markburns

I think they are being more factual than fatalistic. You just differ by definition of “use Gmail”.

They are saying you are using Gmail when you communicate with someone on Gmail.

Knowing very little about lean but speculating here: is lean something that could output a few natural language expressions at key points so that you can still have “it should be clear that” for the natural language reader but have it undeniably proven.

Ie entrust the more tedious aspects but be able to follow along and still have references to check if you are curious about thoroughness.

Almost like a tap with a latex renderer at various insertion points?

The majority of what you may consider to be true is just a representation of your corner of a complex multidimensional truth space.

For a current example take “Lake Ontario (Lake America)” as it appears to me on a map.

The “true” name has at least two definitions, this is because naming things and much of human thought is spent inside a shared space of intersubjective thought. That is to say that much of what we believe to be real and true is only held up by these common shared beliefs. They truly only exist inside human minds.

The last few hundred years have been somewhat unique for humankind as the majority of these intersubjective ideas collided and we ended up with a truly global set of “truths” about how the world operates.

Mostly controlled by putting flags in the ground and having violence back up the beliefs.

But the real truth is that the majority of these intersubjective ideas don’t exist in reality and are no more true than Santa Claus.

And any argument to their truth is only backed by further shared beliefs in other minds.

So for there to be only truths and lies we would have to either drop the intersubjective entirely and think only in real terms and avoid these abstractions or end up in a dystopian totalitarian global state where different opinions are not tolerated.

Those are extremes to demonstrate the point but at its core the point remains that truth and lies are somewhat (inter) subjective assuming we continue with something like our current system.

The server sits underneath Shintaro's desk, the guy needs a break once in a while.

> What explains the emergent abilities of generative pre-trained transformers at massive-scale?

I don't see why the abilities couldn't be an encoded modelling of enough of the world to produce those abilities. It seems like a simple enough explanation. Less data, less room to build a model of how things work. More data, sufficient room to build a model.

Conway's Game of Life is then not conscious in and of itself, because there's not enough in its encoded data to result in emergent behaviour beyond what we see.

If we expand it to also include a vast amount of data such as a Turing machine running an LLM then we can reasonably say we are closer to saying that that configuration of it is conscious.

It's not the firing-of-neurons mechanism and its relevant complexity or simplicity that make us conscious or not.

It's not the GoL algorithm that would make the machine conscious either.

It's the emergent behaviour of a sufficiently complex system.

The system _including_ its data.

People often point to the relative simplicity of the architecture and code as proof that the system can’t be doing whatever it is that consciousness does, but in doing so they ignore the vast size of the data those simple structures are operating over. Nobody can actually say whether consciousness is just emergent behaviour of a sufficiently complex system, and knowing how a system is built tells you nothing about whether it clears the bar for that kind of emergence. Architectural simplicity and total system complexity aren’t the same thing.

Ie the intelligence sits in the weights and may sit there in the synapses in our brains too.

When we talk about machines being simple mimicking entities we pay no attention to whether or not we are also simple mimicking entities.

Most other assertions in this topic regarding what consciousness truly is tend to be stated without evidence and exceedingly anthropocentric whilst requiring a higher and higher bar for anything that is not human and no justification for what human intelligence really entails.

I don't think "Sitting in an office you sit in every day" or "Sitting in your living room" are the same amount of bandwidth/storage as "Travelling around the moon". I'm sure we have compression algorithms for this stuff and it's somewhat related to novelty.

I'm aware of an association between perception of time to number of photons received in the eyes.

These relate to both how much time the events appear to take subjectively as well as how well remembered they are or how long they feel retrospectively. As in there is an actual physiological explanation for "time flies when you're having fun".

There probably is something to also be said for attention too. Increased awareness and attention will undoubtedly use up more 'bandwidth' or 'storage' too.

I saw a fancy HTML table generator that had so many parameters and flags and bells and whistles that it took IIRC hundreds of lines of code to save writing a similar amount of HTML in a handful of different places.

Yes the initial HTML looked similar in these few places, and the resultant usage of the abstraction did not look similar.

But it took a very long time reading each place a table existed and quite a bit longer working out how to get it to generate the small amount of HTML you wanted to generate for a new case.

Definitely would have opted for repetition in this particular scenario.

That seems to me like it just shifts the problem one level. Why are K's and Kikis spiky and why are B's and Boubas round. Why is it universal too across people with different writing systems and languages.

> Reflect on the structure of your own comment

Could you clarify, are you comparing the parent comment to the article?

I think in this example those prep work items _are_ doing the thing.

But then telling people about a new product could also be doing the thing.

There’s definitely something to be said for defining what the thing really is being an important part of doing it, but that can also spiral out of control into not doing the thing.

I think thingness is more of a variable property of the current thing you are doing. Than a binary is or isn’t the thing.

All we can really do is regularly check how much the thingness of the current thing is aligned with the main thing’s thingness.

1-3-5-7-2-4

I would imagine that would be red(1), orange(3), yellow(5), green(7), blue(2), purple(4)

But it seems you have white(1), green(3), grey(5), yellow(7), red(2), purple(4)

I can't quite see what going over the rainbow in thirds here means, but I can see why a fifth would be neutral. Could you expand upon this?

Can anyone explain the kind of dense cloud in the middle? Is that down to human perception? We don't give names to things we can't perceive uniquely?