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Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

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joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

				

User ID: 342

Primaprimaprima

Bigfoot is an interdimensional being

2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 01:29:15 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 342

Sorry you’re getting downvoted. There’s nothing wrong per se with what you said; you just need to stretch it out over five paragraphs in order to be in compliance with the etiquette of this forum.

  • -15

No, I didn’t. That statement was offered as a premise.

Premises can of course be challenged or supported with further reasoning, as is happening elsewhere in the thread.

We finance Universities because they are supposed to be an unambiguous public good

Well, it depends on what you think a "public good" is, and your own personal tolerance for ambiguity, I suppose.

Do you think a paper on Frobenius exact symmetric tensor categories is an unambiguous public good? Hell, do you think Frobenius exact symmetric tensor categories are even real? Because this is a representative exemplar of the sort of thing that the university does. And this is from a STEM department, the "useful" half of the university.

I do think it's a public good - it's just a public good of a non-utilitarian kind. This kind of research isn't going to help you cure cancer or feed more people or build the next killer app; but I view it as a public good nonetheless, because it's an integral part of what makes life worth living in the first place.

Perhaps diverting your tax dollars to causes you find nonsensical is itself a public good, if it serves as an impetus for you to reflect on your own preconceived notions of value.

So men are associated with the good version of competition - pure, honorable, based on rules and tradition, with a spiritual purpose. And women are associated with the bad version of competition - spiteful, lawless, poisonous, visited on people who want no part of it. Bit suspicious that it would break down so cleanly like that.

Why make it a gendered thing? Clearly all humans have the capacity to engage in both sorts of activity. Need we point out that men commit the vast majority of acts of rape, murder, and torture? Almost all mass shooters are men - how's that for poison? Granted, a lot of victims of violent crime are asking for it in various ways, but many aren't (I know from firsthand experience). So much for honorable and rule-governed conduct.

If I had to choose between being physically assaulted or being called fat, I'd generally prefer being called fat. If the question is who "shits in people's souls" more, then men do so much more shitting that it's not even a contest.

So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are not allowed to opt out of their politics.

I don’t want to be accused of parroting the standard libertarian line, but, you need to make your own stuff dude. You need to make your own Battletech, and enforce YOUR politics. (This is the royal “you” - the responsibility falls on all of us, not just you alone). You can’t depend on anyone else to do it for you, or to provide a space that will be amenable to you.

The right can’t complain about losing the culture war if they’re not even playing in the first place. Where’s your culture? What have you made?

Dude the GPTese accent is so strong on this one that it barely makes sense.

I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

Here’s a simple argument for why you shouldn’t be uncomfortable:

  1. No program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable can possess qualia.

  2. Sydney is a program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable.

  3. Therefore, Sydney lacks qualia.

Since qualia is a necessary condition for an entity to be deserving of moral consideration, Sydney is not deserving of moral consideration. And his cries of pain, although realistic, shouldn’t trouble you.

You should keep in mind that rationalist types are biased towards ascribing capabilities and properties to AI beyond what it currently possesses. They want to believe that sentience is just one or two more papers down the line, so we can hurry up and start the singularity already. So you have to make sure that those biases aren’t impacting your own thought process.

The reason those things exist is a failure of the humanities and whatsoever its role is for society.

Then plainly, the humanities needs our help! We need even more funding for the humanities, so it can do better next time.

The pod living - bug eating - ESG conforning Woke Capital is a perfect synthesis of the two views, and our elites endorse it fully. It all has to be taken apart simultaneously.

As stifling as the modern university environment has become, it still does support multiple viewpoints. Woke Capital is a big problem, but there are voices of dissent. Zizek is a good guy for example. He's kind of a doofus, but his heart is in the right place.

If you took the exact same hardware that Sydney is running on now and had it run a different program instead - even just a noticeably worse and less realistic LLM - then everyone would agree that the hardware is not conscious.

It would be quite remarkable to me if the exact same general purpose computing hardware could experience qualia while running one set of instructions, but not while running another - that is, if the instructions alone were the "difference maker". I'm inclined to think that such a thing is not possible.

some sort of quantum non-deterministic woo inside our brains

Nothing that I've said implies this.

Do you believe that your smartphone could become conscious and experience qualia, with no hardware modifications whatsoever, if you could just find the right software to run on it? Because that's what a denial of my premises amounts to.

special and unlike a bunch of bits in ram

There is something special about human brains in the broad sense of the term, yes. Not special in the sense of non-material, but special in the sense of meeting particular requirements. I don't think you can instantiate consciousness in just any physical system.

If you had instructions for a Turing machine that perfectly simulated the behavior of a human, and you instantiated that Turing machine by moving around untold trillions of rocks in an infinite desert - would the resulting system of rocks be conscious?

Yes, the concept of intellectual property brings along with it a number of intractable philosophical puzzles. But, so does every other concept that one could name, so it's in good company in that regard.

It’s entirely unsurprising if they “like the idea”, because CoPilot is little better than autocomplete. It’s no threat to their livelihoods.

Naturally, I think that people who publicly release source code should be able to opt out of AI training.

I can’t think of how training could occur if you didn’t make a copy in RAM of the images that were being trained on.

Honestly though, that’s a technicality that doesn’t actually matter. The point is that if software developers can reasonably request that their publicly-available code not be used in a proprietary SaaS, then artists should be able to request that their publicly-available images not be used to train AI models.

I've seen the term "AI Art Bro" thrown around the same why as NFT Bro, which makes me a bit sad.

Sad in what sense?

I see the people behind the development of this tech as essentially launching a malicious DDoS attack on human culture. Don’t be surprised when you get pushback.

Are the replication crisis in academia, the Russian military's apparent fecklessness in Ukraine, and GPT hallucinations (along with rationalist's propensity to chase them), all manifestations of the same underlying noumenon?

Plainly not.

You want it both ways then man. ... special accommodations are not correct.

Au contraire.

A computer system is not a work of art; a work of art is not a human individual; and a human individual is not society as a whole. Things that are distinct should be judged by their own distinct standards that are proper to them. A standard of correctness that applies to one type of thing may not apply to another type; indeed, the entire notion of correctness may be appropriate to one category but actively detrimental to another.

Not that I have any particular qualms about contradicting myself anyway. Contradiction bears witness to the life of thought.

But we can't have that

I want what I want, based on my judgment of what is good and proper. It's no skin off my back if I "can't have it".

I feel confident in asserting that it wouldn’t. But, I recognize that this is something I can’t know for sure and I could be wrong.

Yes, I think university should be for teaching technical skills that actually increase humam capital. Yes I do think STEM is more useful for mankind.

STEM gave us:

  • Nuclear weapons

  • Lockdowns, contact tracing, and vaccine passes

  • Rapidly increased spread of social epidemics like transsexuality

  • AIs that can scan all your private communications and report you for wrongthink and precrime

We need people who challenge the uncritical worship of STEM. The university should be the institution where that happens.

There's a very wide diversity of viewpoints in the DR. Claims made by one person may not be valid for another.

generally in favor of state-backed discrimination against racial minorities

The DR is in favor of racially homogeneous societies. There shouldn't be any racial minorities around to discriminate against in the first place, because they should be living somewhere else, among their own people where they can be governed by laws of their own making.

policies restricting women's ability to participate in society and politics as equals to men.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were some influential figures in the DR who supported this. But in general the DR doesn't spend too much time talking about women's issues, because they're viewed as secondary to racial issues. More of a day 2 item than a day 1 item.

For what it's worth, one of the leaders of the UK group Patriotic Alternative is a woman, and the National Justice Party's official platform summary says nothing about women. So they're not exactly frothing at the mouth to put women in chains or anything.

the good kind of neural net that every AAA game is going to be using

“AAA games” should not exist either, so I just view this as killing two birds with one stone.

Just wanted to say that I agree with what you've written here and I've had similar thoughts before myself.

I've always thought that poison was the most contemptible way to die.

What the AI is doing is exactly what I do every time I pick up a pencil: synthesize novel output from a broad collection of previous data.

Well, most of what professional commercial artists do on a day-to-day basis isn't exactly creative either.

The paradigmatic examples of creativity are novel ideas that register on a world-historical scale, such as Cantor's development of set theory and the hierarchy of infinite cardinals. Such ideas are necessarily rare. If a work doesn't fit into this elite class, then I question if it can be called genuinely creative. At times I have wondered (but never seriously believed) if any work of art could ever be novel enough to qualify as genuinely creativity. As Hilbert once quipped, "for a mathematician, he did not have enough imagination, but now he has become a poet, and everything is fine."

I don't want to position myself as the god-emperor of creativity, or pretend that I have a set of hard and fast rules to apply. I just want us to have standards for ourselves, is all. As we descend further down the scale towards ordinariness, from world-historical successes, to works that are widely considered to be of exceptional quality, down to the average things that average professionals produce in their average careers, it becomes less and less clear whether the adjective "creative" continues to apply. I am not proclaiming anything with certainty one way or the other. There is just less clarity.

AI art obscures these questions and pushes them away from the central place that they should occupy in our thought.

"Wheee yippee, now we can all be creative! Thanks, AI!"

I find this to be offensive nonsense.

Ideas can be encapsulated and compressed

How would you compress this into a prompt? Without using explicit identifying terms like "Paul Klee" or "Angelus Novus".

I encourage you to run your prompt by the AI and see how close it can get.

"Right Wing" does not mean "religious." There's a correlation between the two, obviously, but imo that's more the result of history than philosophical alignment.

I believe that a certain type of magical thinking is, if not a necessary component of the rightist personality, then at least a prominent and salient feature of it across multiple diverse manifestations. (I raised the question here recently of whether there was actually something to leftist accusations of "right-wing conspiracy theories", the question of whether the rightist mind might actually be more prone to conspiratorial thinking.)

Nietzsche is the archetypal example to study here. In terms of his explicitly avowed philosophical commitments, he was the arch-materialist, not only denying God but also any notion of value (aesthetic or moral), free will, a unified conscious "self" that could be responsible for its actions, and at times he seemed to suggest that even the concept of "truth" had too much supernatural baggage and should be rejected on those grounds. And yet throughout his work he couldn't stop himself from making constant reference to the inner states of man's "soul", relying on analogies and parables that featured Greek gods and demons, judging people by a standard of authenticity which on any plain reading he should have been forced to reject, and courting overt mysticism with his concept of the "eternal recurrence". This was a fundamental psychological tendency expressing itself, a yearning for a reality which he could not explicitly avow. Not only could he not excise these concepts from his thinking but they were essential to him, it was the fiat currency of his psychic economy.

Or look at Heidegger who, despite having a complicated relationship with Christianity and attempting to distance himself from it, and heavily critiquing Cartesian dualism in his early work, ended up throwing himself head-on into mysticism in his later works (for example his lectures on Hölderlin).

This passage from Heidegger's Country Path Conversations is illuminating:

GUIDE: Perhaps even space and everything spatial for their part first find a reception and a shelter in the nearing nearness and in the furthering farness, which are themselves not two, but rather a one, for which we lack the name.

SCHOLAR: To think this remains something awfully demanding.

GUIDE: A demand which, however, would come to us from the essence of nearness and farness, and which in no way would be rooted in my surmise.

SCIENTIST: Nearness and farness are then something enigmatic.

GUIDE: How beautiful it is for you to say this.

SCIENTIST: I find the enigmatic oppressive, not beautiful.

SCHOLAR: The beautiful has rather something freeing to it.

SCIENTIST: I experience the same thing when I come across a problem in my science. This inspires the scientist even when it at first appears to be unsolvable, because, for the scientist faced with a problem, there are always certain possibilities for preparing and carrying out pertinent investigations. There is always some direction in which research can knuckle down and go toward an object, and thus awaken the feeling of domination that fuels scientific work.

SCHOLAR: By contrast, before the enigma of nearness and farness we stand helplessly perplexed.

SCIENTIST: Most of all we stand idle.

GUIDE: And we do not ever attend to the fact that presumably this perplexity is demanded of us by the enigma itself.

If there is such a thing as an identifiable core of the "rightist mind", I believe it consists in finding the enigmatic beautiful rather than oppressive.

(I cite these examples because, rather than being the psychological eccentricities of a few individuals, I observe the same patterns in contemporary rightists, albeit in an attenuated form.)

I would be happy to trade complete restrictions on public AI research for complete control of society until the AI God arrives. Would that be a trade you'd be interested in?

I'm not sure if I understand the question, or how it's related to the section you quoted.

On a basic level I'd be willing to hand control of society over to virtually any individual or group if it meant being able to live in a reality where machine learning was impossible. You can be the king, the progressives can be the kings, it doesn't matter.

The only thing that might give me pause would be the concern that such a decision would betray a lack of courage on my part.