Until we have a testable, falsifiable thesis of how consciousness forms in meat, it is rash to exclude that consciousness could arise from linear algebra. Our study of the brain has revealed an enormous amount about how our anatomy processes information, but nothing of substance on the relationship between matter and consciousness. The software and data of an operating LLM is not purely abstract, it has a physical embodiment as circuits and electrons. Until we understand how matter is connected to consciousness, we also cannot know whether the arrangements and movements of electrons meet the criteria for forming consciousness.

That’s largely a different topic from the article. Many people perfectly agree that consciousness can arise from computation, but don’t believe that current AI is anywhere near that, and also don’t believe that “thinking” requires consciousness (though if a mind is conscious, that certainly will affect its thinking).

yes I agree it's not the angle of the article, but it is my entry point into the idea/concern/unanswered question at the end of the article “My worry is not that these models are similar to us. It’s that we are similar to these models.” - that the enormous difference in the medium and mechanics or our minds and llm's might not be that important.

before i go any further, let me first reference The Dude:

     - "this is just like, my opinion man."

I’m down with the idea that LLM’s have been especially successful because they ‘piggyback on language’ – our tool and protocol for structuring, compressing, and serialising thought, which means it has been possible to train LLM’s on compressed patterns of actual thought and have them make new language that sure looks like thought, without any direct experience of the concepts being manipulated, and if they do it well enough we will do the decompression, fleshing out the text with our experiential context. But I suspect that there are parts of my mind that also deal with concepts in an abstract way, far from any experiential context of the concept, just like the deeper layers of a neural network. I’m open to the idea, that just as the sparse matrix of an LLM is encoding connection between concepts without explicitly encoding edges, I think there will be multiple ways that we can look as the structure of an AI model and at our anatomy so that they are a squint and a transformation function away interesting overlaps. that will lead to and a kind of 'god of the gaps' scenario in which we conceptually carve out pieces of our minds as, 'oh the visual cortext is just an X', and deep questions about what we are.

Hello Rohan. This is really great. If you are able to include parameters to expose the intermediate data as inputs and outputs, so that this can be run to a step in the process and output the data, or run from a step with pre-prepared data. It would mean that other people could build on what you've done to create other diagrams and renderings.

Hi thanks! I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean by intermediate data? Would this be the location data computed for the different components?

as I dabble with neural networks, I keep having these moments where i wonder, is this what I am? (a neural net) And it has begun to make we wonder in an entirely unscientific manner, whether a large part of what notice as neurodivergence, is not the core divergence from 'typical', but something emergent from that difference, that we are noticing is that we are interacting with a mind that has trained with an uncommon loss function, on different features of reality. There is only some much space in one head and so depending on what apsects of reality we are drawn to poetry,football,horseriding,music,art,software,cooking,farming,other people we end up very different people

no, chi and centrifugal force do not really exist. But because everything we percieve is essentially a metaphor, a model of reality, sometimes chi or loosy goosey uses of the word 'energy' really can be a valid heuristic for the things that you can do to optimise your 'ability to do work'. As long as you remember its a vague, subjective, context restricted heuristic, and don't try shooting chi bullets, I say max your chi flow friend.

can you be my collective memory for a minute, I remember the existence of a very satisfying engineering explanation for why the representation of various body parts needs to be flipped left/right in the brain that came down to the topology of the wiring, and explained why unflipped isn't feasible / or perhaps it was just less efficient, it was one of those 'mind explodes' moments, but now I can't recall the logic.

I recall this. The original idea is from decades ago but perhaps you read it in the Quanta article here https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-brains-connections-to... or perhaps that will lead you to what you want.

Ah! That's the thread, not the source I read but I beat if I read the referenced paper I get there , thank you

Are you referring maybe to the "Visual map theory"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contralateral_brain#Visual_map...

I wasn't but that's intriguing Thank you

I have a similar dim memory, but (at least according to this article) invertebrate bilaterians don't have that swap at all, so it can't be too strong a constraint.

I always thought it was so if an organism takes head damage on one side, the limbs facing the danger will have a better chance to still work, giving it a better chance to fend whatever off and survive.

That would be an incredibly unlikely adaptation anyway, but this change occurred in vertebrates before they even had limbs.

That has the smell of an evolutionary just so story

no there is a very specific reason, related to mapping the 2d surface of your body to a 2d mapping on your brain that allows the areas of your brain that process sensory input from your skin to be adjacent to the processing of the areas that are adjacent on the skin that only works with a flip, I can remember what that is, I only remember the tingle of understanding it at the time

Curious, let me know if you find anything about it! That does sort of explain why the brain areas would be locally flipped, but maybe doesn’t explain the global flip (right body -> left brain) that the original article is talking about.

I think it's the theory in the article linked just above by renewiltord

Sort of like an optical projection? (objects projected through a convex lens onto a screen are reversed).

I worked for a company that was bought by CBA, and this was happening while I was there. This would be great if: Indian workers were hired on equivalent terms, in Australia, on visas that give them a clear path to citizenship. If they were hired as individuals and not via contracing companies that force them to sign separate secret contracts that prevent them from pushing for their full legal rights under Australian labor law. Immigration has been great for Australia in countless ways. I get really upset about they way large labor firms have co-opted as immigration a lever for corporations to undermine Australian working conditions and exploit Indian workers and I really don't know what to do about.

No, it would still not be great.

Local options should always be preferred to protect local job markets. Any company only exists because they can do business locally, so they should support local or be burnt to the ground.

I now live in the UK, when I got hired here they had to advertise my position to see if they could fill it locally before they could grant me a visa for it - this is the way.

Many years ago I was hired by {tech company} in {European country} (I'm from the US).

Once I worked there for a month and befriended my team, one of them showed me how they posted a fake job listing with exactly my experience, and we all laughed about it.

All of the implementations of this legislation seem trivial to rig. Even though it feels good to assume you outcompeted everyone in the UK with your leet skills and they had no option to import the heavy guns.

I went through the process honestly. If the process was corrupted from up top, then that isn't my fault, though you're making it sound like it is, or that I was aware of it or something. Cheeky.

Everything is trivial to rig, we live in a world of apathetic morons who want fat, sugar, salt, dopamine - people who vote like political parties are sports teams, who want to pay the lowest price available even if it polluted the planet with cheap plastic crap, who care only about them and their tribe and not humanity as a whole. People who don't care about the betterment of society or accumulation of wealth so long as they get to hate the group that they've chosen to hate for mostly arbitrary evolved chemical reasons with no bearing in the modern world.

I only say hire local because I've given up. Because our species is too fucking stupid to ever have a borderless utopia. And we don't fucking deserve one either.

Yep, same in my EU company, they showed me how easy it was to game the system to easily hire non-EU workers.

EU work visas are like a rubber stamp compared to US ones.

I disagree, these are not anonymous people, but real work collegues that I enjoyed working with, who would love to be able to settle in Australia, and would make a great contribution to the country. Australia without post war migration would be a much duller place. The fact that companies use immigation as a lever against fair wages, doesn't mean that there are not also skills shortages in many areas. I don't think we should conflate that with the need to care for citizens, which I would rather we approach with fair tax systems, maybe some resource extraction royalties and using the increase tax income on vastly increased infrastructure and social spending.

Blaming immigrants instead of systematic explotation and inequality takes us down the disasterous Brexit path.

Was there literally nobody in the country capable of doing what you do? Or were they just not willing to pay enough?

it is extremely routine for big companies to do this - all the fangs, big banks, etc, hire everyone they can in Britain on very pleasant pay packages and then hire overseas and pay immigrants the same amount.

Of course. And it's also a (deliberate, widely accepted) misunderstanding of basic economics. If you pay more you'll be able to hire more. Immigrants such as the one I'm replying to aren't typically hired because there are literally zero available locals with the skills. They're hired because they're cheaper, putting a ceiling on wages. Sometimes that ceiling can be quite high, but it's still there. "You can only bring someone into the country if you can't hire locally" is a polite fiction.

Slaves are not paid wages. There’s no need to resort to hyperbole here, the practices are abhorrent enough without it.

Indentured service is often colloquially conflated with slavery, as the legal protections are removed and so too usually the freedom of association.

Where is the hyperbole? Is a question: where is the line to start calling it slavery. Obviously, for you far. Not for me.

If we want to go the pedantry way, this is the definition I found: “a condition of having to work very hard without proper remuneration or appreciation.”

Emphasis in proper mine.

I'm ont talking about anonomous people, I'm talking about remote-work collegues whose name I know. They were not slaves, they were absolutley paid wages, but not equivalent wages to local hires.

Some influential people in my life were quakers, which has given me a lifelong interest in quakerism, but in my one interaction with a quaker meeting, I was surprised that it seemed much closer to bible based church than I had expected. I think I had expected a skepticism about holy texts as literary/cultural creation rather than the direct word of god, a philosophical attitude of god as an abstract anthropomorphism because 'god may be addressed but never comprehended', but apart from the chairs and egalitarianism, it could have been any other bible group.

Did I misunderstand something, what's your better informed take?

There are a few different varieties of Quakerism and their forms of worship differ accordingly. Some worship in silence, with members of the congregation providing vocal ministry. Some are more like traditional churches, with a pastor leading the service. Others still are more like evangelical Christian denominations.

If you're in the US or Canada and interested in experiencing silent worship, Friends General Conference maintains a directory of meetings here: https://www.fgcquaker.org/find-a-meeting/

Thank you. Is there somewhere I can read about the different theological viewpoints/practices of different branches?

I wonder instead if what is being described here comes from a conflation of drag and maybe something from the BDSM world with trans? I think it does describe the experience of people who live a life in which they feel if not undesirable, then at least ordinary, who have an costumed highly sexualised alter-ego which they inhabit a kind of performance which put makes them a focus of attention, sometimes of desire, and sometimes in a position of power (not these are not exclusive) that is very different from their ordinary lives.

I also ask for any nested codeblocks to be delimited with ~~~, not ``` so as not to break out of the code block

pensions can be whatever we decide as a society agree they should be. Your perspective is an opinion, and many people share it, it has been a dominant view for decades, but it has never been a universal view.

There is a solution for young people they should look at this demographic disaster and realise they need to have children for the sake of their own future. Meanwhile the next generation or two to retire is going to have a very grim time surviving because we had two kids or none, compared to the five our parents had.

And those children will have to have even more children, and so on. The system is designed to work as long as it can grow forever, which it obviously cannot. Some generation is going to have to reckon with the demographic problem.

Yeah, China.

China isn't a generation.

When half of your work output is taken away to give to your already well-off parents, you don't have much left over to have kids.