https://nitter.1d4.us/MKBHD/status/1668048839675092992
diogenes, holding an RGB PC, screaming "behold, a human" at youtubers
In the house of a rich gamer, the only place to spit is on the monitor.
No, that’s not what I was telling you at all, wtf are you talking about
I really love when people point to organs as high tech. Eyes really suck as 'super high resolution, high dynamic range sensors' we are incredibly lucky that the brain has literally co-evolved to interpret (and create) those shitty inputs.
tech implies it was designed and if the human body was designed I have notes
Manufacturing consent for cybernetic brain implants by bringing biology discourse into alignment with tech discourse?
A bit late for that. Your phone is already a cybernetic augmentation. They've been manufacturing consent since the 70s with CogSci computational theories.
Nah, dude. Actually, its extremely normal to upgrade your frontal cortex every three years.
We've had cybernetic brain implants for decades. There are cyber eyes that people can use to determine rough shapes even if they previously had no vision. The current limiting factor in resolution is you have to glue the leads from the camera to individual nerves and you can only fit so many of them in before the heat of their operation starts to damage the nerves.
Tech bros will really look at the beautiful tragedy of human existence and go "yeah this is just like my sweet gaming rig"
i really think the comparison of a brain to a computer is more apt than a lot of people here would like to admit, and it isn't just some tech bro shit, like. Yeah, I know there are innumerable ways computer chips and neurons differ in how they function but ultimately it's all about sensing and sending and interpreting and responding to information. the physical nature and evolutionary development of the brain has given it so many layers of complexity and redundancy that weird shit like consciousness has come out of it as an emergent property, and while yeah computers and shit like chatgpt aren't there yet at some point (lol we'll all die first probably tho) I imagine at some point they will become so similarly complex that individual people or teams of people will no longer be able to adequately maintain and understand them any better than people currently understand the human brain and that whatever results will be so indistinguishable from actual conscious thinking life that anyone attempting to argue that computers and the human brain are totally different will end up having to dip into some really uncomfortable rhetorical arguments to maintain that biological life is like, totally different, bro
i'm high and on more caffeine than my body can handle, don't @ me arguing about this I will simply be really annoying in my responses u_u
I read an article somewhere a looong time ago which made the point that the way brains are viewed basically corresponds to the current state of technological development in society.
In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.
In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. That spirit ‘explained’ our intelligence – grammatically, at least.
The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.
By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.
Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software.
It reminds me of Marx's comment about Charles Darwin looking at the biological world and only seeing bourgeois categories, but the science spoke for itself
Turns out that mental illnesses aren't due to "chemical imbalance", that's just something drug marketers made up because it's more reassuring than "we have no idea what this drug does but sixty percent of people feel better when they take it, but one in 200 times your immune system attacks your mucus membranes for no identifiable reason and your skin falls off.
It's more that your brain does not work like a computer in any way. Like, not at all.
Ok you're going to be one of the bio supremacists arguing with chatgpt-9000 how the infinitely and impossibly complex layers of algorithms that people no longer understand that make it up are somehow different than your biological signaling because reasons and that's why it has to work the Wendy's "self checkout" and doesn't get to go to robot heaven because it doesn't have a soul, cool story bro
Just talking about neurons shows why the comparison is severely flawed. We keep finding out that there is cognitive processing going on in your digestive system all kinds of internal and external factors effect how your brain works, and there isn't a really meaningful distinction between the brain and the rest of the body. It's so much, much more complex than a few logic gates on a rock and comparing the two is very reductive. We're not going to make a human-like mind just reproducing neuron linkages. There's a lot more to it than that, even if the people saying there are quantum processes involved in cognition turn out to be wrong.
We keep finding out that there is cognitive processing going on in your digestive system
literally just more neurons, so what, more information and sensory shit getting added to the mix but it's still basically an infinitely tangled algorithmic spaghetti that makes up your consciousness
We’re not going to make a human-like mind
you can just stop it there, I'm aware
It’s so much, much more complex than a few logic gates on a rock
A neuron is much more complex and can consequently do a lot more things, adding to the complexity of the signaling and processing and whatever else you wanna call it mix that eventually comes out as consciousness, but that doesn't mean that "a few logic gates on a rock" can't be configured to operate with a similar degree of complexity
I don't think chatgpt is alive but I do think that at some point the systems underlying things like it will grow sufficiently complex that you could call it conscious and, again, like I said, have to resort to some real questionable arguments to say that biological life is different
I would be Commander Data's friend and not allow him to be chopped up and studied just because his circuitry could be reduced in argument to "a few logic gates on a rock" :soviet-huff:
I don’t think chatgpt is alive but I do think that at some point the systems underlying things like it will grow sufficiently complex that you could call it conscious and, again, like I said, have to resort to some real questionable arguments to say that biological life is different
People are already failing the turing test against chatgpt, but as it stands it doesn't do anything like thinking. All it can do is produce series of letters based on statistical weights in it's training model. There's no awareness, no context, no abstraction, no cognitive process what so ever. It can't reflect, it can't evaluate truth values, it can't perform any cognitive processes at all. People talk about lying and hallucination, but both of those terms are deeply misleading and fundamentally misunderstand what the models are doing. It can't lie - it has no theory of mind. It has no awareness of itself, let alone anything else. It can't hallucinate either. It's not answering questions incorrectly or giving you the wrong information. It's not answering your questions at all. It's comparing the sequence of letters in your prompt to sequences of letters in it's training set and producing a statistically weighted sequence of letters based on that training set. There's no abstraction, there's no manipulation of concepts. There's no cognition. That's why the image plagiarism generators can't draw hands, or really any complex object except faces - hands come in so many different shapes that the model weighs the colors and shapes of fingers, but lacking abstraction it cannot recognize that all of those shapes represent the same conceptual object. It doesn't know that most hands have five fingers because it doesn't know what hands or fingers are. It doesn't know anything. It's a math problem that compares numerical values and produces outputs statistically similar to the input prompt.
Personally i think trying to make thinking computers is stupid bazinga stuff. We already have fully functioning self aware machines capable of all kinds of extremely complex functions we mostly don't understand yet. We should work with what we've got instead of trying to recreate one of the most complex emergent systems in observable reality when we don't even understand it's basic operating principles. Augmenting existing brains, to me at least, makes a lot more sense than fussing around stratching crude drawings on rocks.
On the flip side, you can shrug on a camelback and credibly claim you've installed water cooling on your CPU.
CW: That quote about all the horrible things happening every moment
spoiler
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
No. No, not at all. I thought this would be in response to something but he's actually just a fucking idiot saying this for no reason. We do not do real-time data processing. We approximate a lot of shit. Most of what you're "seeing" right now is actually shit you remember seeing a microsecond ago, your brain filling in the blanks because it can only actually focus on one point at a time. Also, literally every time you move your eyes in their sockets, you go blind until they stop again. You don't notice because, again, your brain is filling in the blanks.
I really, really want people to stop using the computer analogy, because it's so wrong on every level. There is no differentiation between hardware and software. Your mind is an illusion created by itself. You're a bunch of chemical reactions, a system in motion that wears itself out as it moves, and your fucking bone marrow affects the thoughts in your head right now.
I am deeply uncomfortable with how neuroscience keeps finding out that random pieces of your digestive system have significant cognitive functions.
you me and everyone is a fire that stokes itself
DO NOT FORGET TO STOKE YOURSELF OR YOU WILL BE CRABBY AND THEN DIE
You should just skip ahead and realise free will itself is an illusion. You can't not do what you have a high enough drive to do, for example if you're trying to lose weight, a long term goal you think you set for yourself (lol) but there's a tasty free pizza offered to you, just sitting there, if your drive to lose weight is high enough you'll resist the pizza, if not, you'll eat it because of your other drive, hunger/craving for tasty things/craving for nutrient you need from that item.
You don't choose your needs, everyone knows that, but most people haven't figured out you don't choose your wants. They just exist.
Next time you get an itchy ear, try not to scratch it, unless your drive to prove me wrong is high enough, you'll scratch it, so no matter what you do, you did it because you had to, scratch the itch or prove me wrong, which ever matters more to you, a thing you didn't decide.
Enjoy your uncomfortable feeling for a few days before your brain makes you forget this as a coping mechanism :)
Free will isn't even an illusion, it's a nonsensical leftover from when primitive frenchmen believed in the existance of an immaterial soul. I've been forced to conced that the universe may not be deterministic because of those quantum mechanics dickweeds, but choice is almost certainly illusory at best.
I have severe long term treatment resistant depression, anxiety disorders, severe executive dysfunction from time to time. If I had free choice of the will I would go punch Rene Descartes right in his stupid face.
___Ah so you know already, fair enough! I can't say I understand quantum mechanics enough to know if or how it might prove our universe isn't deterministic, but I'm willing to bet it's one of those things that eventually the people studying it will loop back around to thinking it proves determinism again on a larger scale or something (such as infinite dimensions with infinite configurations of atoms/quarks/whatever).
PS sorry to hear about your mental health issues. I've got an anxiety disorder myself so know some of what you're going through.
I believe in you, if you want to go punch Rene Descartes I think you can achieve that goal if you want it enough.
I appreciate the solidarity. I have this ongoing suspicion of a lot of philosophy specifically because so many of the people talking about will and perception and whatnot don't consider the failure states of the human mind. Asserting "I think therefore I am" sounds very cut and dried until you encounter people who don't have any internal process that they're aware of, or people who have a persistent, hopefully delusional belief that they do not exist.
I have a hard time with philosophy bc it seems like you need to invest many years to even get to the point where you can evaluate the merit of what you're reading, but i get the impression that mental illness is a huge unknown unknown for many philosophers. They seem to have an unwarranted confidence that they're not unwittingly experiencing the same kind of cognitive aberrations as mentally ill people. But if you take a really big step back and observe that billions of people have delusional beliefs like the existence of gods and magic that are utterly resistant to interrogation or evidence, you kind of have to wonder if there are gross distortions we're all subject to that we're incapable of recognizing.
I read somewhere that very intelligent people can be more susceptible to delusion and misinterpretation because in so far as "intelligence" involves highly capable pattern recognition, that pattern recognition does not necessarily also mean that the individual can correctly evaluate the truth value of that pattern. Eg correlation vs causation. Without empirical testing and experiment there's no way to reliably establish causal relationships. So if someone was very smart, and working with an idea that is currently untestable, or even nonfalsifiable, they could very well use that intelligence to construct a delusional belief very far from reality without being aware of doing so.
Ps - had a funny idea. Guy from our universe where free will isn't really a thing gets isekai'd to a universe that works on Shonen Anime rules where just being real real dedicated to something and yelling real loud will let you violate physics and do magic and stuff.
:wojak-nooo: YOU, A BRAINLET: So do we have free will or are our actions predetermined????
:gigachad: ME, AN INTELLECTUAL: Yes.
The human body is simply mitochondria which is the powerhouse of the cell
What is the cell but a prison for the mitochondria.
:foucault-madness:
Lol. No, it's six billion years of barely functional kludges and hacks that can go completely ro shit at any or no times. Our senses just barely give us enough of a picture of the world around us and are frighteningly easy to deceive. Our brain works more like a badly organized dewey decimal system in a library that has just suffered an earthquake than a computer. And if we get hungry everything immediately stops working properly.
For instance, re-readin this like half the sentences are not what I intended to type and I didn't notice that at the time because something got lost between my conscious mind and my fingers.
my adhd ass: is there another way to write? my subconscious mind is a better writer than me, anyway.
The Wachowskis wanted the object Morpheus held up to represent AI's use for mankind to be a microprocessor, but they didn't think it would be recognizable enough, so they just went with a battery
ughhghghh that would have made so much more sense and quashed all of the stupid pedantic arguments about how unreasonable the exploitation in the matrix is with conservation of energy
They kind of fix it in the sequel by saying that the matrix is using human brainpower to balance the operation of some kind of fusion power plant, and without the massive number of humans embedded in the matrix the machines can't keep their fusion generators working. It makes slightly more sense than batteries.
Also in defense of the Wachowskis i've heard they wanted to do "the machines are using humans to do computing" but they were shot down by executive meddling.
The human body has those things, but those things do not a human body make
