LastThursday

I tried again with Miles and a better mic this time and had a lot smoother conversation. It still misunderstands and goes off on a tangent, so you kind of have to interrupt it and guide it back on track. I can definitely see using it for bouncing ideas around.

I have a whole list of these I enjoy on my journal here:

@integral I tried it for ten minutes or so. It was very good, but still not quite there IMO. I did feel quite awkward talking to a machine especially since the tone was super upbeat and American (sorry Americans) - like a happy puppy. It wasn't helped by the bot misinterpreting what I was saying, maybe due to a bad mic or just an accent thing. I found that if I didn't talk cleanly to it (no hesitation or mumbling) it would misunderstand me and start going off on a tangent. All in all: awkward. But it's still science fiction come true.

If the system allows the by-pass then it's there for a reason, take advantage of it. If you're concerned about eligibility, but not convinced by the people you've spoken to, then speak to someone higher who can definitively say yes or no. Also, do you have a tutor you can talk things over with, can they find out for you? And, if you're still not convinced after all that, then don't take the option. Either way, a year or the extra effort may seem like a lot now, but in the bigger scheme of things it won't seem like much. An extra year would give your more experience and knowledge and better grounding, or putting in the effort now will rob you of time and peace, but it's only for a short period.

It's no coincidence. AI is made in our image. What the technologists are hell bent on doing is creating a facsimile of a human. Why? Because machines are tireless, don't complain and don't get ill. But we are also intrinsically fascinated by ourselves, it is an indulgence for men to create a person from wires and electricity and pure logic.

Probably Donald Hoffman or possibly Daniel Dennett or Anil Seth. Being an AI is just the modern version of Rene Descartes "Evil Demon", an all powerful entity that creates a deceptive reality for us, and try as we might we can never be certain that we're not being deceived. We can't have "certain knowledge" about anything at all. On the face of it your question has no clear answer. Then again, the only AI is the AI we have now, and it's taken 70 odd years to get here, and it's very clear that it's nowhere near the level of capability to simulate our reality. So if you're basing your question on our current AI (anything else is a fantasy), then no, we're not AI. The problem with these sorts of questions is that you have to find the "Evil Demon" or catch him out, to prove or disprove the question. You may as well replace the word "AI" with "God", it's the same difference.

Some of my random analytical thoughts. You could say that "feeling empty" is just a figure of speech or stock phrase, and so it just stands for something not connected to its literal meaning: there isn't some sort of emptiness. Maybe then it's just a general malaise whatever that might be, some negativity, so nothing special there. On the other hand, if you take it in a more metaphorical way, then just look to its opposite: "feeling full". Full of what and what is being filled? I guess that's fairly nebulous, but you could substitute in any number of things like joy, excitement, stimulation, emotion, fulfilment of goals and so on. You are the container being filled with these nominalisations, like a bottle being filled with liquid. Feeling empty then is not being filled with those positive things, a metaphorical lack. I think the common everyday usage of it though is just as a way to describe a generally overwhelming emotion, say "feeling empty" after someone's death; or, when the fun stuff in life has been taken away, or when there's nothing meaningful going in life in general. In short a lack or removal of something positive. It is fascinating how much metaphorical language is taken in a literal way. People go around acting as if there are actual hurdles to jump over, and mountains to climb, and bottled up rage ready to explode. It goes to show how much abstract ideas and emotions need to be grounded in more concrete things even if it's just in our heads. Consequently, one way to do therapy is to play with that metaphorical language: "if you were to feel full, how would that be?" and so on.

The only way to change how you act is through introspection and self awareness - which is what you're doing. When your anger is triggered by whomever, it triggers a programme of set behaviour (i.e. a habit) within yourself. That happens because nearly 99% of the way we act is automatic. So you have options: cut the link between the trigger and response (behaviour), or change the behaviour itself, or just avoid the trigger. Since you learnt the behaviour over time, it can be unlearnt. One way to unlearn a habit is by pure repetition: every time you find yourself overacting angrily, you force yourself to calm down or behave differently in the moment - this is doable but takes time and patience and good self-awareness. Another way to unlearn behaviour is by interrupting the automatic programme. You can do this by doing something completely different in the middle of the behaviour: hug your father for example or walk out of the room, start dancing, go for a run, the choices are endless. The point is to interrupt the pattern every time it happens. Over time the behaviour will be weakened or "unlearnt" - and as a bonus you will find other ways to cope with your angry emotion. I'm not pulling this out of nowhere, this is what NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is all about.

@Ninja_pig classic Escher. @trenton your link didn't work.

You could also take the intent angle and ask yourself does "sober living" align with your intent? Nearly all of us carry on living without any strong intent, and we end up relying on what society provides to give us meaning: news, social media, streaming, junk food and on and on. All those things can be quite exciting or strongly stimulating and a way to fill time or to feel like you're taking part in society. And, we end up being neurotic because we start relying on that stimulation to feel "normal". Without it we feel lost or detached from society, and without the distraction we start looking inward at all the bad things about ourselves. To re-engage with loving life, you need to build up strong intent in how you go about things. In other words you actively choose what you want for yourself, instead of being spoonfed by society: a life purpose. But a good start, is to cut out the time wasting distractions, so you can at least give yourself time and mental space for working out what you want out of life.

Rant: I have to congratulate you on actually engaging with your own question, many on the forum make a post but don't bother to actually engage with the answers. Rant over. I suppose you could look at it from the other end. What does being gullible involve? Such a person would take anything they're told to be true. They will go about their day acting as if X fact is suddenly now true. Maybe they believe they're God, or that they'll reincarnate when they die, or that the world will end in 2027, or that eating peppers is bad for the gut, or that you can survive on air alone and so on. Maybe all of those things at once. Applying your heuristic, then you could fairly say that the aforementioned are all wrong, and you'll then need to wait patiently for proof of each of them to come along (or look for proof proactively). Some things you may never know until it actually happens, for example the end of the world, effectively making the belief unfalsifiable - you can neither say it's right nor wrong, and you can't take a position at all (logically). If you do proactively look for proof, then you're admitting a more neutral position: why waste your effort if it couldn't possibly be true? I think it's this that you're arguing not wasting time on. My point then was that discernment works better than proof. If a belief is unfalsifiable, then you just move on, and cut the potential BS at the root. If you do have a modicum of belief then your discernment should kick in first. For example, is reincarnation real? Well, you have to look at the numbers of reports of it compared to the number of people in the world (or who have ever lived), hmm it's probably BS, since that ratio is near zero. Another example, do mobile phones give you brain cancer? That's less clear, but you can still be discerning, i.e. radio waves don't travel well in water, and your brain is mostly water, it's probably BS then. In short most of us have some ability to discern things and judge whether something is true or not. Gullible people just choose not to be so discerning, they want to be believe, because it's exciting or through wish fulfilment or it makes some sort of sense, or they just "know" it's right. They are actively guillible (if not consciously so).

I don't know, it feels as though there's more nuance to openmindedness. There is a process of discernment which comes with having knowledge and experience and this allows you to cut through most BS. It's also quite possible to hold a neutral or ambiguous position towards things, and then fall to one side or the other as you get more experience or knowledge around it, or even flip-flop over time. I would say that you're free to take whichever starting point you want, wrong until proven right, right until proven wrong, or something more neutral, because in the end you may change your mind in any direction. But, if you're not very discerning in the first place, then wrong until proven right is a helpful heuristic.

I believe they're also called Alsatians, Alsace being in France (now). Sorry couldn't resist.

Scotland and Wales are already countries. Countries are imaginary. The European Union is just an admission of this fact and in lots of ways acts a de facto country in world affairs, especially economically. There's benefit to having divisions at lots of different levels, humans are good at dealing with a certain amount of organic chaos. People should be free to able to choose when to be separate and when to be together at any level they see fit. The one serious downside to countries (nations) is that the division it creates can increase the sense of separation, protectionism and induce potential conflict. But, fundamentally the Earth itself belongs to no-one and no one person has any more right to a piece of land than any other. Do animals care about international borders?

Having a vision is only a means to an end. The crux of it is somehow building up a strong positive emotion in yourself that will propel you forward. A vision is just a good story that gets your emotions going, if there isn't a vision that does that for you, then you'll need to try other things. Another way is finding your Zone of Genius, basically, all the things you're good at. The reason for doing that is because there are already positive emotions attached to the things you're good at. Concentrating your efforts around those things focuses your time into positive emotions. I could be wrong but that is essentially what Leo's Life Purpose course taps into. Other things you can do is to research. Learning new things can open up avenues that excite you. If you're a people person, then collective activities may inspire you instead. So rather than focusing narrowly on having "vision", you should be focusing on "what produces strong positive emotion within me?" and that will carry you forward.