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[faust]

I recommend this critique of NFTs and, more generally, the crypto landscape as it exists today. Caution: Video is over 2 hours long.

[silverspawn]

I worry that this will inevitably take more of my energy than I am willing to exert on non-consciousness stuff right now, but I'll keep it in mind

[silverspawn]

[silverspawn]

I'm working on the next post describing problems for theories of consciousness right now. The first two points are

1. Physicalism (= the claim that the laws of physics are *causally closed*, i.e., exhaustively describe how physical stuff evolves)
2. The Meta Problem (= the observation that consciousness appears to have causal power since we talk about it).

One way around this is of course to reject physicalism, but AI people overwhelmingly don't want to do that (and neither do I). If one accepts physicalism, then on first glance this may seem to present a contradiction. Consciousness cannot have causal power because physics describe everything, but it must have causal power because we talk about it!

How to solve? By recognizing it as another instance of THE ONE TRUE PRINCIPLE THAT IS ALL YOU NEED TO GET WRONG ABOUT PHILOSOPHY. Except that now you're treating "consciousness" as supposed to "yourself" as outside the system.

Just as you square "I determine my actions" and "everything is predetermined" like this...



you resolve this problem the same way, i.e. by choosing one of the two ≙ theories

I will admit that this has substantially increased by appreciation for the "functionalist reductionism" "within physics" "consciousness is what an algorithm feels like from the inside" view. It certainly holds up better than the alternatives, except panpsychism.

[silverspawn]

Also it's "interactionism" not "interactionalism", good thing I use this thread to practice

[silverspawn]

Netflix has raised monthly subscription prizes from 13.99$ to 15.49$

my take is that 15.49$ still seems ridiculously low. There is no way that you can buy rights to tons and tons of feature films, and have an increasing number of people produce films exclusively for your platform, and then offer all of that for 50ct per day. And in fact I remember reading that Netflix operates at a loss every year.

they seem to be playing the long game; make the service super awesome, kill streaming sites, make everyone rely on netflix, then slowly up prices. This won't be the last increase.

Would I cancel my subscription if it cost twice as much? Don't think so. Maybe I would strategically turn it on and off or something since i sometimes don't use it for a while

[silverspawn]

But you have to value your time very low and/or have pretty morals to prefer dealing with streaming sites to paying 50ct per day. Even downloads feel like more effort than that, though mostly because my internet keeps cutting out when I use a proxy

[silverspawn]

I don't like that Netflix is lying to me

We hope you’re enjoying everything Netflix has to offer. We’re updating our prices to bring you more great entertainment. Your monthly price will change to $15.49 on March 13, 2022.

but it is very rare for large companies to not lie to their customers

[silverspawn]

of course your product would become substantially better still if you changed your algorithm to a linear regression model and gave every movie the option of no subtitles and english subtitles

[Awaclus]

But you have to value your time very low and/or have pretty morals to prefer dealing with streaming sites to paying 50ct per day. Even downloads feel like more effort than that, though mostly because my internet keeps cutting out when I use a proxy

I mostly prefer torrenting because it lets me avoid supporting a company that charges for DRM, and lets me support torrenting by seeding the things I torrent (my arbitrarily chosen goal is to maintain a ratio of 6, although at the moment it's only 5.2 and I'm a few TB short of re-reaching 6). I do also get a higher quality product for what is, at worst, the same amount of effort and often actually less, and have to give up less of my data to surveillance capitalists.

[silverspawn]

torrenting may be a thing I should do since I have a vpn, though it's probably not mainstream enough to change the point.

[silverspawn]

Here is a QRI concept that's been on my mind all the time recently.

Wikipedia:

In metallurgy and materials science, annealing is a heat treatment that alters the physical and sometimes chemical properties of a material to increase its ductility and reduce its hardness, making it more workable. It involves heating a material above its recrystallization temperature, maintaining a suitable temperature for an appropriate amount of time and then cooling.

QRI thinks the same process happens in the brain. If you enter a high energy state and then cool the brain down slowly, your brain will enter a healthier, more pristine state.

How do you enter "high energy states?" Generally, it's everything that feels very intense. A horror movie, an intense romantic experience, a high stakes situation, an unexpected emergency, psychedelics, meditation. Traveling or visiting a strange convention may also work because prediction errors from the brain increase energy, though this would require a rather high number of errors.

Meditation seems to be the most reliable, on-demand available method, if you know how to do it. In general, bottom-up sense data increases energy and top-down thoughts decrease it; since people usually think all the time, the normal state is low-energy, but disabling the energy sinks for long enough...

The best thing after entering a high energy state is to go to sleep to make the cooling period as slow as possible. The worst is going on social media and distracting yourself, making the cooling go too fast.

My last one-hour session was done for this purpose, and it took somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes for things to really kick in. A normal 10 minute session doesn't do it, at least not at my level of skill.

The theory predicts that you should be in a high mood for a while after doing this, though I don't know how long. (3-ish days?). This was definitely the case last time for at least two days after; extremely curious to test if it will work again.

If this is true, it explains a lot of things, like why the first day on vacation is often special (lots of prediction errors) and often leads to intense dreams (high energy states seem to do that), or why I sometimes feel unable to do anything but that totally resets when something sufficiently unexpected happens, or the panic monster for procrastinators, and in general why people sometimes have completely disproportionate sessions of extreme productivity. In general, I've previously had no model for why my hedonic set point varies from day to day, and this seems to be where all people are. Could also nicely fit with things like depression.

[infangthief]

I totally grant the distinction. But my point is, if every instance of a bit, like in a brain or computer or in DNA is reducible to physics, then why do you believe that the concept is fundamental beyond that? Where is the evidence for this?

To necro this... I just realised that the evidence that the concept of a bit can be abstracted is right there in what you said! You've given three instances of things which are physically very different from each other, but you've labelled each of them as a "bit".

But it probably doesn't get us very far. The reductionist can say that the concept has been abstracted one level, but is still something physical; "the concept of a bit" is just particles going round in my brain.

Ok, here's a thought experiment. If there were such a thing as a non-physical being, would it come as an "extra" surprise to find out that it was doing maths, understanding language and (non-physically) humming Beethoven's 9th to itself? Would you say "even if there were a non-physical being, it wouldn't be able to do maths because maths needs physical particles"?

[infangthief]

Also, that QRI thing sounds interesting, like it could explain a lot of stuff that just seems weird.

[silverspawn]

Would you say "even if there were a non-physical being, it wouldn't be able to do maths because maths needs physical particles"?

I definitely wouldn't say this

[silverspawn]

Note that I continue to dispute that I even am a reductionist by your standards; I'm yet to be convinced that the distinction is real. (Or if the above thought experiment counts, I'm not one.)

[silverspawn]

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

A: I promise that if you just remove both boxes, it will be logically impossible for your inability to answer this question, or lack thereof, to make a difference.

In fact, "Just remove both boxes" is a universal solutuion to every problem, phsyical or logical.

[infangthief]

Sorry, should have phrased that as "I think a physical-reductionist would have to say..."

I think with your Atoms - Consciousness table, I would say C is a comma: There are atoms, There is consciousness.

[infangthief]

But of course a physical-reductionist wouldn't get started on that statement at all. "If <false>, then , well, you can say anything you like."

[silverspawn]

Note that I continue to dispute that I even am a reductionist by your standards; I'm yet to be convinced that the distinction is real. (Or if the above thought experiment counts, I'm not one.)

Elaborating on this, maybe this is a good way to put it

whenever you describe something on several levels of abstarction, there is a 1:n relationship from one layer to a lower one, i.e, every high level concept can be implemented by several low level concepts, but every low level concept corresponds to only one high level concept. E.g., a calculator can be made out of transistors or simulated on a computer, but the particles of a pocket calculator correspond to only one high level concept; a calculator.

My reductionism is then just "It's possible to describe everything on the lowest level (i.e., physics)", not "you have to describe everything on the lowest level". I'm fine with low level descriptions.

In your thought experiment, you postulated that there is such a thing as a non-physical being, which would then maket my kind of reductionism false (unless there is a third thing physics and that non-physical stuff such that both is reducible to that)

[silverspawn]

I think with your Atoms - Consciousness table, I would say C is a comma: There are atoms, There is consciousness.

Doesn't this dodge the question? The C? in the table is about how they are causally connected. Either consciousness influences Matter (<-), or matter influences consciousness (->), or they influence each other (<->) or they are sort of the same thing (≙). If you say they're different things, this seems to only dispute ≙, but it leaves open how they influence each other. Like, <- and -> and <-> all say that they're different things.

[infangthief]

I think I'd go as far as to say "atoms could be helpful in understanding some features of consciousness"; if you're studying consciousness then you might come across atoms and want to analyse what they're doing.

One is a "higher level" concept/thing than the other, but that does not mean one causes the other.

[silverspawn]

I think you're still dodging the question? If "consciousness" is fundamental and irreducible, and "matter" is fundamental and irreducible, and they are not the same thing, then either consciousness has causal effect on matter, or it doesn't -- right?

[silverspawn]

So what about dual lands in MTG that work like this

Land XXX taps for two colors

You may choose to play XXX tapped. When XXX enters the battlefied untapped, each opponent may choose to discard a card. If they do, they draw a card.

[silverspawn]

Wikipedia:

In 1985 Stove held a competition to find the "Worst Argument in the World", and awarded the prize to himself for the argument "we can know things only under our forms of understanding/as they are related to us, etc, therefore we cannot know things as they are in themselves". He called this argument "The Gem" and argued that it appeared widely in various forms.[2]

If nothing else, at least this is pretty funny