They will also grab with their toes. Place your finger across their toes between the foot and the sweet little toesies and they will grip your finger pretty hard. We monkey
When the wife wanted to divorce, the dad recruited his mother-in-law to convince the wife to stay on the marriage.
He was selfishly hiding information and making lifelong decisions for everyone because "he knew best."
The dad died of a heart attack. His family was too ignorant to know a quick drive to the hospital was the best action. They didn't know because the 911 operator told them to wait for the ambulance (for legal reasons, they will not tell you to rush to the hospital. Imagine the liability of a wreck).
There's no need to play devil's advocate. Private decisions were made, and we all have the privilege of reading about the outcome. It gives us much to consider, and not much else.
So every trained model (algorithm + weights) has a recording of one consciousness, put through many simulations (different contexts). Whereas a human's or animal's consciousness only goes through one simulation per our own consciousness's simulation (the universe).
> Could you ever possibly plug the AI consciousness into a human body and see it function? What about a robot body?
People have trained AIs to control robots. They can accomplish tasks in controlled environments and are improving to handle more novelty and chaos, but so far nowhere near what even insects can handle.
i think it's still an open question how "conscious" that infants and newborns are. It really depends on how you define it and it is probably a continuum of some kind.
This is well documented fact, in the medical and cognitive science fields: humans consciousness fade away as their neurons are reduced/malformed/misfunctioning.
You can trivially demonstrate it in any healthy individual using oxygen starvation.
There's no one neuron that results in any definition of human consciousness, which requires that it's a continuum.
For sure, pain is useful when it leads to learning. We learn through feedback from our senses. We're completely dependent upon this mode in the beginning.
As our brains mature, we learn how to predict our environments in ways to maximize pleasure, and avoid pain (grossly oversimplified). We learn more about others, what works, and what doesn't.
An AI also learns from feedback, but is it ever perceiving anything?
Do the physical quanta we call electrons experience the phenomenon we poorly define but generally call consciousness?
If you believe consciousness is a result of material processes: Is the thermodynamic behavior of an electron, as a process, sufficient to bestow consciousness in part or in whole?
If you believe it is immaterial: What is the minimum “thing” that consciousness binds to, and is that threshold above or below the electron? This admittedly asks for some account of the “above/below” ordering, but assume the person answering is responsible for providing that explanation.
It can bind to anything. Human consciousness can temporarily bind to a shovel, and to a gopher who can only perceive things at its level, under the ground, the shovel will appear conscious. Similarly, our body is the outer layer that's temporarily bound to our brain, which in turn is bound to activity within neurons, which in turn is driven by something else. As for the fundamental origin of consciousness, it's at different levels in different people. In some rare examples, the highest level is the electrochemical activity within neurons, so that's their origin of consciousness. Those with the higher level will perceive those below as somewhat mechanical, I guess, as the workings of their consciousness will look observable. On the other hand, consciousness from a higher origin will seem mysteriously unpredictable to those below. Then I think there is a possibility of an infinitely high origin: no matter at which level you inspect it, it will always appear to be just a shell for a consciousness residing one level higher. Some humans may be like that. Things are complicated by the fact that different levels have different laws and time flows: at the level of mechanical gears things can be modeled with simple mechanics, at the level of chemical reactions things become more complicated, then at the level of electrons the laws are completely different, and if electrons are driven by something else then we are lost completely. For example, a watch may be purely mechanical, or it can be driven by a quartz oscillator that also takes input from an accelerometer. I understand that this idea may seem uncomfortable, but the workings of the universe doesn't have to fit the narrow confines of the Turing machines that we know of.
That's a very meta view. There's levels to consciousness for sure, due to intelligence and perception.
But, my mind never leaves my skull so it's definitely bound to my brain and nothing else (ignoring electrical fields).
We can imagine what it's like to be other things, but we can never be sure (and almost certainly would not accurately match reality). Our imagination is bound to our senses, so it's limited. I can't even be sure that the color red that comes to my mind is the same color you see in your mind. As long as our imaginations paint the same color every time red is perceived: we'd be none the wiser and would go on thinkong we see the same thing. And also consider animals that can perceive colors and sounds beyond human range. Does this say anything more about consciousness?
An electron almost certainly is not thinking or aware, but does it perceive? Does a thermostat on a wall perceive temperature? Do AIs perceive anything?
Is perception even useful to think about when trying to define consciousness?
I'm rambling off topic... going back to your points: if something is sufficiently intelligent to understand the workings of a thing: does this automatically place the understood thing in a lower consciousness?
Could a diety, or a force of nature have a higher consciousness than us? Or are we above the force, in terms of consciousness? It doesn't even seem useful to make these comparisons....
I would say yes, that things below us is what we clearly understand and see, and things above us is what we are confused about. For example, the motions of electrons as well as the motions of galaxies is a mystery to us, so any lifeforms at those levels will be above us. Studying them won't be an option, as any meaningful understanding of their ways of life would require consciousness at their level.
When we blow air, the motion of air particles may be studied in a mechanical way, and some intelligent microbes, if such exist, would come to a naive theory of air motion, as they are oblivious to what brings that air into motion. It's understandable, because many generations of those microbes change while we exhale just once. Similarly, what we perceive as magnetism or even the time itself might be some incomprehensible formless lifeform, and it would see us as simple and predictable microbes.
Biased newsfeeds are one thing, cronyism and flooding courts/weaponizing the judicial system are a different thing.
It could be the case that the level of cronyism and weaponizing we see today is the same amount as in the past.
It's up to the reader to determine how much of their opinion is due to bias, and how much is due to a real increase in nefarious political strategy. Some are more diligent about checking their sources that others.
To be fair to Trump, he was the target of lawfare after his election loss in 2020, for instance. He claimed later that he would have vengeance. Not a magnanimous move, but Trump is not magnanimous. He has stated before that he enjoys destroying his enemies, with relish and verve.
In any case, when we fixate on one political figure or party, we lose sight of the general picture. In sociological terms, Trump is not very important. He is more of an expression of the times than their cause. He may catalyze certain changes, but he's hardly alone in doing that. In the broad sense, the general historical trajectory is not really deflected by him.
A wiser perspective is to look at broad trends. One should read Plato's Republic. The decadence of society described in that book - degenerating into timocracy (rule by honor), then oligarchy (rule by wealth), then democracy (rule by freedom), ending finally in anarchy - are a good context for understanding how these processes tend to play out.
So those boxes of classified documents were totally innocuous? "Find me votes" and alternate elector slates weren't to advance his stated goal of reversing his loss?
I think my point is you're expected to triage find me votes vs 911. And the fact that find me votes is in the news isn't indicative of democratic decline, its the way the news work.
I am not sure I understand. Both of those events are significant: a sophisticated terrorist attack on the United States and a president trying to coerce a swing state governor into changing its election results.
News triages the newsworthiness. Viewers triage what elements of the news that are most meaningful to them.
I don't really see the problem, except qualms about execution.
News triages newsworthiness based on clicks, its incentivized to get an emotional reaction out of you.
The reader has to wade through all that to triage the absolute importance.
After years of consuming media that led me to believe dt was a Russian spy or at best a political underdog I stopped believing there was some grand scheme that he's trying to overtake the government. Half the country voted for him twice, the dedicated investigation did not convict him of collusion, the supreme court is doing its job.
Do you not see the trend to keep you anticipating some terrible coup etc?
> To be fair to Trump, he was the target of lawfare after his election loss in 2020, for instance.
To be fair to reality, no, he wasn’t. He committed a number of very serious crimes flagrantly out in the open and the Justice Department was inordinately slow in responding to them out of a number of factors, including institutional partisan bias (even under Democratic Administration the bulk of the federal criminal investigatory apparatus has always been Republican, including political appointees at the FBI, and every single FBI director in the bureau's history), concern over appearing political trumping concern over enforcing the law, and, well, a number of other things.
One I wonder about but cannot prove: I wonder if the Justice Department wanted the prosecutions to wait until 2024, so that they would tar Trump during the campaign. If so, they were well-served for that bit of trying to put a thumb on the electoral scales. Trump was able to delay the cases until after the election. If they had begun a year earlier, we might be living in a very different world.
They are and they aren't. They're both a form of escapism, for the user to deny reality while in an altered state of consciousness. Users do it to their detriment, despite social and health consequences. Thus, some of the techniques used to help people with substance use disorder (SUD) are also applicable to screen addiction. fwiw, gambling addiction is another different but same addiction with similar treatment plans. No, gambler's aren't shooting up heroin the the bathroom, nor are screen addicts, but at some level they are comparable. The first thing you reach for in the morning and the last thing you think about before bed.
This elides the difference between drugs/addictions that make you more conscious of your surroundings and those which make you less conscious of them. I put cigarettes in the same category as coffee. They make you more alert, make your brain work faster. They are sister chemicals. If I want to escape I drink or smoke weed, play video games or gamble. Cigarettes are not an escape.
In both cases the whole society is affected. I have to pay into my countries health system for people who got sick by choice. Thankfully this isnt the case for people addicted to screens.
Smoking related deaths are relatively cheap. In Canada a typical pack-a-day smoker pays an extra $5k/year in taxes, and then dies not long after they retire and start collecting social security.
A bigger burden are the healthy people who live into their 90s while their bodies slowly decay over the span of decades
smoking, alcoholism and obesity are fiscal positives, not negatives.
smokers pay obscene amount of money in cigarette tax for decades only to die in their 50's or 60's instead of collecting the benefits of having also contributed into social security all their lives. most of them die suddenly from a heart attack or after a short illness.
Its not that simple. Smokers that dont die suddenly (how many are those actually?) dont die much earlier because healthcare improved and also:
- kill/cause damages through passive smoke
- can/do cause enormous health bills (my dad struggled on for almost 6 years)
- cleaning up their trash costs money
- set fire to stuff with thrown cigarette butts
- often dont just die and just cant work anymore thus stopping working earlier, create less value in general
I'd love to read up on current studies/research but lots of studies are 10+ years old now but the damages seem to outweigh them not having a retirement.
Smoking used to be an unavoidably pushed part of life, too. It was linked to strength, manliness (or femininity actually, depending on the target market), independence, etc. Tobacco company mascots loomed over us from billboards, and told us on TV that cigarettes make a person cool. Untold billions of dollars were spent on marketing literal poison, using every trick in the book, and it worked. People smoked all the time, everywhere - at the dinner table, on planes, at their desk at work. People burned their houses down because they went to sleep with a cigarette still in their mouth.
Just because something feels like an unavoidable part of life, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true - it could just mean that that giant advertising companies convinced you that it is. I wonder if in a couple decades we’ll look back at screen addiction the same way we look at tobacco now.
I understand how cigarettes were advertised and pushed, and seemingly unavoidable.
Is technology the same? Yes and no...we can totally abstain from tech and live that lifestyle. But then we wouldn't be here discussing this issue at all, or ever.
So while they are both pushed: if you cut out smoking today you can still live a 'normal' life. Cutting out tech is a drastically different life.
I'd rather not discuss what is meant by 'normal' -- I hope you get where I'm coming from.
I think “using technology” is just too broad, and a distinction needs to be made. Screen addiction doesn’t just mean using a screen.
You’re right that it’d be pretty much impossible to refuse to engage with any modern technology these days (unless you lived in an Amish community or something similar); but obviously there’s a huge difference between responsible use of tech where useful or necessary (and for fun, too, in moderation!), and lying in bed mindlessly scrolling through Tiktok and/or watching cable tv for hours every day - which I see a lot more people doing in the past couple years.
Maybe there are different ideas about flow. But to me, flow is about eliminating distractions, and being creative without requiring too much pondering.
Our brains are always looking for distractions. Having your phone nearby, or working in an area where distractions are easily accessible prevents flow. Your brain is always looking to be distracted, it's akin to how you are tuned to pay more attention when you hear your name called. Even if you think to yourself: I'm not going to touch my phone while I work, it's always there calling for your brain's attention.
So step 1 to flow is removing distractions. Going to a library helps because you're cut off from many distractions and your brain stops "listening" for a bit.
And then, you must be able to create something from what you already know. Fluent writing, art, programming can then "flow" directly from you into the real world without requiring looking up info, or taking tutorials.
Flow has little to do with the "true nature of things", imo.
This could be valuable advice for someone who is beating themselves up about not being perfect at controlling their focus (if they are ready to hear it).
However it’s also stated in a way that’s disrespectful to the discussion. It’s okay for people to have goals, and to strive and struggle towards them, resisting instinct that could undermine their efforts, and sometimes falling short and being disappointed. This is a natural part of the higher level reasoning we are blessed with.
SAYS Chuang Tsu: Confucius went to the West to deposit his writings in the library of the Imperial House of Chao, and Tsu Lu counseled him, saying:
“I have heard that the officer in charge was one named Lao Tsu, who has resigned his office and lives privately. As you, master, wish to deposit your works, why not go and gain his help? “
Confucius said, “Good”, and went to see Lao Tsu, who refused his assistance, whereupon the other began to give a summary of Spring and Autumn with the view of convincing Lao Tsu. But Lao Tsu interrupted:
“This is all nonsense. What are your fundamentals? “
“Charity”, replied Confucius, and duty to one s neighbor.
Said Lao Tsu: “And do you think charity and righteousness constitute man’s original nature?”
“I do. Without charity the princely man could not be what he is. Without righteousness he would be of no effect. These two belong to the original nature of the superior man.”
Lao Tsu continued:
“Tell me what you mean by charity and righteousness?”
Confucius answered:
“To be in one s inmost heart in sympathy with all things, to love all men without selfishness this is the characteristic of charity and duty to one s neighbor.”
Lao Tsu exclaimed:
“What stuff! Does not universal love contradict itself? Is not your elimination of self a positive manifestation of self?”
I would invest in micro strategy if I cared about Bitcoin because I don't want to mess with wallets or pay someone to manage my wallet.
Banks can do fractional reserve banking to 'pay' for the expense of storing our money. Can crypto wallets do such a thing? Or would they have to borrow money?
Some exhanges like coinbase are basically banks at this point.
You open an acccount, you do a kyc, you declare it to the state, and they are submitted to regulations in your country.
Coinbase is an expensive one, but way cheaper than micro strategy, and is from y combinator s12 so you know what to expect.
Deal with an exhange directly, it's cheaper, and more flexible. No wallet to manage, and you can handle a few millions before even having to talk to a human.
Of course you lose a lot of advantages of crypto, but you were going to with micro strategy anyway.
Or buy an etf if you really like your bank.
Although I would argue now is the worse time to buy. You had to buy last year, or wait until 2 years, assuming the halving cycle is still relevant, which I believe it is.
It is expected from most crypto holders that we are not that far from the top and the usual crash back is near.
Some my friends are still in, but have placed their exit orders already. I'm already out with a 500% profit and play it safe.
You may be able to get some more, but it's getting riskier by the day.
And maybe the cycle will break, but it's really not what I would bet on.
Because you said it is? Come on, let's have some more informed dialog than that.
> As long as the Bitcoin price goes up, that is a viable business.
He's been doing this for 4 years. The price has had some wild swings in that timeframe. He's sold one time (for tax loss harvesting) and bought right back in. Everything is tracked in public, because it is a public security. https://saylortracker.com/
He's never sold because he had to. In that timeframe, bitcoin has also always gone up. It is higher than it was 4 years ago. He has stated in public that he won't ever sell, nor will he have to.
There's an old saying: Time is money. Flip that around: Money is time.
If you have money, you have more time, more opportunities to try things in order to find success.
You can read all about how to play an instrument, or how a bike works, but you'll never learn to ride or play without time to practice.