vinceguidry

Motivating students to want to learn isn't rocket science, just a rare skill to see.

Or just learn how to teach.

That's because we're missing an abstraction, salience. LLMs and biological minds alike have salience functions that both use complex and seemingly inscrutable means to answer the question "why am i paying attention to this right now?" And those salience functions are tuned the same way, the way the Greeks worked out thousands of years ago and called logos, reason.

When you think about it that way, you can bridge the two types of cognition more usefully. The how of intelligence, what attention consists of, can remain completely different, while the why can feel so universal that humans can easily forget they're talking to a machine.

One of the stranger aspects of Roman history is that for centuries, there was a fight over who gets the public space. You'd have the local mystery cults defacing whatever the Christians put up and vice versa. Assimilating local traditions rather than demanding people just adopt theirs fits in with a faith that aims to be higher than all others. Jesus has no need to fight Vishnu, and never did.

We're just looking at this through the lens of the Protestant Reformation so this pragmatism is often lost.

> Also note that I'm using the term "materialism" loosely to mean that oneself is a part of a larger world rather than the whole.

No matter how good physics gets, it can't solve the mind-body problem, that exists at a level that the very activity of using repeatable physical experimentation cannot provide a usable answer towards. A person can believe that physics could create a solution, but it would just be yet another belief about metaphysics in a sea of many.

> The movement of things have predictable bounds regardless of whether this apparent movement of matter has metaphysical origins in mind/simulation/god/whatever, it can be predicted as if it's material.

What is the black-body speed of an idea? I'll let you assume the idea is spherical. If your position is that an idea is just neurons firing in the brain, then you need some kind of way to account for changes in said speed. What is so special about that hundredth monkey... on the physical level? All you can use to guess at this answer is... more ideas.

> I know with metaphysical certainty that you are bound by the workings of a materialist world, because I am defining certainty using my own consciousness, and you are a part of my materialist model. But hearing this from me is not enough for you to prove to yourself in a metaphysically strict sense that you are in a true material world, even if we're both in a true material world, because your definition of certainty is based on your own consciousness, and we do not share the same consciousness.

This is perhaps the most hilarious bit of equivocation I've ever seen from a materialist. "I know this with certainty but you won't be convinced of my certainty because our consciousnesses are different." That consciousness is different between people is a part of the mind-body problem, subjectivity cannot be explained with materialism alone.

Color is perhaps the worst thing to try to make this argument with. We can measure it with tools and there's entire industries that would fall apart if human color perception wasn't a knowable thing.

Like, the whole Apple iMessage thing with the green and blue bubbles wouldn't, couldn't have even been a thing if human color perception weren't widely shared.

We, like all mammals, have very similar neural architecture that evolved to keep us safe from predators. It's pretty reliable.

I first read your comment as "giving money to kids." That's probably how commenter interpreted it and it makes sense in that context.

> Solipsism or simulation theory type of metaphysical positions remain undefeated, but they don't matter for practical purposes because materialism and its accompanying theories of physics have the same predictive power about what I will observe in the future regardless of whether solipsism is true (def true: as real as my own consciousness).

Materialism determined that you wrote this essay? I'd love to see you demonstrate that with physics.

You got lucky, mine didn't even start up, even after overnight charging, batteries have such short lives these days.

I don't know what the deal is with Linux and cameras. I've got Fedora installed on this old Retina MBP and apparently Linux somehow stopped supporting the built in webcam. I've never heard of a device losing Linux support but here we are.

I love it. Claim gets made, it's pointed out that there's no evidence for said claim, claim gets justified anyway with some version of "it's logical / rational / stands to reason."

All it amounts to is 'sounds good to me'.

Ah! You're right, I had read somewhere that he'd implemented his own X windows but I suppose I was mistaken.