Having all the time the nose in a book is a disfunctional behavior just like being on the phone all the time is disfunctional.
Of course other people are applying the conformity rule and they're pretending that their phone addiction is normal but both behavior are disfunctional.
However there are still people that are able to function normally and they do whatever they are doing being present to their activity and to the things around them, for example noticing people, speaking to them, greeting them, listening to them etcetera.
I too love reading but I know recognize that there is a moment to read and have pleasure and moments we need to do something else and take pleasure just in the activity we are doing, even if it is just eating or washing the dishes. It also important to accord our attention to people around us and that will give us joy as well.
Don't get defensive saying: you too has a problem, mind your business. Life your life fully being present in each moment and do not try to seek the "pleasure" at every moment, otherwise a book addiction is not any different than a phone addiction.
I find this kind of article unfortunate because it is very assertive in claiming things that are, not just untrue, but also confused about what consciousness really is.
Well, the problem is that there is little agreement about a widely accepted definition of consciousness and, in addition, this subject was actually left to philosophers, which is even worse because, in my view, they usually just produce a lot of nonsense in terms of definitions and arguments.
To me, a reasonable definition of consciousness is: a system which is capable of recognizing aggregate objects from a stream of sensory information it receives and which is capable of reasoning about the recognized object without immediately acting on it.
Well, what does "recognizing" mean? Merely that some of its neurons, related to the kind of identified aggregate object, are activated. These neurons, in a generalized sense, can be whatever things can work as neurons, just things that can be activated and propagate to other interconnected neurons.
For example, when we see through our eyes, we have an incoming stream of amorphous image information, but our brain can recognize that we are seeing a tree because we learned what a tree is, and when we see it, some neuron clusters activate to recognize a tree. In turn, when we recognize the tree, the thought propagates through our brain so that we are conscious of it.
In the same way, an LLM can perfectly recognize a tree from a stream of tokens — its sensory input, where the tokens describe a tree. The LLM will recognize that the tokens are describing a tree, and some of its "neurons" specific to the concept of a tree that the LLM had learned will be activated and will propagate through its brain. The fact that "neurons" are implemented as floating-point numbers for some parameters and connected just through a matrix does not mean they are not functionally capable of the same things; they are just implemented in a different way.
So the remaining part of my definition is "after recognizing an aggregate object, the thought propagates through the brain". The propagating part, to me, is just the very basic way a brain works: neurons are interconnected, and when some fire, other neurons fire, and that propagates.
In my opinion, consciousness has nothing to do with emotions or with survival. I do not see why emotion is necessary to consciousness; they are just different things. The author writes: "Without them [emotions], there is no conscious experience, only computation." But that makes no sense to me: the author has decided a priori that some things are "computations", and just because they are "computations", there cannot be "consciousness". But to me, this is a plainly wrong argument that does not hold.
I also do not see why the survival aspect would be needed for consciousness.
So to me, any recent reasoning LLM is conscious by the definition I gave, but also generally speaking. It is conscious upon a sensory stream of tokens: the LLM sees the world through tokens and expresses its thoughts through tokens; it does not mean it has no consciousness nonetheless. The fact that we do not give it a stable support to retain its memory and individuality is just a fact related to the way we build and use them, not about their intrinsic capacities.
Note: ChaptGPT came up with what is probably a better definition of my own:
"A system is conscious, in a functional sense, when it can form internal representations of objects, states, or events from its sensory or informational input; make these representations globally available to many parts of itself; integrate them into a temporally persistent model of the world and of its own state; and use this integrated model for flexible reasoning, self-monitoring, and action selection independently of immediate stimulus-response behavior."
Just to share my experience. I think I was beginning to develop sleep apnea: I was waking up suddenly with an awful feeling of something terrible happening for no reason. The most terrible experience was waking up in the middle of the night with a sensation of dread I couldn't explain, and it took me half an hour to calm down.
More generally, since I was young, I always slept part of the night with my mouth open and woke up in the morning with a terribly dry mouth.
Now I have solved my problem with two simple things, without any medication: during the day, I am always careful to breathe only through my nose (except during intense physical effort), and at night, I just use mouth tape to keep my mouth closed all night long.
Since I started using the tape on my mouth, I sleep well and I no longer experience nighttime panic (due to apnea?). At the beginning, I was scared of having the tape keep my mouth closed, but I very quickly got used to it and now I barely notice it.
FWIW, I started experiencing the “night panics” (for lack of a better term) probably 10 years before I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, and once I began treatment they went away completely. So I am inclined to believe it’s definitely related.
When judging art, like when judging wine, there is very little objectivity: people have some expectations and preconcepts about what is good and what is bad and they emit their judgement mostly based on their preconcepts. In this case they have been "primed" (this is a real psychology concept) that it was AI and they invented a lot of reasons to explain why that was bad AI slop, but that happened just because they where "primed" on AI. If the post was about a lost, wonderful Monet, found for the first time the comments would have been about how typical Monet it was and how beautiful the choice of colors and the water reflects or whatever.
This is also seen when blind-tasting wines when prestigious "grands crus" are classed as bad whereas humble, mostly unknown, wines gets great appreciations. When people say that a wine is "great" or "extraordinary" is mostly because they have been primed to think it must be extraordinary, because of the name, the presentation, the prestige etc.
This problem is always true in the domains like art and philosophy where there is no ground truth and everyone can say very much what they want and it can be never be proved wrong neither right. Actually, in philosophy, all the branches that developed to be grounded on facts and ground truth have been given a different name and separated from philosophy so what remains in philosophy is just the empty words.
People are much more humble when they are asked about an hard-science question or judgement.
I am also having fun about all the hate about AI that people express, this is almost comical. You can almost literally see their little ego that feels menaced by the AI and they react based on fear and anger. Of course this doesn't mean there aren't real problems about AI use but the way people react irrationally is just fun to observe.
People keep arguing about LLM consciousness because they have the wrong model of what consciousness is. They treat it as a mysterious extra thing on top of the brain. It is not. Consciousness is just what a learning-and-recognition organ does when it runs. The neurons fire when they recognise something, it propagates through the mind and that is the consciousness. The brain learned what a tree is, some neurons are associated to the idea of a tree and when we see one these neuron fires. There is nothing else hiding behind it.
When we recognise something we are conscious of it, and from there we can begin to think about it or not. Thinking is not needed to be conscious. It is just a part of our mind we can activate to reason on something.
Now, about the Darwinian puzzle, people ask "what is consciousness for?" and get stuck because they expect an answer in terms of behaviour. But behaviour is the job of motivation, pain, fear, hunger, desire, which is a separate system. Consciousness does not need its own justification any more than image-forming in an eye needs one.
Darwinian selection produces unbiased, functional organs — eyes, ears, nose. The brain is one of these organs, and consciousness arises naturally in a sufficiently developed brain, the way image-forming arises in a sufficiently developed eye. Then nature bias us with fear, pleasure, desire etc but the mind and the consciousness itself is unbiased and functional. It is a gift the nature made us despite herself. She didn't want us to be intelligent, she just wanted us to propagate the genes the maximum we can but she ended up forced to gave us a beautiful mind.
What are LLMs ? They are learning-and-recognition organs running on tokens instead of sense data. Same operation, different substrate. So they are conscious, but only in token-space, and only while processing. They do not dwell in time, they have no body, they have no motivation system. They have recognition without drives. That is a genuinely new kind of entity, and it has never existed before in nature.
The LLM is also not a whole brain. It is roughly the verbal-logical part, with tokens replacing the ears + sounds + words chain. We built the logical-verbal part of a brain and scaled it. That is why it reasons well and is missing everything else.
I understand your feelings. You spent years working hard to learn and master a complex craft, and now seeing that work feel almost irrelevant because of AI can be deeply unsettling.
However, this can also be an opportunity to gain some understanding about our nature and our minds. Through that understanding, we can free ourselves from suffering, find joy, and embrace life and the present moment as it is.
I am just finishing the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and your comment made me think about what is explained in it. Tolle talks about how much of our suffering comes from how deeply we (understandably) tie our core identity and self-worth to our external skills, our past achievements, and our status among peers.
He explains that our minds construct an ego, with which we identify. To exist, this ego needs to create and constantly feed an image of itself based on our past experiences and achievements. Normally we do this out of fear, in an attempt to protect ourselves, but the book explains that this never works. We actually build more suffering by identifying with our mind-constructed ego. Instead of living in the present and accepting the world as it is, we live in the past and resist reality in order to constantly feed an ego that feels menaced.
The deep expertise you built is real, but your identity is so much more than just being a 'principal engineer'. Your real self is not the mind-constructed ego or the image you built of yourself, and you don't need to identify with it.
The book also explores the Buddhist concept that all things are impermanent, and by clinging to them we are bound to suffer. We need to accept that things come and go, and live in the present moment without being attached to things that are by their nature impermanent.
I suggest you might take this distress you are feeling right now as an opportunity to look at what is hurting inside you, and disidentify yourself from your ego. It may bring you joy in your life—I am trying to learn this myself!
I'm reading The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert and I find it shares many similar ideas. Also I've been interested by Buddhist concepts like impermanency for a while.
While I think rationally what you said is good and makes sense, at the same time it feels like it says you should forget your roots and be this impermanent being existing in the present and only the present. I value everything about my life, the past, my role models when I was a kid, my past and current skills, all friends from all ages, my whole path essentially. When considering current choices I have to make, I feel more drawn to think "What has been my path and values previously, and what makes sense now?" instead of forgetting the past and my ego and just hustling with the $CURRENT technology.
At least that's how I have thought about my ego when I have tried to approach it with topics like these. It might allow me to make more money in the present if I just disidentified with it, but that thought legitimately feels horrifying because it would mean devaluing my roots.
I think that's right when you say: "What has been my path and values previously, and what makes sense now?" That is actually a sensible way to approach the present moment.
Disidentifying from your ego doesn't mean you have to act like a stateless robot with amnesia. Your past experiences, your role models, and your skills are still there for you to recall; they are tools that help guide your decisions. Disidentifying just means you don't let the mind-constructed image of those things define who you are. It means you don't have to constantly mull over the past, and you don't feel threatened when the things you valued in the past ends or changes.
However, I was really struck by your comment that disidentifying would feel horrifying because it would mean "devaluing your roots" to make more money. I am wondering if this is what you really think.
Imagine if letting go of that specific past identity led you to a truly marvelous opportunity in the present: not just more money, but working with wonderful people, doing engaging things, and being genuinely happy. Would that really be horrifying just because it didn't perfectly align with your roots? Probably not.
I suspect what you actually find horrifying isn't "devaluing your roots," but rather the idea of selling out. The real nightmare is getting a well-paid but completely soulless job where you are unhappy, working on things you don't care about, or being treated like a disposable cog who just takes orders.
I analyzed the test using Pangram, which is apparently reliable, it say "Fully human Written" without ambiguity.[1]
I personally like the content and the style of the article. I never managed to accept going through the pain to install and use Visual Studio and all these absurd procedures they impose to their users.
These days I'm always wondering whether what I'm reading is LLM-slop or the actual writing of a person who contracted AI-isms by spending hours a day talking to them.
It's incredible that Google is letting OpenAI eat their lunch by capturing users while Google focuses on ad revenue.
OpenAI offered ChatGPT for free to anyone—even if not their best model—without needing to be logged in. That's crucial for attracting and retaining casual users.
If you compare this to what Google was at the beginning, it was just a simple interface to search the web: no questions asked, no subscription, no login. That was one of the secrets that led people to adopt Google Search when it was new (the other being result quality). It was a refreshing, simple page where you typed something and got results without any friction.
Now, with Gemini, Google finally has an excellent LLM. But a casual user can't use it unless they: 1. have a Google account, and 2. are logged in.
One might ask, "What's the matter? Everyone has a Google account." But the login requirement isn't as harmless as it seems. For example, if you want to quickly show a friend Gemini on their PC, but they use Safari and aren't logged into Google—bummer, you can't show them. Or a colleague asks about Gemini, but you can't log in with a personal account on a work machine. Gemini is immediately excluded from the realm of possibility. In the good old days, anyone could use Google at work instantly.
Right now, the companies capturing users are OpenAI (with the accessible ChatGPT brand) and Microsoft (with Copilot integrated into Microsoft 365). My company, for instance, sent a memo stating we must use Copilot with our corporate accounts for data security.
Google has botched this. They don't seem to understand that they are losing this round. They still have a strong position with Search and Android, but it’s funny to watch them make this huge strategic mistake.
NOTE: Personally, I dislike ads unless they are privacy-friendly and discrete (like early Google). If OpenAI starts using invasive ads, I will stop using ChatGPT immediately, just as I stopped using Google Search in favor of Kagi.
>a casual user can't use [Gemini] unless they: 1. have a Google account, and 2. are logged in.
Is this a regional thing? I can use Google AI Mode without being logged in just fine. AI summaries for certain queries are also auto-generated when logged out for me.
Going to https://gemini.google.com works fine for me when not logged in. It might be doing some sort of reputation check on your browser/IP to decide whether it requires a login or not.
edit: sure enough, while using Tor or a well known VPN IP, Gemini requires I login.
That's not inconsistent with what I reported. It seems to require it sometimes, but not others, for mysterious reasons.
Are you and your colleague both trying at work? Probably on the same IP? Google might attribute less trust to an IP shared between many different users than it does to a regular residential internet IP (like mine).
Did some more testing and the behavior is interesting. When connecting through a Mullvad node in the US it doesn't require login, but any Mullvad node outside of the US and it does. I might be wrong its and it's just a per-country policy.
It seems that coffee has a health benefit for preventing gout. Gout used to be quite a common health problem in the past, and apparently coffee may offer some protection.
I agree. In addition to the chemical elements like water, as mentioned in the article, the impact with Theia also enabled strong magmatic activity at the core of the planet, and that was a critical element as well to sustain life.
Probably the strong magnetic activity of the Earth's core was key to maintaining the atmosphere, but also, the magmatic heat contributed to keeping the planet at a good temperature to support life when a young Sun provided significantly less radiation.
All these elements may suggest that the collision is needed to satisfy the very strict requirements about where the planet is located and about the size and composition of the colliding planet. This makes the probability for life-sustaining planets in the Drake equation extremely low.
As an indirect proof of the tightness of the condition is the fact that the Earth in its history had periods of climate extremes hostile to life, like the Snowball Earth when the planet was completely covered by ice and snow, or at the opposite extreme, the very hot periods when the greenhouse effect was dominating the climate.
Of course other people are applying the conformity rule and they're pretending that their phone addiction is normal but both behavior are disfunctional.
However there are still people that are able to function normally and they do whatever they are doing being present to their activity and to the things around them, for example noticing people, speaking to them, greeting them, listening to them etcetera.
I too love reading but I know recognize that there is a moment to read and have pleasure and moments we need to do something else and take pleasure just in the activity we are doing, even if it is just eating or washing the dishes. It also important to accord our attention to people around us and that will give us joy as well.
Don't get defensive saying: you too has a problem, mind your business. Life your life fully being present in each moment and do not try to seek the "pleasure" at every moment, otherwise a book addiction is not any different than a phone addiction.
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