pka

I don't know, but my current intuition is that invention = more or less preexisting ingredients + some tiny spark of creativity ("connecting the dots") rather than this grand myth of "creating something from nothing". And then the tiny spark could itself be a remix of previous tiny sparks (connecting the dots between dot connections, a bit like maps between n, n+1, n+2, ...-dimensional manifolds), and so on.

> and pattern-matching is hardly an invention

Exactly. That's what I meant with turtles all the way down, until the tiny spark disappears into a dot and it turns out that creativity is just an illusion - akin to how nobody would call the gene (the spark, the pattern matching) formed by evolution (the brain connectome) "creative".

Recently I watched a documentary on the tanzanian Hadza tribe, one of the last hunter gatherer tribes on Earth. Their language is a distinct click and pop language and they regularly imitate animal calls (monkeys, baboons, birds) when they hunt but also when they communicate with each other, tell stories etc.

I think it's not impossible that words evolved as adaptations of the environmental sounds with which our ancestors lived. The human creativity producing DNA is also a remix of preexisting molecules formed under evolutionary pressure, so the view that it's turtles all the way down, unintuitive as it is, may not be so indefensible after all.

Off topic, but the design is marvelous! Did you do it?

> There has been much refutation and quality analysis at every point.

I am curious about this. Any high quality refutations that directly engage with the arguments and the findings of published safety papers?

> Many people’s analyses showed in the first week that the mathematical model

Even if the model is faulty it just changes the timeline, no? (they predicted the OpenAI outbreak will happen in January 2027 fwiw, so they don't seem too far off)

> Slutcon or the use of AI safety group buildings to host orgies

I mean it's a bit weird, sure, but so what? What exactly is bothering you about these orgies?

> It's like saying bubble sort is autonomous...

Or Schrödinger's equation.

> Do you keep trying to whack-a-mole the AI tools for this, or the humans actually making and distributing fake nudes of real people?

Both, obviously. For example, you go after drug distributors and drug producers. Both approaches are effective in different ways, I am not sure why you are having such trouble understanding this.

> Arrows are slightly the wrong abstraction because they require an operation arr :: (a -> b) -> (a ~> b)—which requires you to be able to embed Haskell functions in your category, something which is almost never possible.

Yeah, this is such a shame. It would make arrows actually usable.

Same!

The topic was immutability, not Clojure?

But ok, if mutability is always worse, why not use a pure language then? No more cowardly swap! and transient data structures or sending messages back and forth like in Erlang.

But then you get to monads (otherwise you'd end up with Elm and I'd like to see Apple's payment backend written in Elm), monad transformers, arrows and the like and coincidentally that's when many Clojure programmers start whining about "jumping through unnecessary hoops" :D

Anyway, this was just a private observation I've reached after being an FP zealot for a decade, all is good, no need to convert me, Clojure is cool :)

If there was a language that didn't require pure and impure code to look different but still tracked mutability at the type level like the ST monad (so you can't call an impure function from a pure one) - so not Clojure - then that'd be perfect.

But as it stands immutability often feels like jumping through unnecessary hoops for little gain really.

> immutability in Clojure doesn't mean inefficiency.

You are still doing a gazillion allocations compared to:

  for (let i = 0; i < data.length; i++) { hist[data[i]]++; }

But apart from that the mutable code in many cases is just much clearer compared to something like your fold above. Sometimes it's genuinely easier to assemble a data structure "as you go" instead of from the "bottom up" as in FP.

> Would you say that there was a single consciousness that both bodies shared, but that it suddenly split once the meteorite hit?

I agree, this is super weird. In a sense this seems to be the difference between viewing consciousness from the first person vs the third person. But until we understand how (if at all) matter generates felt experience the latter view can not, by definition, be about consciousness itself.

I guess this kind of perspective commits one to viewing first person experience in the way we understand abstract concepts - it is nonsensical to ask what the difference between this "1" here and that other "1" over there is. Well, you can say, they are at different positions and written in different materials etc, but those are not properties of the concept "1" anymore.

So yes, coming back to the thought experiment, one of the consequences of that would have to be that both bodies share the same consciousness and the moment something diverges the consciousnesses do too.

The point about time is interesting, and also directly related to AI. If at some point machines become conscious (leaving aside the question if that's possible at all and how we would know without solving the aforementioned hard problem), they would presumably have to generate quanta at discrete steps. But is that so strange? The nothingness in between would not be felt (kind of like going to sleep and waking up "the next moment").

But maybe this idea can be applied to dynamical continuous systems as well, like the brain.

(Btw this conversation was super interesting, thank you!)

> I'm sensing redness here and now, so the sensation of redness exists very clearly tied to a particular point in spacetime. In what sense is the qualia of redness not firmly anchored in spacetime? Of course, you could talk about the concept redness, like the concept Pi, but even then, these concepts exist in the mind of a human thinking about them, still tied to a particular location in spacetime.

But qualia are inherently subjective. You can correlate brain activity (which exists at a position in spacetime) to subjective experience, but that experience is not related to spacetime.

Said otherwise: imagine you are in the Matrix at a coffee shop and sense redness, but your brain is actually in a vat somewhere being fed fake sensory input. "Where" is the redness? You would clearly say that it arises in your brain in the coffee shop. Imagine then the vat is moved (so its position in spacetime changes), your brain is rolled back to its previous state, and then fed the same sensory input again. Where is the redness now?

You can't differentiate the two sensations of redness based on the actual position of the brain in spacetime. For all intents and purposes, they are the same. Qualia only depend on the internal brain state at a point in time and on the sensory input. Spacetime is nowhere to be found in that equation.

> The two brains don't receive the same sensory inputs

But let's say they do. Identical brains, identical inputs = identical qualia. What differentiates both consciousnesses?

It might be deeper than you think.

Qualia exist "outside" spacetime, e.g. redness doesn't have a position in spacetime. If consciousness is purely physical, then how can two identical systems (identical brains with identical sensory input) giving rise by definition to the same qualia not literally be the same consciousness?