Ooh, a ribbonfarm fresh off the presses! First off, this is some incredible stuff. It's difficult to live at the edges of understanding, and even harder to art

Ooh, a ribbonfarm fresh off the presses! First off, this is some incredible stuff. It's difficult to live at the edges of understanding, and even harder to articulate it. Rao is dancing right at the edge. In 20 years the map's probably going to be filled in and crystallized. Everyone who cares will know, and everyone else will have forgotten, but right now this is dank shit. I think the reasonable (not rational!) stance is that everything is conscious until proven otherwise. Either because the universe is built on consciousness or whatever woo, or because we're conscious and observing it. AI's in this weird spot where it can do things, but we can't have a proper relationship with it because it doesn't exist in our universe of discrete entities and time and skin in the game. Pushing the SIILTB in the other direction, I don't think it's clear that there is something it's like to be us without all our externalities. Take out the need to eat and sleep and communicate and relate, and there's not a lot left. Pure existence looks a lot like no existence.