Tommaso Sciortino

Someone quick. Dump some Epstein files to cover up the Iran War before this gets out of hand.

As a Google employee I got to test drive an early model variant that went too far in the other direction: at one point yelling at me in ALL CAPS when I failed to agree with it.

In Gemini's defense: I was wrong on that particular argument.

3.1 is a lot better on this!

Europe has productive farmland too. Famously, quite a bit of it.

Gas rationing would be a horrible idea. Every economics text book will tell you this.

I finally learned why "America/Tijuana" is always included in timezone lists and I'm surprised to learn it was not a joke entry.

Sure. But if that's what you mean by that, it doesn't really conflict with what Will was saying in his original post.

My position is: if evolutions - the dumbest least efficient algo in the universe - can find the consciousness algo. Surely we can find it with a systematic scientific search.

We don't need to find the specific human algorithm to achieve consciousness. The human algo is just one method of getting there. It proves that such an algo exists but we have no reason to believe that there's just one road to get there from here.

Willing? probably not. But I think we might have to once it becomes clear that intelligence doesn't work the way we thought it did.

There Is No Antimemetics Division - Wikipedia

I am a giant fan of that story. If you haven't read @qntm.org 's new book you should!

I honestly would be shocked.

Like, I expect we will be *inspired* by the human brain. But emulating it? Meh.

Personally, I suspect that the whole concept of "consciousness" will have to be scrapped. What people actually care about is when computers deserve moral consideration. It might be simpler to attack that question directly.

To perfectly simulate everything a human brain does will be hard. But it's not clear how much we need to simulate to achieve "consciousness" or "AGI". It could turn out to be like flight where much of the complication in the evolved solution is basically unnecessary.

Fair. It's also not clear how much of the human brain API is needed to achieve "consciousness".

My bad. I'm in several threads right now and I'm losing track of who is claiming what.

Oh. I think you're probably right on that one. Making a copy of a specific human consciousness and running on silicon might be entirely impossible for all I know. Even if you're willing to destroy the brain. I have no opinion on that either way.

Why we should assume that consciousness can only arise precisely the way it does in humans? Isn't that like assuming flight can only arise precisely the way it does in birds? So planes can't possibly fly because they don't have feathers.

If your position is "Nothing can be conscious unless it does things precisely the same way the human brain does" then you're just assuming away the possibility of machine consciousness (and non-human animal or alien consciousness for that matter).

Precisely. It doesn't matter how hard Roger Penrose wishes for QM to be a "get out of causality free" card. It just doesn't work.

I don't follow. When, say, Gemini is in content generation loop where it's repeatedly generating new tokens based on old ones, isn't that "carrying on from moment to moment"?

Quantum effects are basically random at the temperatures in the brain. Even if quantum effects mattered, all that would mean is that it would need a bigger Turing machine to simulate it (or a quantum computer).

I have a physics degree and I'm not afraid to use it.

Daniel Dennett - Wikipedia

I believe in free will in every way that matters. I'm with Daniel Dennett.

I think this is watering down the definition of "trauma" in ways that end up accidentally excuses parents who inflict *actual* trauma on kids.

This is clearly false. We already know there is an algorithm for calculating it: Whatever the algorithm used by the atoms in the human brain.

The fact that the brain is just atoms obeying the laws of physics proves that it is calculable. If that means consciousness doesn't mean anything, all the worse for consciousness.

My friend has a trans 8 year old. It's fine. The kid's biggest gripe about their parents is they don't make the preferred kind of mac and cheese every night.

Who says they get to be good people forever? Not me!

Are you asking what if my kid does something I can't forgive? Well I suppose if they decide to be a Nazi or a rapist or something then Id probably treat them in ways they wouldn't be happy about. That wouldn't be me traumatizing them. That would be them being assholes.

I think defining down trauma that way is not super useful and possibly a little insulting.