the father sitting on the curb crying with his family when he discovered their U-haul was looted during their overnight stay at a hotel it was parked in? Stealing a dog from an old man who left it tied up outside a store for a moment. Stealing a ~10 year-old's small pink bicycle in front of unSafeway as the family went in to buy snacks and water for their bike ride, to find it gone when they came out. A man... entertaining himself while glairing intently at children in front of the Union Square McDonalds?

These, and infinitely other unmentionable things (including a myriad of stories that involve myself as the victim, many of them worse than above): absolutely a daily occurrence for me in the TL.

What is your bar for "shocking"? I believe you are blind.

I believe I am seeing the problem here.

You are, presumably unintentionally, using a blanket descriptor "mentally ill" and "drug addicted" to describe an extremely wide spectrum of expressions.

"Serious Mental Illness" definitionally requires substantial interference with or limiting of one or more major life activities (including maintaining a safe house, and maintaining employment).

You are conflating people's common use of the term "mental illness" - yes, we can agree that most people with say, seasonal depression, can hold down a job and maintain a house. This is not what San Francisco's visible homeless "mental illness" is referring to. They are suffering from Serious Mental Illness.

No, we cannot agree that most folks with Serious Mental Illness are able to muster the ability to sleep indoors, definitionally.

Again, "drug addiction." There is an appreciable difference between the character of the drug, and the addiction - aka "Chronic Substance Abuse."

That is, once again, I do not agree that someone with open meth sores on their face is going to hold down any sort of a job and/or be able to muster a safe home environment.

Next, you ask what has changed in the past few years? Then conclude only two things have changed in 10 years - "housing prices and rents."

While there may be a correlation, possibly even a causation, this is still an oversimplification of the problem. There are other cities, even in the US that have seen an increase in housing prices and not the corresponding inhumane treatment of both the housed, and unhoused in SF particularly.

I wonder if anything else has changed in SF in 10 years that makes it uniquely inhumane to the homeless, and also disproportionately affecting the entire character of the city? Could it be policies? Complete lawlessness and availability/encouragement/facilitation of new drugs and drug addiction?

There are at least two obvious problems that are unique to the West Coast, perhaps namely SF, 1) an overall increase in homelessness caused by certainly a multitude of factors that include much more than "rent," such as the bifurcation of particularly the SF labor market and the educational/cognitive barriers to "information technology work" versus the alternatives. That is to say, the problem isn't necessarily inherently that rents went up, the corollary is true that pay didn't go up for those experiencing homeless who were happily housed and paying rent before. Ought they move? Ought we relocate them? Ought we pay, say, fast food workers similar to MAMAA developers? It seems you suggest affordable government project housing? And 2) policy that makes it such that those who do suffer from Serious Mental Illness/Chronic Substance Abuse (by some counts, the majority of those experiencing homelessness) that does everything it possibly can to ensure they maximally suffer, while having the greatest possible negative impact to the bystanders, often other people experiencing homelessness, but also the housed, and business owners. That is to say, SF policies it as absolutely easy as possible to stay addicted, and as difficult as possible to overcome the addiction, while simultaneously pretending severe mental illness is not a thing (i.e. you [paraphrasing for emphasis] "most mentally ill people can maintain a house and a job".)

It seems our conceptualization "homelessness" is corrupted by inadequate, and inconsistent use of nomenclature.

No one is arguing the scam isn't insidious and inherently difficult to detect for possibly even most customers. The argument is that Amazon is complicit because they're banking off those sweet counterfeit thumb drive profits, and that there's little risk to Amazon.

I'm suggesting there is a significant risk, and anyone reasonable at Amazon would account for it. There's enough users (tech savvy, or heavy researchers as you point out, and ultimately some portion of casual customers) who will have a negative experience and potentially be skeptical of all purchases - major or minor. Amazon will certainly incur reputational and real return/handling costs.

It seems fairly implausible to me that Amazon would make the decision to say "Yeah, while tech savvy and discerning customers, and some portion of casual users will discover the scam, we just make so much money from fake thumb drives that it's worth it to destroy our reputation with that subset since a significant portion may not notice or ultimately associate Amazon with selling low quality products." All while we see the listings for these items get removed nearly as quickly as the pop up. Doesn't add up.

While I agree this is a problem - one which I have been the victim of as well - Amazon accepts the return with no questions and/or charges. This, of course, is not a great consolidation, especially for a novice who doesn't understand or encounters it too late. But I strongly disagree with "Amazon runs little to no risk selling the fraudulent products, but still makes money off of them." In the next paragraph the author outlines how they've lost trust in Amazon and will not be buying electronics. Erosion of trust is absolutely a massive risk, and one that eBay is also arguably pretty publicly recovering from. I suspect Amazon would prefer not to have fake drives and the costs associated with returns and erosion of trust for the infinitesimal rounding error that makes up the extra revenue they get from fake $20 thumb drives. I'm far from an Amazon fanboy, but I think the problem is more complex than Amazon turning a blind eye because they're making $10k extra profit a year from phony thumb drives. As an outsider, it seems like a difficult tradeoff of not creating incredible hurdles to list products, versus counterfeits getting through.

In my case, the phony thumb drive I bought was delisted before I got home from the walk to the mailbox, literally.

This was my exact reaction. I have to conclude this is a troll - I still think so based on the wording and such.

My counter-example, however, was a grocery store I worked in in college where the manager wouldn't give the weekend off to one of the hardest-working, friendly shelf-stockers to attend his father's funeral. I was there. It really happened. He quit on the spot. I was right next them in this interaction. It was so enraging I wanted to quit out of moral-support, but I did not.

This sort of interaction is absolutely unfathomable in my current professional environment. Whenever I feel injustice, or underappreciated, I frequently remind myself of those times to appreciate what I have today.

Wait, what misconception? That crypto is good for black market transactions? You assert that it isn't?

Not to mention an important vehicle in enabling NK's nuclear program: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58719884

And all the other crimes that are made much more efficient/difficult to detect.