grabbalacious

13 ms·

1.
by grabbalacious 6y ago
Or bath. Douglas Adams endorsed baths for such purposes! I'm just glad PG is writing them. I don't mind if they're not always in his sphere. That's the point of essays: to try to sort out our thinking in new areas (from
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by grabbalacious 6y ago
>Imagine going through life with a high-tech spam filter from the future that can filter out wikihow and boring science. Happily it's available now and it's called intuition . If something is boring then avoid; if something
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by grabbalacious 6y ago
Very true. From those classic movies I've watched frequently my brain has gleaned a collection of images, phrases and situations which readily pop into mind. They're not all fully-fledged parables: they're mostly quick analog
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
The main thing is, "so-and-so proved that" or "he showed that" or "they demonstrated scientifically that" refer to processes that can't convey certainty . Even in mathematics there's no certainty bec
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
Yes, and isn't this cause for some optimism since many people have now received vaccines such as Prevnar-13 and Pneumovax-23?
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
Outsider's uninformed opinion: if you attend AA then regardless of any official narrative or agenda this means you're spending important time with people who (a) used to drink, and (b) don't drink any more. Their example plus
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
Coming soon, AI prediction of what untelephonic voices would have sounded like! Starting with a detelephonised One Night in Bangkok. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgc_LRjlbTU
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
Thanks. It's possible to unconsciously interact with objects. My guess is that conscious perception requires both representations of oneself and the object, together with associated memories. e.g. a green ball has an associations wit
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
Well the reason I think it is that you can't just be conscious: you have to be conscious of something. No, unless the software included a representation of the computer itself. Then it might be capable of consciousness, IDK. But be
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
You're quite right. That last sentence was intended to be a catchy and rhetorical summary.
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
You have to learn to see stuff, or recognise sounds, for example.
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
Well I suspect a memory system, together with stable input/output hardware, are necessary but not sufficient. To be a conscious agent, said agent's memory must include a representation of itself. Otherwise it can't truthfully
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
My argument against panpsychism (the principled form of animism, which is ancient) is that to perceive something you have to have a representation of it in memory. Ergo if you don't have a memory system you can't be conscious of a
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
>What is it in us that longs to do that? It is animism , the belief that everything is alive, active and imbued with spirit and it is very natural. It arises because we perceive things only indirectly, via our mental representations o
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
Why is it not full AGI? Seems to me that the ability to perform 'spontaneous yet coherent storytelling' perforce makes one a universal explainer (i.e. a person).
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
House rules that obviate this to some extent (e.g. 'free parking') seem a bit like a debt jubilee .
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
This clip from his first Connections series is a favourite of mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPcZ_5uCldg Near the end it provides an answer to OP's question 'What's the most important modern simple i
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
Most thoughtful people seem to agree that school is bad for creativity and that real learning is led by curiosity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY But we still have little idea how curiosity works exactly or how
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
Communities used to be small with the members mutually dependent upon one another, e.g. a medieval village. Everyone knew everyone else and the arrangement had to work. If it didn't work then people suffered and could be seen to suff
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
Well, that's OK, provided we're honest about what it is, e.g. we don't use media to create the illusion of a majority consensus where none exists.
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
But to begin with he was somewhat aloof from his father and brothers and he decided to kill that police captain. As I recall.
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
It's hard to think about these potential calamities. Any given pandemic is unlikely to be on the scale of 1918. But the next big one will come, eventually. Any given asteroid strike is unlikely to be on the scale of a Yucatan. But the
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
Yeah he tried to get out and he couldn't. Perhaps the secret is not to get sucked in in the first place.
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
Good point. Although I think it tends to be a consensus among an influential minority of the populace rather than society as a whole.
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
I started near the end and thought that Columbo had been shot by the mafia. As in Lieutenant Columbo. The horror! More seriously, though, they're great movies and I enjoyed them. Can't help feeling though that some people come awa
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
>I'm not sure what the author is really proposing that AI practitioners should do. If he wants us to work for our moral betterment ('Nobody does AI for our moral betterment') he's asking us become like old-fashioned
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
>On the other hand, philosophers agree That's hilarious. I've never noticed philosophers agreeing about anything. One thing I would question is the necessity of having viewpoints at all about things which aren't connec
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
>Environmentalists are divided over nuclear power, with some maintaining it is dangerous and expensive, while others say that to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 all technologies are needed. Yes, a mix of technologies. But there&#x27
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
You're right, it isn't a trivial matter. However, neither has it been well explained. For example, how exactly has porn been ruled out? Porn also grew steadily since mid 20th C...
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by grabbalacious 7y ago
Yes, BPA accumulates in body fat. However, the environment has also been flooded with pornography which could also be responsible for the decline in testosterone/sperm counts, no?

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