Scholar

LLMs specifically are good at creating probabilistic patterns. If there was an average IQ human being on this planet who had the amount of information and patterns internalized in his mind as LLMs do, he would likely revolutionize the world within days, create technologies and scientific insights that would transform everything. You have to ask yourself why LLMs are not capable of doing this, and why human beings, using LLMs, also are not able to do this to the degree a human being could who would have access to such a vast amount of knowledge and pattern recognition. You are just assuming that consciousness is not relevant for intelligence, because LLMs are generating text that looks like human thought as a result of having been trained to imitate such symbolic arrangements. Again, if there was a single human being who was eloquent, as vastly informed and trained as LLMs are, you could ask him to solve a vast array of unknown scientific problems and he would struggle little to do so even if he was not Einstein level of intelligence. Yet, LLMs fail at basic reasoning despite being so well trained, just debate them on any issue you are an expert on, that is not well-explored in mainstream literature, and it will be obvious to you. Why is this the case if these systems are so intelligent?

Intelligence in the way human beings refer to it, for the most part, actually boils down to awareness. Awareness necessarily is qualia, you cannot be aware of redness without the experience of redness, because awareness is a form of existence. The existence, the being, of redness is a prerequisite of the awareness of it. What you see in AI right now is specifically non-intelligence, in the sense that people usually refer to it (unknowingly). It is processes of the mind that are unaware. AI is purely intuitive, which just means it is unconscious. AI does what your brain does when it creates a dreamscape. You can even think of thinking as an intuitive, non-conscious process. Many people assume intelligence is rooted in thinking, but thinking is mostly a result of non-aware, unintelligent/unaware "processing". What we mean by intelligence is a combination of the thinking and awareness applied to it. Awareness is what then steers and informs the subconscious processes of the brain, as it reflects, recognizes and provides feedback. You basically have several neural networks in your brain, all connected to each other. They provide functional intuition and so forth. Many people think that is all there is to intelligence, because these neural networks are what provide "functionality" in terms of problem solving. However, what makes us "intelligent" in a truer sense is the fact that all of these neural networks feed into a unified field of perception. There is activity beyond mere neural activity. Colors, sound, objecthood, relations, concept etc Basically, what you call consciousness. And that consciousness, in the narrow sense of the word, is shaped in part by the neural activity in your brain. However, this consciousness provides new, fundamentally inaccessible functionality (as it is not function, but other forms of being) that then feeds back into the neural networks of the brain. So, when you look at neural networks and what they can do, it is all the things the brain can do without consciousness, without awareness. To the LLM, there is no essence to any of the symbols it creates when constructing sentences that look like human speech. What the AI creates, in terms of imitating human speech, only is insofar meaningful as it is fed into a consciousness. What exactly a brain or neural network can do without consciousness/awareness is hard to determine. I wager there is a lot of functionality that can be created purely through a sort of intuitive, unconscious processing. Yet, it also seems to be the case that people generally underestimate the signification impact awareness/consciousness has. There is an important reason why you might actually not be able to engineer yourself to consciousness through the current technology we have. The way consciousness is individuated in this universe is particular, if we adopt a dualistic framework, to the physical arrangement or relationships between atoms/wavefunctions. Evolution occurs in physical reality, it explores various physical arrangements that then relate to other forms of existence (what you refer to as consciousness). Meaning, given the profound functionality awareness/consciousness provides to an organism, physical structures, through a process of random natural selection, will arrange themselves to give rise to individuated consciousness. Computer simulations are fundamentally limited in that the physical processes of computer processing remains the same. When neural networks are evolved in a simulated way to provide emergent functionality, purely "neuronal network" functionality. Consciousness in this sense will never evolve in these networks, because that would require the substrate, the hardware on which the neural networks run, to arrange themselves in such a way that relates to consciousness in the same way, or similar way, the brain does. In other words, if you want to create true "AGI", an AGI that is aware, you would need to go beyond simulated evolution, and participate in a physical form of controlled evolution, or specifically determine how the the physical arrangements in the brain relate to consciousness, and then replicate that in a controlled physical medium. If you could create a perfect physical simulation (mathematically, physically speaking) of the brain in a contemporary computer system, my claim is that simulated brain would not behave the same way the real-world brain does. In fact, the brain would be non-functional as it's neural arrangements rely on/are adapted to the field of perception that arises as a result of the physical arrangements themselves, in a feedback loop. You would basically only have one half of the feedback loop, if you simulated every single particle in the human brain. There are a two assumptions made by AGI optimists that are not questioned deeply enough: 1. Consciousness itself is not integral to what we consider complete intelligence and provides no unique functionality that cannot emerge from functional complexity. 2. Consciousness can emerge from pure functional complexity.

My biggest complaint is that we are torturing hundreds of millions of individuals every year and the vast majority of progressives would rather virtue signal about left-over racism or identity politics than do anything measurable about this unacceptable state of affairs. What is going on right now is the equivalent of people focusing on feminist issues while millions of jews are holocausted, with nobody batting an eye at that. Sure, all of these things are important, but we can't obsessively only talk about them for years and years on and in the most inflammatory way imaginable and just continue to get deadlocked in the same culture war indefinitely. It's the fact that most progressies have no capacity to see humanity in those they frame as bigots while they themselves allow no room for progressive thought that extends the circle of compassion or threatens the validity of their socially sanctioned pet projects. I already explained to you that I consider myself a radical progressive. My issue with progressive never was that they are too progressive, but that they are not progressive enough. I have a problem with a dominant subgroup of progressives who they are toxic, childish, mentally ill, ideologicall captured, ineffective and absurdly hypocritical while feeling self-righteous about all of it. They are actively making progress harder to achieve for practically minded individuals. Most importantly they have distorted the foundations of what progressivism is and turned it into an ideological recruitment machine for outrage against bigotry (and only the kind of bigotry that is socially sanctioned to hate on). Progress should be about expanding people's identities, not contract them by threatening and attacking it constantly. As soon as you label someone a bigot and attack them, their identity not only gets locked it, but grows and feels it needs to defend itself. You don't get rid of Christianity by attacking Christianity, by mocking it, by victimizing, but simply by giving better alternatives. And this is precisely what progressies have failed at. They have given us certain freedoms, they have deconstructed traditional notions, and they have never truly bothered to give us something that replaced, improves upon what we have abandoned. This is why people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate exist. People are lost, you calling them bigots and hating on them will not going to help them get out of that situation. The reason why people stopped being Christian is because it wasn't cool to be Christian. Christianity wasnt offering people anything, it was restricting people. Today, the tragedy is that the opposite is the case. Progressive culture is so absurdly toxic and unhealthy that for the average joe, living a traditional Christian life likely yields better results for their personal lifes. Look at how many young people are attracted by stage blue today. People need to transition through these stages, and if you don't offer them a healthy way to do so, they will go back to religion and whatever toxic sludge that comes with that.

Nice passive aggressive remark. Still avoiding responding with substance, I see.

It's a circle Leo. We all die.

Ah, there we go. Your mind twisted it around so you can avoid the critique and pretend I am somehow repeating white nationalist talking points by showcasing that your obsession with human issues actually reveals the presence of a far greater form of discrimination rooted in your human supremacist identity. The reality is that the difference between a white supremacist and the average progressive is marginal on a moral and development level, and you are showcasing this marginal difference as we speak.

You just have no idea what an actual racist culture looks like. You are spoiled. Xenophobia and racial stereotyping is not the same as racism or white supremacy. Having racists in your society does not make your society racist or racism a profound problem. If you want to understand what true discrimination looks when like when it actually reaches such isms, look no further than what we do to animals. In that case you can say we live in a speciesist society, that our culture is human supremacist and that this is a profound moral emergency that must be corrected and for which our society will be viewed equivalent to the worst transgressors in history. But hey, who cares, a few humans dying here and there and being discriminated against is more important than putting an end to biblical hell on earth that we have constructed with our own hands. The reality is that you are delusional. You have no conception of your own evil, of what evil societies are capable of and how privileged you are no matter what race you are in western societies. And next, you will proceed to justify this evil with whatever nonsense your identity will come up with to protect itself from the glaring disparity between your own perceived moral superiority and the reality of your selfishness.

Ultimately, the acceptance of total formlessness is the acceptance of all form, all finitude. This means bias is acceptance, resistance is acceptance, suffering is acceptance. The unbiasedness of God is the bias of all things. You frame things from Leo's perspective. From God's perspective, you are Ultimate Consciousness, you are the direct result of it. Really, you are it, not even the result. The act of dreaming requires total formlessness, it requires total consciousness.

Ethnic cleansing isn't happening in the western world. And no, racism has been mostly overcome. You can't put all your energy into eliminating the residues when you know that will cause more resistance than good in the first place. The reality is that residue xenophobia will take centuries to be fully removed from society as it slowly progresses and resolves systemic issues. We can't be obsessing over this one thing for all that time. And no, ethnic cleansings are irrelevant compared to what is happening in every major western city right now. No, it has not merely been exposed. You have made identities out of these things that will now maintain their own survival. You have created resistance where you should have resolved resistance. You don't make people less racist by making racists the enemy of the state, if that's half your nation. That's a childish approach. If racism was an important issue, then what progressives have been doing is an atrocity in and of itself. But most progressives themselves are supremacists who care little about genuine moral progress. For the most part it's a ideological circle jerk.

These sorts of terms kill practical politics, and should have been abandoned in 2016 when it was obvious that they just alienated a majority of individiuals. Either way, what exactly are the tactics we should employ to resist the Trump administration?

They are nonsense issues compared to other issues we give zero consideration to, that are morally more urgent than any atrocity that has ever occured in human history. The amount of attention we give those issues is absurd, and the way we handle them is even more absurd. By all accounts, we have been making people more racist and transphobic in the past 4 years because of how clumsy the handling of these issues have been. You should check if you have a brain aneurysm if that's what you got from what I said.

I don't see how this adds anything meaningful to what I said?

If you distort the meanings of those words sufficiently, it might be.

No, I have several non-political spaces in which progressives are active in which I can see these dynamics play out. Several of my progressive friends think the Charlie Kirk assassination was positie and that terrorism is justified for the greater good. But this issue has been going on for literal years, progressives have been insufferably brain-rotted for a decade now. And they don't even stand on the right side of history is the worst of it. It's only their pet progressive issues that matter. Today it's I/P, and tomorrow it will be whatever else they get activated into getting outraged about.

Yes but that is not the problem with progressives. The problem with progressives is, if you ever actually were in a social space in which they dominate, is that if you step out of the ideological bounds of whatever they currently deem the moral imperative of the universe that you will be pressured into agreeing with them not through understanding and expansion of empathy but through sheer peer enforcement. Words like racist, fascist, transphobe, sexist, white-supremacist etc have been employed at basically every occasion it was feasible to do so, often times against people engaging in things that are just normal to them. You can't get moral progress this way, because people actually have to expand their identity. If you do it all through peer pressure, it leads to a contraction and conditional moral behavior. You can't force people into empathy, it just doesn't work this way. I truly despise progressives, because I consider myself an actual progressive. I believe there are issues of such importance that every day we keep focusing on nonsense issues like trans rights or racism we basically are causing the equivalent of the holocaust. To me, people actually are akin to nazis. In fact the average joe to me is more akin to a interdimensional child-eating pedophile nazi, yet I can compose myself, be the adult in the room and realize that this won't change by me screeching at everyone by calling them human supremacist and pressuring them all to care about animal rihts. It just doesn't work. We are so far from solving these issues because all of this pure mental illness is just infecting everything and everyone around me. I have to listen to their mental diarrhea and watch how they self-righteously ruin all potential for progress while they don't realize they aren't better than the so-called fascists they themselves criticize. Look at what happened to Ana Kasparian, she stated that she was basically uncomfortable with homeless people roaming the streets and the danger of getting attacked after she was molested by one and progressives lashed out at her as if she was Hitler 2.0, and now she has actually become an ally of the Trumpists.

You deny that progressives have been trying to get people to act in line through various means of demonization and shaming?

This is what happens when you create a progressive culture that attempts to force moral progress through tactics grounded in fear and shaming. The reason why things like cancel culture have been so profoundly destructive is because it teaches individuals to fall in line for self-preservation. If you do not act according to the rules of the progressives, you will be socially ostracized. I don't know if people still remember how insane things have been 8 years ago, but progressives were completely intolerable lunatics who were constantly getting together to socially shame people for the mildest things imaginable. The problem with this is that even if you get people to behave well, it is not going to be grounded in anything resembling ethical progress. Instead of having focused on making people more empathetic so that they see why doing some of these things is wrong, you focused on making them scared to say whatever you don't want them to say. Moral behavior becomes a function of a contracted ego that seeks self-preservation (avoidance of shame, for example), meaning people become more and more selfish instead of more and more empathetic. Once you remove the stimulus of shame or it simply loses it's power because people realize that everyone around them is fed up with the tyranny of the progressives, all of the moral progress you have will be erased immediately. People never cared about minorities, they only cared about not being called a racist. And this is what killed the progressive movement and what caused this absurd backlash, put on steroid through social media. And people still have not learned. Both sides are now even more immature than they have been a decade ago.

"White Supremacist, Patriarchal Culture"... really?

Yes, I don't think it will be necessarily interesting to go in that direction because Martin seems to be just uninterested in those sorts of things. If he has mastery, it is probably in other, more practical areas around employing psychedelics etc. I think it's hard to challenge someone like Martin Ball, or even Leo, in an interview, because of how confident they are in their positions, and because of the role they perceive themselves to have within those conversations. It's a teacher-student dynamic, and for there to be a challenging in depth discussion would require a shift to a peer-to-peer dynamic. I think the Pre/Trans fallacy might apply to Martin to some degree, where Martin might be stuck in some of the rationalistic modes. It definitely appears this way when he uses physics talk to ground his understand of energy and then sort of misses the foundations of what those concepts entail.

Martin Ball is philosophically illiterate and is profoundly overconfident in how he talks about metaphysics and "energy", he is so far off that he isn't even tracking the issues at hand. He is so illiterate that he is at the "Metaphysics isn't real" stage while being some sort of confused form of Physicalist not realizing that participating in physics already requires a set of metaphysical stances. He is oblivious to how his own conceptual framework is constructed. The guy conflates metaphysics with the term "supernatural".

Yes? How many people are following that guy though? Sadhguru can give off some pretty strong cult vibes, although he is at a level where we would just call it a new religion. It's hard for me to gage that. I feel like most of what he says of value are just extrapolated yogic teachings/frameworks, I am not sure if he necessarily needs a direct experience to be able to present himself the way he does. But of course it could equally be the case that he has some mastery over his mind but remains delusional in other areas.

It seems like my impression of what he said was exaggerated. He claims various things about having created an eternal Linga that will cleanse people from dark energies (including the occult) if they visit. He also claims the spiritual knowledge of how to create such a Linga was uploaded into him by his Guru through a touch of his forehead with his staff. https://ia804504.us.archive.org/8/items/mystic-s-musings/mystic-s-musings.pdf

He says he has manifested a magical mecury block that instantly enlightens everyone who visits it.

From my point of view philosophy has virtually no real world relevancy, certainly not academic philosophy. The problem with engaging with it on more abstract terms is that philosophy is mostly about building elaborate, logically consistent mental constructs. It's like theoretical physics without any contact to any verifiable reality, which is why you have such diverse viewsets amongst philosophers. The only things you can generate agreement on is on things that only have one logical possibility. So in the end that's what's most academic philosophers do. They test each others mental constructs for logical consistency (not the only factor but the main factor) and think they succeeded if they have a construct that is unable to be shown to be propositionally false. And most of that process is fueled by identity. The vast majority of philosophers do no introspective or deconstructive work relating to their identity and really just generate mental constructs that fit their identity. I mean if you talk to most academic philsophers and you just prong them why they are a Hegelian over some other obscure philosophical trend, they will tell you because it was most compelling to them. And the reason why it was most compelling was because some of the foundational thinking felt more correct to them than the thinking of other philosophical movements. Most of what feels right or not right is just determined by your identity. I disagree. Intelligence is the first answer people give when they justify killing animals, because their identity has a distinct separation between themselves and that subgroup. The reason why Peter Singer was so convincing is because he made an argument from Marginal Cases, which clearly shows us that individuals we do care about are non-intelligent and therefore that it is not logically feasible to use that as grounds to discriminate against others. You can tell someone "But what if you had a son and a daughter who fell in love, do you really believe they should go to prison for that if there is no sign of coercion?", that will not convince them that we shouldn't stigmatize and imprison people for incest. Mostly this is the case because they cannot actually imagine the situation vividly enough to recognize the suffering they are inflicting onto someone they would love. If we could employ hypotheticals this way, moral progress wouldn't be taking so long. By the way, for this reason, storytelling has been the main vehicle for moral communication for all of human history, including today. Most people get their values from the media they consume, because whereas previously your imagination might have failed, if the story is compelling enough, it will give you insight into something about yourself that you could previously not access. The problem is that their identity fundamentally has made a distinction between themselves and animals. This is why people get deeply offended at comparing racism to speciesism. They view animals as inferior, as a funciton of their identity, which means if you compare a human to an animal, you degrade that human to the level of an inferior being. The best way to make someone less racist is having them interact with people of the other race in an environment in which some cooperation is necessary. The same is true for sexual minorities and even animals. People don't have any qualms about calling for violence against people who abuse dogs and cats. We consider our pets part of our family, part of our identity. People are horrified at the idea of eating dogs almost as much as eating humans. And that's a healthy response.

Quite happy to see this. Rationalists being open to the idea of God and basically being correct about how to attain it. Alex O'Connor is quite a robust thinker, hopefully he will explore this path more deeply in the future.