HN user
Or bath. Douglas Adams endorsed baths for such purposes!
I'm just glad PG is writing them. I don't mind if they're not always in his sphere. That's the point of essays: to try to sort out our thinking in new areas (from the French word essayer).
Imagine going through life with a high-tech spam filter from the future that can filter out wikihow and boring science.
Happily it's available now and it's called intuition. If something is boring then avoid; if something is exciting then pursue.
Problems being that it's purely anecdotal and you have to know and trust yourself. If you're too attracted to prestige, money or job security then it's going to return a distorted signal. Which is why organised science is now bureaucratic and slow despite the fact that there are more scientists than ever before.
Very true. From those classic movies I've watched frequently my brain has gleaned a collection of images, phrases and situations which readily pop into mind. They're not all fully-fledged parables: they're mostly quick analogies which help me to grasp and sometimes to communicate what's going on in the real world.
The main thing is, "so-and-so proved that" or "he showed that" or "they demonstrated scientifically that" refer to processes that can't convey certainty. Even in mathematics there's no certainty because mathematicians are fallible and someone may eventually find a flaw in a proof.
Yes, and isn't this cause for some optimism since many people have now received vaccines such as Prevnar-13 and Pneumovax-23?
Outsider's uninformed opinion: if you attend AA then regardless of any official narrative or agenda this means you're spending important time with people who (a) used to drink, and (b) don't drink any more. Their example plus hearing what they've got to say seems like an excellent approach.
Coming soon, AI prediction of what untelephonic voices would have sounded like! Starting with a detelephonised One Night in Bangkok.
Thanks. It's possible to unconsciously interact with objects. My guess is that conscious perception requires both representations of oneself and the object, together with associated memories. e.g. a green ball has an associations with 'grass' and 'apple' among many other things.
We can imagine and create new things but their attributes are always recombinations of the attributes of old things we already know about.
you would need some state in order to build such an inner world
This feels a bit like essentialism to me. As far as I'm concerned I just am that inner world. It is built from my memories and experiences.
It is true that the inner world is in a particular state at any given time. But it's not made out of some kind of 'state-iness' stuff, any more than a brick is built out of 'brickiness'. Please correct me here if I'm wrong.
is there simply a feeling of existence?
I don't think there's a feeling of existence per se. However one does with experience become aware of subtle sensations from the body at rest, for example noise in the optical system (static or 'snow'). One can then dream or imagine or think about these things too.
Well the reason I think it is that you can't just be conscious: you have to be conscious of something.
No, unless the software included a representation of the computer itself. Then it might be capable of consciousness, IDK. But being so capable it would then be a person rather than just an app.
You're quite right. That last sentence was intended to be a catchy and rhetorical summary.
You have to learn to see stuff, or recognise sounds, for example.
Well I suspect a memory system, together with stable input/output hardware, are necessary but not sufficient. To be a conscious agent, said agent's memory must include a representation of itself. Otherwise it can't truthfully say, "I see a pebble."
Edit: it can't truthfully think, "I see a pebble."
My argument against panpsychism (the principled form of animism, which is ancient) is that to perceive something you have to have a representation of it in memory. Ergo if you don't have a memory system you can't be conscious of anything. Rocks don't have RAM.
What is it in us that longs to do that?
It is animism, the belief that everything is alive, active and imbued with spirit and it is very natural. It arises because we perceive things only indirectly, via our mental representations of them. We (our minds) live in an inner, virtual, world. It matches the outer world only partially. The match is limited by matters such as how rational we are, how much we know, how much our culture knows, what our misconceptions and mistakes are, and so on. All very much in line with Karl Popper's epistemology.
Our mental representations are alive in the sense that they are labile and interconnected in all sorts of ways that make up our worldview. Creative geniuses don't consider their tools dispassionately. They literally relate to them, e.g. a certain equation might be like an old friend.
The problem for the animists is that just because things (trees, rocks, equations) are connected in our minds does not imply they are connected in the real, external universe. There aren't spirits 'out there'. If there is a spirit, it's 'in here' working behind the scene. It's the operation of our own brain. So primitive cultures had a very limited knowledge of how the outer physical world worked outside of necessary activities such as hunting. Scientific knowledge came later.
Materialists, on the other hand, i.e. most of us nowadays, assume that they perceive external physical reality directly. They forget they had to spend months just learning to see things when they were babies. (Or that this process was more about sorting out what was what than about building a telescope.) They assume that objects are are unconnected, like atoms in a void. This is of course true on the wider physical level but merely self-fulfilling in the inner world. Thus their mental representations of things (not us) remain relatively dormant. They never hear the 'wind in the willows' and never realise their full creative power.
Why is it not full AGI? Seems to me that the ability to perform 'spontaneous yet coherent storytelling' perforce makes one a universal explainer (i.e. a person).
House rules that obviate this to some extent (e.g. 'free parking') seem a bit like a debt jubilee.
This clip from his first Connections series is a favourite of mine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPcZ_5uCldg
Near the end it provides an answer to OP's question 'What's the most important modern simple invention?' although whether this in fact would be Burke's answer, I don't know.
Most thoughtful people seem to agree that school is bad for creativity and that real learning is led by curiosity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
But we still have little idea how curiosity works exactly or how an institution could be turned from an exam factory into something a bit closer to a child's bedroom and computer at home, i.e. to a place of play.
For most of life we need permission to play. Parents allocate 'screen time'. At university one is effectively granted permission to do 'curiosity-led' research by an external grant agency.
So what does institutionalised play look like? Perhaps something like a university. Yet how much could university life be said to be 'following the fun'?
Communities used to be small with the members mutually dependent upon one another, e.g. a medieval village. Everyone knew everyone else and the arrangement had to work. If it didn't work then people suffered and could be seen to suffer.
So it's perhaps not so surprising that large 'communities' which are full of strangers and where membership is optional are subject to very different problems.
Well, that's OK, provided we're honest about what it is, e.g. we don't use media to create the illusion of a majority consensus where none exists.
But to begin with he was somewhat aloof from his father and brothers and he decided to kill that police captain. As I recall.
It's hard to think about these potential calamities. Any given pandemic is unlikely to be on the scale of 1918. But the next big one will come, eventually. Any given asteroid strike is unlikely to be on the scale of a Yucatan. But the next big one will come, eventually. And the fact that there were so many small pandemics, impacts and so on will be used as evidence by Naysayers that there's nothing to worry about. And Doomsayers will continue to classify each potential calamity as uniquely dangerous in order to gain leverage.
Yeah he tried to get out and he couldn't. Perhaps the secret is not to get sucked in in the first place.
Good point. Although I think it tends to be a consensus among an influential minority of the populace rather than society as a whole.
I started near the end and thought that Columbo had been shot by the mafia. As in Lieutenant Columbo. The horror!
More seriously, though, they're great movies and I enjoyed them.
Can't help feeling though that some people come away with the wrong message: they think that mafia morality is how the world really works and so they must now embrace it.
Instead of noticing that Michael Corleone was trying to escape from it all and create a different life for his children. A life without the threats and violence.
(And then I think, hmm, perhaps mafia morality is still alive and well. It's merely that instead of being assassinated people are being deplatformed, disemployed, etc.)
I'm not sure what the author is really proposing that AI practitioners should do.
If he wants us to work for our moral betterment ('Nobody does AI for our moral betterment') he's asking us become like old-fashioned saints or modern-day activists. But they are not problem-solvers per se. They act like they already have the solutions to our problems.
The irony is that, whatever the intentions of its creators, AGI probably will lead to our moral betterment by giving us a clearer understanding of what it means to be human.
On the other hand, philosophers agree
That's hilarious. I've never noticed philosophers agreeing about anything.
One thing I would question is the necessity of having viewpoints at all about things which aren't connected to some problem in my life. I don't need to take a position about whether triangles are better than octagons, for instance, unless I'm trying to build something out of octagons. Sometimes opinions are necessary, e.g. a physician must make a diagnosis, but on the whole progress depends upon solving problems and not upon debating them. Furthermore, the best way to persuade others you have solved a problem is to ignore them and use your solution to make further progress.
Environmentalists are divided over nuclear power, with some maintaining it is dangerous and expensive, while others say that to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 all technologies are needed.
Yes, a mix of technologies. But there's more to it than that. We're going to need increasing amounts of power in the future to explore the solar system and to solve all kinds of existential problems. Energy usage is not inherently evil provided we learn how to do it safely, which is an ongoing process.
You're right, it isn't a trivial matter. However, neither has it been well explained. For example, how exactly has porn been ruled out? Porn also grew steadily since mid 20th C...
Yes, BPA accumulates in body fat. However, the environment has also been flooded with pornography which could also be responsible for the decline in testosterone/sperm counts, no?