wildermuthn

12 ms·

61.
by wildermuthn 4y ago
Explaining why consciousness exists is the same task as asking why anything exists. Take applesauce: we know what it is made out of and we could probably recreate it without using any apples — applesauce is just a configuration of matter, s
62.
by wildermuthn 4y ago
I have two kids and actually do what the article concludes with: teach them both types of games (in my case, replacing Poker with Hearthstone and the card game Coup). I’d also recommend Lichess as it is always easy for the kids to find a ga
63.
by wildermuthn 4y ago
Consciousness is a pre-requisite for intelligence.
64.
by wildermuthn 4y ago
Good explanation, but I disagree about the improbability of being “first”. Probability doesn’t apply when taking about why we are conscious at this moment in time. The same applies to the why I experiencing consciousness as a 21st century h
65.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
One thing: Rich Hickey has to reject the ecosystem-killing mindset that he summed up in his essay, “Open Source is not about you.”
66.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
If he wins the bet, he gets money. If he loses the bet, money is worthless,
67.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
It isn’t hard to learn how to think: practice increasingly complex levels of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Schools actually do a fair job of this, especially at advanced stages. It’s trendy to criticize social media these days, and I’m
68.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
Agreed. Even if all you learn is the difference between validity and truth, this is an especially worthwhile difference to hammer into your brain. A lot of poor thinking comes not from invalid reasoning, but from hidden assumptions that are
69.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
The Italian mind-couple in the article sound a lot like “Tulpas” — imaginary friends that seem to have their own personality and consciousness separate from their “host”. According to the Attention-Schema theory of consciousness (AST), the
70.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
The article would be better served by exploring the “explanatory gap” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap?wprov=sfti1 ) — how is it that neurons firing in a parallel asynchronous manner leads to sequential sy
71.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
What are the economic benefits of low gravity? If so, would the moon be more economically valuable than Mars? I’m genuinely curious about the economics of doing more in space than putting up satellites.
72.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
True. I find it helpful to think of current DL models as a form of the reptilian brain — information processing and, at best, instinctual pattern recognition. Intelligence is different kind of processing. It resides in the particular form o
73.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
More than half these comments are meaningless because they misunderstand what Wet Bulb temperature is. I too didn’t understand what Wet Bulb temperatures meant until I used this calculator: https://www.omnicalculator.com/phy
74.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
Sensation, emotion, and reason all exist inside consciousness. The article points out that some animals seem to have great depth of emotion and sensation, whereas human consciousness often is more focused upon reason. Anyone who has lost ti
75.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
Optimizing for Mutual Physical Attraction (OMPA) Saint Louis | CEO | REMOTE OMPA is currently a PyTorch model that predicts if you’ll find a face attractive or not. It requires about 10 minutes of work from a user to gather enough data to t
76.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
There’s a really interesting parallel here with evolution: exaptation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation?wprov=sfti1 This occurs when a trait that evolved to solve one problem also happens to solve (or almost so
77.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Inverted problem solving, done naively, is an infinite task — you could kill all the pilots in infinitely and progressively improbable ways (e.g., use time-trav
78.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
The “hard problem of consciousness” is not essentially about consciousness. It’s just the most obvious form of the problem to conscious beings. The “hard problem of applesauce” is the same essential problem. While it is true that we will on
79.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
Actually, I found the post you linked to fairly logical. He’s saying that humans are inherently lazy, and that a language that gives us the option between being diligent (strong types) or being reckless (opt-out of strong types) will lead t
80.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
tldr; worker libraries are a catch-22: they help a lot for people who don’t need them, and they don’t help much for people who do need them. I had a pretty clear use-case: running a cpu-hungry ML model at 5-10 FPS without locking a dynamic
81.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
Another refutation: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kvZshdx5FzTPjyhxG/...
82.
The Temporal Singularity: time-accelerated simulated civilizations (2018)(arxiv.org)
1 points by wildermuthn 5y ago|1 comments
83.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
To address your scenario concretely, though, technology advances generally – not just giving the power to destroy, but also giving the power to protect and restore. Covid and mRNA vaccines are a good example – globalization surely contribut
84.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
I really like this idea, especially since it plays well with Simulation arguments. But unless there is some kind of inception-like time distortion occurring in a Simulations-all-the-way down scenario, then disappearing into virtual worlds i
85.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
You paint a compelling picture here. But if we extend this picture to a galactic timescale and space, then even a minuscule chance of surviving distributed technology would mean a galaxy full of intelligent life. So if we can imagine even a
86.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
The only problem I see here is that if intelligence has a large evolutionary advantage over non-intelligence (or lesser intelligence), then intelligence should always emerge given a large enough population over a large enough time-scale. Gi
87.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
The paper basically says that the Drake equation is just a guess, and if we’re going to guess, we might as well do so using probabilistic models. Their model puts the Great Filter behind us. This makes intuitive sense too — an early Great F
88.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
Babel has always struck me as the lowest-quality highest-profile tool that exists in the JS ecosystem. Their website and documentation are unorganized and unhelpful beyond the most basic usage — transpiring JSX. I had some thought of implem
89.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
I was trying to think this through and realized it would be faster and more accurate to just write up a little script. Pretty sure this is accurate: https://replit.com/@NateWildermuth/Monty-Hall-Problem Thinking about
90.
by wildermuthn 5y ago
This is a solved problem though, with optimistic updates. See Mosh, which does this for the terminal. If you've ever had to run Vim on a high-latency remote connection, it feels like having superpowers.

More ›