> Then I started working on a library at $WORK with dozens of downstream users abusing the hell out of my idiomatic underscore usage [...]. When I’d “break” their test suite [...] I’d get all kinds of shit
I can understand this happening once. But, after that, management should have been involved and addressed the root problem. It would be no longer a technical or communication issue, but a project management one.
I had textbook symptoms of sleep apnea with a BMI of 19, before I was diagnosed. The sleep tech told me bluntly that plenty of slim people, even children, develop sleep apnea.
Obesity increases the chance of developing sleep apnea, yes. But sleep apnea also increases the chance of becoming obese. It is not just a simple unidirectional cause and effect.
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
Is there a distinction in your mind between consciousness and intelligence? Is it possible, for example, for a machine to solve complex problems but not be conscious? Or vice versa, can an animal or a person be very unintelligent yet still conscious?
A philosophical zombie [1] is essentially a mobile, autonomous human body devoid of consciousness. Critically, still giving all of the external cues that it has in fact consciousness. It is supposed to prove that physicalism doesn't work. "The sense of consciousness" is used like a "soul, with extra steps".
In my humble opinion, which I have no way to prove or disprove, consciousness ("as a soul with extra steps") does not exist, and we are all philosophical zombies. Consciousness "as an amalgamation of complex biological signals and neural interactions that has evolved through millions of years as a successful survival strategy" does exist, and that is all that is needed.
>For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain, but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would.
in the Wikipedia article because I don't get on well with the sharp poking. On the basis of Occam's razor I assume all other humans and higher animals are similar. It would be odd if evolution had made me different from all the others.
What I am denying is that there's anything metaphysical about the whole process.
The opponents of physicalism like Chalmers start from the axiom that consciousness is, in fact, separated from the physical world. Then they use the zombie to "demonstrate" (using circular logic, in my opinion) that physicalism is not possible.
I do believe that your (our) feelings, emotions, and our sense of self all emanate from the physical world. So in that sense "we are all the zombies that Chalmers talks about".
"but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would"
So the pain would be registered, and reacted to.
The only difference is in how the world "feel" is interpreted.
For Chalmers, the difference between a "zombie" and a "regular human", according to Chalmers, is that for the "zombie" is just "meat reacting to things". The "human" on the other hand is "meat somehow connected to something outside of the meat called consciousness that is the only thing that really feels".
I (and the author of the article) disagree. Consciousness can be "just meat". No need to add an "external thing".
Serves me well for answering a comment before reading the article. This is basically what the author says, even pointing to the Philosophical zombie and all. Shame on me.
The question is mainly interesting in the context of our own behavior and interactions. Because would we treat our food differently if we decided e.g. pigs were intelligent and conscious? I had some salami on my pizza yesterday. But I also believe pigs are intelligent and conscious. And they are close relatives of us genetically. Some people choose to not eat meat for this reason.
I'm of the school of thought that we are all biological computers with emergent properties like intelligence, consciousness, etc. that we might eventually succeed in replicating. Maybe at a more modest level at first. From a practical point of view, I'm more interested in intelligent agents than conscious ones. I mainly need them to do useful things for me. Too much consciousness is a double edged sword. Because then I would have to consider how my agent feels about all this. But can you really have one without the other? I don't have a good answer to this.
People have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything around them. Definitely their pets, plants, and in some cases even inanimate objects. Which doesn't help the debate because it's already happening with LLM tools. Even though they are probably still on the definitely not conscious side of the fence even when they demonstrate mildly intelligent reasoning occasionally.
At some point, people will have a hard time telling the difference with AGI. Is it all smoke and mirrors at that point or are they dealing with an intelligent/conscious thing? That's no doubt going to entertain philosophers for centuries to come. But from a practical point of view, does it really matter at that point? If we can't reliably tell the difference, is there still a difference?
I find this notion discombobulating every time it pops up. Just because a particular nuance of an emotion doesn't have its own precise word in the local language, it doesn't mean that the locals don't experience it.
Emotions are universal. Even if some hypothetical language has a particular term for an emotion that in English would fall somewhere between "guilt" and "shame", it doesn't mean that English-speakers don't often experience it; they simply lack a term with the exact nuance, because it rarely matters that much, and we can express the idea with the help of a longer sentence.
Emotions are not only biological stimulii but a culturally conditioned experience. When people say a culture has words for certain emotions that don't exist in other cultures - it means a person's culture, including language, shapes their experience of the world and themselves.
As one lives with various cultures and languages, it becomes clear that people experience and express the world very differently. Some experiences are universal, others are cultural, and they are all uniquely personal. There's a limit to what can be translated. Outside of that limitation is a whole unknown expanse of "dark matter" that are lost in translation, no matter how many words or longer sentences you use. For deeply cultural or personal experiences, some things are not only impossible to translate, they are impossible to communicate.
If one’s goal is universal appeal, sure. If one’s goal is to capture a very specific time and place and culture, that exact nuance with that name could be very important. Proust spent hundreds of pages in trying to do this sort of thing.
> Emotions are universal. they simply lack a term with the exact nuance
You are mistaking culture for language here. That's mistake number one.
Mistake number two is assuming that a language is merely a purely biological response you can easily map to. Emotions as we conceptualise them, exist in a sociocultural context.
You say emotions are universal but, are they? Have you ever experienced what an edo period Samurai was going through after failing his lord? Ever experienced the feeling of passing your rite of passage in an amazonian tribe. No. You can surely interpret those situations through your own lens and experience feelings about your interpretation but that doesn't mean you are feeling what they are feeling. You could have your own interpretation of what falling from a high altitude feels like. It doesn't mean that is going to match the emotion of someone who has actually jumped.
Mistake three is assuming that your own cultural context (which you have ignored) has the same emotional interpretation of a situation as any other context. A situation that in a cultural context might elicit feelings of belonging, in another might elicit feelings of entrapment, anxiety or lack of freedom.
The very idea that everyone experiences the same emotions is itself a cultural byproduct of a culture that often sees itself as the mirror of the world rather than as an additional perspective of it.
To be fair with you, I have only mapped English Films as of now. I havent had much finding enough Indian film scripts (and am interested in Japanese / Korean films over time), but i do know that the way stories are told - there is a big difference between the way stories are told in europe vs how they are told in Hollywood (even they are both in english).
Not pitching, but giving some context here : The first product we built is an audience analytics platform. We use near eye headsets while audiences are watching films during test screenings, to collect occulometric and biometric data to map engagement.
Emotions are a messy thing to map and rely on. For eg, there was a film that we were testing, and three of the 50 audience members had a totally off-beat engagement signal compared to the rest of the audiences - and this was a scene in the park. So after the film was done, I had flagged the moderator to ask those three audience members what happened in the scene. So he casually brought up what parks meant to them. And one of them said, it was a weekend routine to spend time in the park with his mother whom he lost recently - so the minute he saw that park shot, thats all he could think of, and had nothing to do with the film.
So if you really base a narrative structure on emotions, we will have to baseline every single person on earth for all of their experiences, and wade through that - and it would be impossible to produce a mass media outcome.
Stories hinge on emotion (absolutely) but beyond that it is also a journey, where the audience participates, pays attention, and engages - we see this with occulometric and biometric data. And to truly engage, audiences must understand the words being spoken - i could watch a portuguese film without subtitles and as much as i could guess maybe 10% of the narrative, i wouldnt have a clue whats going on - let alone participate in it.
Our system currently cannot accomodate for languages other than english (we are doing some tests with German, French, Spanish and Hindi - but i wouldnt rank the confidence levels on those to be high enough yet). Beta, at best.
Thank you for asking that very crucial question. I appreciate it.
I am only going to address the last point, because I believe is a summary of your whole critique.
> The very idea that everyone experiences the same emotions is itself a cultural byproduct of a culture that often sees itself as the mirror of the world
I was raised by people from different regions, who spoke a common language. When I was a child, we moved to another region that spoke a different language. By that time I had already became bilingual and multicultural.
Then, I learned English. Yeah, not my first language, nor my second.
Eventually, I married a foreigner from a completely different culture to mine. We moved to a third country, then a fourth. We currently live in what is arguably the most cosmopolitan city in the world, with over 50% of foreign-born residents. And no, I have never lived in the US, although I've had coworkers there.
Does this help clarify how much I conflate language and culture, or how much my thinking is "a cultural byproduct of a culture that often sees itself as the mirror of the world "?. Or is it possible that my thinking is shaped precisely by the variety of languages, cultures and nations I've been exposed to?
Quick reminder that not all mothers are good people that we must keep in touch with. For people recovering from a rough childhood, here are a couple of resources that may be useful to you:
1. "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents" by Gibson.
I grew up in a toxic household (my mom cheated when I was two, my stepfather was very abusive towards my mom, and my mom was always condescending and materialistic and kept using me to get money from my birth father, my birth father has depression and I just never felt any love from him), and I now barely keep in touch with both my parents, the first one hit home.
Thank you for the acknowledgement of this. Mother's Day can be intensely painful for people who had or have abusive or neglectful mothers. I think this should be acknowledged before the blanket advice of "call your mom" is given.
It is a little frustrating how those without this perspective react with shock when they discover that some of us have gone no contact with one of our parents. I was chatting to some muslim street preacher the other day and he told me that respect for your parents was a pillar of the faith, so that and my inability to grow a beard means I could never pick the Islam.
Thank you for saying this. It needs saying as society finds it hard to acknowledge. My children are now no contact with their mother but it is painful.
They may read like so many others, but what I don't understand is why special agents in the FBI would take it upon themselves to report strange phenomena.
This seems like it would be a CLM, as the authority of their testimony is central to their function as federal LE.
Yes, you touch on something that is key to the past few years of soft disclosure: why are highly cleared people like Grusch, Gallaudet, Nell, and so many others putting themselves in such a delicate position? I have not been able to come up with a solid plausible explanation, other than they genuinely believe what they say, bizarre as it sounds.
And what sort of evidence does it take for people like that to believe things like that? I presume it takes more than blurry dots moving against a dark background. Hopefully future data releases will give us something that answers that question.
> The object was described as being "similar to the Eye or [sic] Sauron from Lord of the Rings, except without the pupil, or maybe an orange Storm Electrify bowling ball."
It would have been some fantastic spy tech, alright.
You make a good point. At the same time, when he broke his electoral promise to stop foreign interfefence and kidnapped Maduro, his voter base did not turn against him. That seems to have emboldened him to pursue more military actions abroad.
Now let's see how long until he invades Cuba, and how his voters will react.
I wonder what Cuba would look like now if Batista had never been overthrown. That's probably on par with how it would have worked if US meddling were more successful. I can't say I know it would be worse.
Difficult to separate "Cuba is bad because it is badly governed" from "Cuba is bad because it has been heavily sanctioned and no longer gets help from the Soviet Union", really. Too many different variables. Hard to imagine it being worse than Haiti or El Salvador, but also hard to imagine it having free elections (because that would immediately elect an anti-US socialist who would be overthrown again).
Somebody, in a conversation of which there will be no record, told him it was a good idea, telling him it would be quick, he would be lauded as a hero, there would be vast mineral riches, etc. This person wanted to break up NATO, but this wasn't part of the sales pitch, I imagine.
I think that was just silly. Nothing actually happened in Greenland. His whole thing is about slowing China down. That explains Venezuela, Iran, and a lot of the price-rising tariffs are explained by wanting to choke Russia's oil and gas revenues, which also has the secondary effect of hitting China.
Almost everyone's asking the same question regardless of what they think's going on inside Trump's head. The two most coherent answers I've seen are "to soothe his narcissistic injury from being told he can't" and "feels entitled to it because NATO", you will note neither of these was his stated reason, and all of this is still catastrophically poor judgment on his part.
My experience has been exactly that: retirement = uninterrupted weekend.
I can't understand people who can't conceive of a healthy fulfilling life that does not involve work or volunteering. There is more to life than laboring.
My intuition is that it is a lot like sports betting: many laypeople bet for what they hope will happen, rather than trying to beat the market earnestly.
The winners, as you point out, are the house and those with insider knowledge.
I can understand this happening once. But, after that, management should have been involved and addressed the root problem. It would be no longer a technical or communication issue, but a project management one.
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