3 ms·

Peter Watts’ work is indeed bleak, harsh, but brilliant. I thought Blindsight was a hard read but the Rifters trilogy is another level

megiddo 2y ago
Made me stop reading for awhile.
Symmetry 2y ago
If it makes you feel better, while someone with blindsight is able to interact with the objects in front of them through a subliminal awareness of them they can't form memories of those objects. Memory is actually very useful and consciousness[1] is necessary for its formation so you don't have to worry about non-conscious lifeforms out-competing conscious ones. [1] In the sense that is related to blindsight. Maybe someone with blindsight still has philosophical qualia of the objects they say they can't see, I don't know
ufo 2y ago
For what it's worth the Blindsight pwoerpoint presentation is kind of funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOUaJW05bU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOUaJW05bU
justlikereddit 2y ago
While Blindsight and Echopraxia had some interesting world building and were both very readable books. It is worth mentioning the "science" part of them as science-fiction novels are essentially just a distillate of the most over-hyped pop-sci singularity-ism memes from the early 2000s era A combination of "humans only use 1% of the brain" mythos married to a "super cognition unlocks emergent superpowers" results in something that's more accurately described as an unofficial entry in the Marvel cinematic universe than the hard-scifi it styles itself as.
zusammen 2y ago
I got a blindsight vibe when interacting with early ChatGPT through rot13 but I can’t be sure if it was real uncanny valley (pseudo) consciousness or me anthropomorphizing. Probably the latter. It really shows how much work was put into making LLMs not scare people.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  Conversing with early GPT-4 (in the first days of Bing chat) was surreal beyond any non-drug experience I know of. The infamous negative behaviors are well documented [0] but every part was so... alien. [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jtoPawEhLNXNxvgTT/bing-chat-is-blatantly-aggressively-misaligned https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jtoPawEhLNXNxvgTT/bing-chat-...

megiddo 2y ago

Made me stop reading for awhile.

Symmetry 2y ago

If it makes you feel better, while someone with blindsight is able to interact with the objects in front of them through a subliminal awareness of them they can't form memories of those objects. Memory is actually very useful and consciousness[1] is necessary for its formation so you don't have to worry about non-conscious lifeforms out-competing conscious ones. [1] In the sense that is related to blindsight. Maybe someone with blindsight still has philosophical qualia of the objects they say they can't see, I don't know

ufo 2y ago

For what it's worth the Blindsight pwoerpoint presentation is kind of funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOUaJW05bU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOUaJW05bU

justlikereddit 2y ago

While Blindsight and Echopraxia had some interesting world building and were both very readable books. It is worth mentioning the "science" part of them as science-fiction novels are essentially just a distillate of the most over-hyped pop-sci singularity-ism memes from the early 2000s era A combination of "humans only use 1% of the brain" mythos married to a "super cognition unlocks emergent superpowers" results in something that's more accurately described as an unofficial entry in the Marvel cinematic universe than the hard-scifi it styles itself as.

zusammen 2y ago

I got a blindsight vibe when interacting with early ChatGPT through rot13 but I can’t be sure if it was real uncanny valley (pseudo) consciousness or me anthropomorphizing. Probably the latter. It really shows how much work was put into making LLMs not scare people.

HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
Conversing with early GPT-4 (in the first days of Bing chat) was surreal beyond any non-drug experience I know of. The infamous negative behaviors are well documented [0] but every part was so... alien. [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jtoPawEhLNXNxvgTT/bing-chat-is-blatantly-aggressively-misaligned https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jtoPawEhLNXNxvgTT/bing-chat-...