I’m broadly skeptical that atoms and electricity can be conscious

There are various flavors of pan-psychism (and the "consciousness-first" idealists, who think that Mind is a substrate below Matter). There are some who claim that it goes all the way down, that even subatomic particles experience a micro-consciousness (and we can't rule it out, even as I share your skepticism).

One common confusion (IMO among critics and supporters alike) is to say something like "a rock experiences rock-ness". But this suffers from a compositional dilemma: does half of the rock experience half-rock-ness? If we flipped a coin for every atom, do the heads-flip rock atoms have their own experience? If we pick two rocks at random, are they experiencing two-rock-ness? It gets silly fast.

This is one thing that fascinates me about "ontology", simultaneously an inquiry into categories, and Being. It bewildered me at first, that it seemed to be doing double-duty on two distinct subjects, but I now see that the two are inseparable, that Being is in part defined negatively (apophatically), by the boundary that separates the Being from its not-Being.

My intuition on the nature of consciousness, is that it's something akin to a field which permeates the Universe, and that biological systems adapted to leverage that field, acting like a gravity well that concentrates subjectivity in one place, drawing a boundary (event horizon?) around experience, in a way that a rock doesn't. My ancestors could have avoided fire with "-X utility points", and sought food with "+X utility points", but it turned out to be more efficient to adapt with "fire ouch, food yum". And in zero-sum competition (predator/prey dynamics), each organism has an incentive to avoid leaking its subjectivity into another's.

It's far from a full theory, but it's the best I've got. :)

theories like this seem like grasping at straws to over explain a phenomenon we don't fully understand. it places consciousness on a pedestal. it's religious thinking.

For good and ill, the phenomenology of human experience is that we are religious animals. Naturalism / Materialism has still left us with two unsolved (perhaps insoluble) questions: the hard problem of consciousness, and why there is something instead of nothing.

I think it's a mistake to leap to socially-constructed, historically contingent solutions ("my magic book has the answers, as written by the Universe Architect, it says so in my magic book"). I also think it's a mistake to dismiss (seemingly) outlandish hypotheses.

These theories do, explicitly, place consciousness on a pedestal, precisely because there's no reason to derive consciousness from evolutionary selection pressures: show me any biological or cognitive feedback loop, and I can describe a "p-zombie" version which is pure mechanism, without experience, a thermostat with extra steps. The notion that consciousness is an "epiphenomenon", a spandrel, a side effect, is entirely unsatisfying (and doesn't address the question, of where else that side effect might be taking place; the IIT-ers bite that bullet, that the thermostat experiences something).

For an intellectually rigorous exploration of philosophical idealism, I'd recommend Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman. (I'm not claiming they're correct, just that they put forth the strongest version of the case.)

I think it's more the patterns and activity in large numbers of them that have interesting properties. Like one pixel isn't much but a bunch of them can be a movie.

But you can: you can just: use the thing you’ve built and derive utility from it, casting aside the origin

Hey are we re inventing Tim berners Lee solid protocol

Ngl I think this is partially an artifact of it having a better grasp of English than almost everyone

Frequently its choice of a particular word is perfect and gives me the vocabulary to talk about the task at hand the way I want

Like it’s tuned to just be “maximally dense” instead of “dense/technical where you can handle it and simple where you can’t”

It doesn’t know where your language strengths/weaknesses are, so it can’t communicate to you like a fellow human does.

Human explaining something: are you familiar with phlox gabrania? no? let me give you some background first

Claude explaining something: gedarkin load bearing phlox gabrania seam. Also, you didn't ask about cheesecake but let me tell you about phlox gabrania cheesecake woles.

Quality and accuracy of information on the internet is going to shit:

Models are already paying per search for gated access to higher accuracy info (this is abstracted by anthropic, chatgpt etc currently where they have cut deals w Google etc to allow their traffic through)

Models don’t currently interact with the economy directly in a real way (by eg themselves deciding to pay for a high quality information source), but they will within a few months as folks get more claw-like agents

Those transactions can happen with bitcoin…. or they can happen on stripe

At least that’s my read

Totally fixable w a little configuration (ask Claude)

But yeah it’s completely ridiculous and frustrating that the default is to just lock up your DE

Oh my pi already prunes tool calls on compaction (not sure if normal pi also does this)

> The fact that you’re nervous means you will be the first to be replaced!

Is that sarcasm? Cause it's not too different from something I'd say sarcastically (e.g. it's very 10X AI engineer, very overconfident while missing pretty obvious things).

Generally no. It’s a good model

How would you compare it to Opus?