mikk14

Companies can buy the monopoly of violence from governments and kill you if you're inconvenient to them.

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

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I would say that both A and B would claim to be X and have the "continuous"[1] experience to be X while agreeing that they are distinct persons. I think that the question of whether A or B, both, or neither is the true X, is not a scientific question, and as a philosophical question, a fairly empty one.

I agree that it is not a scientific question, but as with virtually all ethical questions not being scientific doesn't mean it's empty. They are, in fact, very fundamental. This specific question might be empty now, but it won't be when people start messing up with brains (e.g. advancements in Neuralink).

In the hypothetical scenario, it is the most important question in the whole world from X's perspective because it involves, you know, them dying. X cannot be either of A or B, because they are indistinguishable (any argument proving A=X also holds for B=X, but A!=B so they are wrong). Saying that X is both A and B requires dualism (A's and B's experiences somehow get beamed to a third consciousness). Only X's death and A and B independence (with the same memories) is compatible with a position that doesn't involve contradictions or souls of some kind.

Regarding the challenge, I would expect that the consciousness would be forked: there is a "me" that would awake inside the machine and would be very glad to be alive, while the "me" outside would experience dying. This seems to go against the exclusiveness of the experience of being themselves, but assuming the existence of the magically perfect duplication, both would be valid experiences and again neither could make a claim about being the real me. I don't find this to be a contradiction.

Do you not find a contradiction in saying that you cannot make the claim of being the real you just because your brain was copied? Suppose that this copy happens without you falling asleep and without you noticing: have you stopped being you?

But all of these scenarios have been explored extensively. Are you familiar with the Egan's "Permutation City"?

I read it a while ago. From what I remember, it is based on Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis, which I find being hopelessly confused about the nature of reality. Doesn't the novel assume the consequent (it starts from the assumption that you can do this kind of manipulation with consciousness)? I had similar issues with Accelerando.

[1] what does "continuous" even mean? Do one have a "continuous" experience of being yourself after a night's sleep? After anesthesia? After a coma?

Sleep and anesthesia? Of course: your brain is still active even if it is not recording memories. Coma it depends: unless you're brain dead, still yes.

Ok, but then I fear you're either contradicting yourself, or addressing a point I didn't make.

Let me restate:

1. energy123 says that, if we completely annihilate the body of X and then we re-assemble it one planck time later, X is still the exact same self after the annihilation as they were before.

2. I reply: a monist must hold the position that X died with the annihilation and the recomposed being is a different self, Y, which just so happens to have the same memories as X. If you insist that the new being is still the same self X, you must assume that something that was not in the body survived the complete annihilation of the body and was put back in the body during the re-assembly.

3. You attempted to say that that something was the information needed to recompose the body. But now you're saying that actually we have produced two entirely different beings, A and B, both of whom believe to be X.

I 100% agree with you that this is what happened. But you cannot tell me in the same breath that X is still alive. That is a contradiction.

The ultimate challenge is always the same: assuming the technology to perfectly copy and simulate a brain exists, would you upload your mind and do you expect that it is you that awake inside the machine? If you answer "yes" you must concede you are a dualist. A monist can only answer "no". And, as I gather from this discussion, a functionalist would (i) answer "yes" after redefining what "you" means, (ii) mean "no" because as you just admitted we created two new beings, (iii) upload themselves and then die happy knowing that something else with their memories will live on.

(I realize you actually have not explicitly objected to this specific challenge yet, so maybe we fully agree and that's that)

If this actually happened, would the 'I' that replaced you be any wiser. How do you know this hasn't happened to you already? Maybe multiple times per second?

If this is true, that the body dies every planck time and the mind survives it, then it simply means the dualist position is true.

The information of how to put your body and mind back must have survived somewhere, in the alien mind for example or the machine they used. But the information would still be in (a medium in) this universe and bound to this universe physical laws. I would say this is still a monist position.

I'm sorry, but you're circling back to the first message I wrote. You are giving to information magical properties that it cannot have, because they lead to a contradiction. With the same information you can make multiple copies of me at the same time. But if you make two, the experiences of one do not get magically transmitted to the brain of the other. So those are two distinct selves, even if they are made with the exact same information. This clearly does not work. It's the same issue of mind uploading that I initially argued about.

if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.

If you have a son and you kill him, you haven't destroyed the concept of a son. You can always make a new son. If the son had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.

Is that the same son? Do you not go to prison for murder?

Sorry, perhaps I just don't know what "monism" truly means, I admit my ignorance, but if we just limit ourselves to the mind-body problem, I just meant that a dualist position considers the mind as separate from the body, and monism rejects that.

The functionalist point of view you propose doesn't seem to be to be useful at all in this context. Let's backtrack. The original example I provided you when you asked about whether there can be somebody proposing monism and at the same time holding dualist positions was asking:

"If I do mind uploading, do I die?"

You can be creative in redefining what the word "I" means, which is what you engaged with, but when push comes to shove and I do the actual mind uploading, then the self that experienced my qualia since birth will irreparably stop experiencing qualia (aka: dying) and be replaced by another self. You're free to call that self as if it was me, and be all happy it can do the same things I could do, but that's not gonna change the fact that my previous self (the only "I" that matters to me) died.

Would you step in the Star Trek teleporter knowing that you will die, and think you haven't died just because you have been replaced by a different being that is functionally equivalent to you? I sure as hell will never do it.

Just because the brain doesn't form memories while you sleep, doesn't mean you have ceased to exist. You have probably forgot many things that have happened to you today: does that mean you didn't exist in those moments you forgot? Am I misunderstanding your point?

What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?

Apologies, I read too quickly and skipped over this. See one of my sibling comments. I concede this is problematic for my position and I need to think harder on how to solve it, but I don't think it's unsolvable. The placeholder answer is that there must be a certain level of damage -- the precise % probably doesn't matter as much as exactly which parts you destroy -- that is incompatible with keeping continuity.

For the rest, as a social construct, if we incinerate me to create a clone of me that is identical to the original at the subatomic level I agree that, for everyone else in society, it is me. But my self has still died and whatever replaced it is having its own experiences. And it matters very little what everybody else thinks: if tomorrow an imposter convinces everybody else that they are me, they aren't me for me. Their experiences aren't magically beamed to my brain.

Your tennis ball example is again a textbook dualist position. You can have a tennis match with different balls which is functionally identical to have it with the same ball, because the ball in the game is an abstraction that lives _outside_ the ball itself. But, assuming balls can feel when they are hit by the racket, the ball you used in the previous point and now is lying on the sideline does not feel being hit when the next point starts with another ball.

None of these scenarios would result in "me" from a monist perspective. The destruction is a discontinuity point, I died there and then, and then the next planck moment a new being was created with all my memories. But "I" died.

The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist. It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled. If "it" survived the complete physical destruction of the body, it must be somewhere else, detached from the body.

And, you know, there's really nothing wrong being dualist. I do not mean to denigrate that specific worldview. What is problematic is claiming to be a staunch monist while holding dualist positions.

I admit that this is a troubling problem with the position that I stated, but I don't think it's a complete takedown.

The easiest rebuttal would be to simply say that continuity is not a mere implementation detail. If you give up continuity, you can make a copy without altering the original, you just have to read it.

But if you need to ensure continuity you have to alter the original. This seems to me a very fundamental part of the process, making it qualitatively different.

A true monist would realize that any experience of the uploaded being that received a copy of the brain is not felt by the original brain that has been copied. This is a fact and it is elementary to see it as true, as well as supporting the view that the copy is not the same being at all. If your description of computation functionalists is accurate, then they simply are dualists and would do good in admitting this to themselves.

Invoking the Ship of Theseus is a distraction. The Ship of Theseus paradox does not involve a full copy at the atomic level while the original still stands. If it did, the paradox would not even exists. The paradox exists because there is the key element that you do not have in mind copying/uploading: _continuity_.

I don't know if this is discussed by actual serious philosophers, but consider the issue of "mind uploading." I have seen very staunch monists seriously discussing that, if you were to produce a complete digital copy of your brain -- copying any possible information to the most minute synapse -- then you effectively "uploaded" yourself into a computer and can live a digital life.

These people believe this while at the same time considering dualism so ridiculous as to laugh dualists out of the room. The evident problem being that "mind uploading" is the most dualistic possible position to take. A real monist would easily see that by doing mind uploading you have just created a clone that is a whole separate entity from yourself and it is not yourself.

You do realize that the literal first factor that is used to calculate that index is GDP per capita, right? And that life expectancy (another factor) correlates with the GDP of the country?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#Interna...

Not a Bond one, but there's already a movie about it: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1879016/

This and the other top comments are right that sharing an artist is only the crudest (and very noisy) way to estimate actual influence. I suppose one way to improve it would be to actually looking at the songs themselves, which might be possible with some deep learning? But that would require to actually have all the songs, which might not be feasible.

Thank you for the kind words! I'll take a look at your post. And feel free to get in touch in case you'd like to collaborate on this.

All correct, it was also one point raised by the reviewers. They had some suggestions about temporal centrality, but in the end I didn't followup on that because this centrality analysis was just a descriptive part that didn't really support any of the primary nor secondary claims in the paper.

Hey Mali! Thank you so much! Do you want to do the network of Turkish music? :-)

Actually yes! It's on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/13309793

It contains both the original artist-band bipartite network, and the actual projections used in the paper (and blog post).

The page on my website (https://www.michelecoscia.com/?page_id=2336) is slightly better because it also contains the code to make the projections yourself (and to verify the claims in the paper).

If you look at it, I'm sure you'll find equally plenty of people rolling their eyes at film critics for "making that up".

But I broadly share the sentiment of your message, and I personally blame some sort of variation of Goodhart's law. School curricula take an unquestionably good thing ("the critical search of meaning is an important skill to have") and have to pigeonhole it into something standardized and quantifiable (otherwise, how can you stitch a grade number to it? The horror!). The result is this desolate widespread contempt for everything that is not a literal interpretation.

Is it so hard to accept the fact that an author might not be completely 100% conscious of all the things influencing them when creating a work of art? That some choices they made because they just felt right in the moment come from somewhere else? And that someone else can see this happening from an external perspective and propose that way of reading the text that the author didn't think about?

At the same time, is it monstrous to put forward the option that you, as an audience member, are not a passive brainless drone, but you are collaborating in creating the meaning of what you experience? That your inner life and meaning and interpretation stemming from being exposed to art are actually interesting and worth talking about?

Why do we have to live in a world where we assume words written on a page or colors dripped on a canvas have a single truly objective interpretation? Why do we have to beat with a stick on the head of someone telling them "no, you're enjoying this work in the wrong way because the author said so"?

If you click on the number it will expand showing you the other recipes from that area that could not be fit in the maximum zoom level.

I'd give it a shot to make node embeddings with Node2Vec [1] and then reduce them to 2D with UMAP [2]. I think it could help breaking apart the hairball, assuming you have a nice clustered structure.

[1] https://pytorch-geometric.readthedocs.io/en/latest/generated... [2] https://umap-learn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Granted that I'm not a physicist and I may be wrong about this, but I don't think what you say is correct. This is not a matter of interpretation. In no interpretation changing the spin of an entangled particle will change the spin of the other at a distance.

I have visited it in the Easter week, with my 4 year old. It's nice, but I experienced a major disappointment when visiting the immersive experience about the quantum world: they explain quantum entanglement in the wrong way!

The voice-over _clearly_ says: "when two particles are entangled _they can influence each other_ no matter the distance", which is super wrong. If you have two spin entangled particles and you change the spin of one, the spin of the other does not change, there is no influence, only correlation.

Maybe they intended something about the wave function collapse, but they didn't say it. If even explanations coming from CERN get this wrong, I despair for the status of science communication in general...

I don't know if this is exactly what you are thinking about, but there are some physicists working to understand what happens in transformers: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2023/file/b...

Some people would disagree with dismissing information as non physical. For instance: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=3327 The argument there would be that stuffing an extra bit of information in an information saturated volume would make it collapse into a black hole.

Not OP, but in a similar situation. I'm 39, the last time a dentist looked in my mouth I was probably 16 or so* and I brush only once a day (after breakfast, which is the least effective over doing it before going to sleep). Never had a cavity. I don't think I have halitosis, at least the people I have kissed over the years never complained to me.

Being Italian, I eat pasta literally every day, and my daily breakfast is chocolate chip cookies.

My impression is that mouth health is 100% genetics and biome lottery.

* I have extreme mistrust in their profession, due to bad experiences. When I was a kid, I injured a milk tooth which turned black. The dentist shrugged and said that it would fall normally. It didn't and it fucked up all permanent teeth that sprouted in random directions in the area. Every single dentist surveyed to fix the problem requested gigantic payments (to the tune of tens thousands of dollars, this was in the 90s in Italy, so adjust for inflation and cost of living to know how crazy this was) without providing any result guarantees, so I kept my crooked teeth. It doesn't help dentistry in Italy is that profession where you mainly do tax evasion, and occasionally look into people mouths to pass the time.

I haven't tried it unfortunately, and I don't really have data to make an educated guess. I have played a little bit with some training and it seemed a bit slow, but the environment for testing is not really representative of the speed for submitted jobs -- even my inference in the testing environment was pretty slow, but once submitted the runtimes were very different.

Funnily enough I literally just today launched a big job on LUMI that I have started also on another smaller cluster with nVidia GPUs. Basically, I'm running Llama2-70B to do some zero-shot text classification. The nVidia setup uses 4 A100s, while on LUMI I could access 6 MI250Xs.

It is, unfortunately, not an apples-to-apples comparison, because on the nVidia cluster I'm running it via llama-cpp-python and a quantized 34B version, while on LUMI I'm running the official non-quantized full 70B version via the transformers library.

Long story short, I'm getting a 7.5x higher throughput from LUMI than on the nVidia cluster (which means each card is 5x faster on LUMI).

Edit: The AMD GPUs work fine because one can run Pytorch for ROCm via the pytorch-triton-rocm package.