Scott McFarnell

YouTube video by Dr Tevin Naidu Suzanne Gildert: Can We Engineer Consciousness? Quantum Physics, Robotics & Conscious AI Technology

youtu.be/KUkw668q_mk?...

Fascinating conversation between @suzannegildert.bsky.social & Tevin Naidu.
Suzanne pictures minds as bubbles connected but separated. They pop or join a larger bubble but lose individuality as they are absorbed. Reminds me of Thales’ ‘everything is water’ or that minds are icebergs/waves.

“One of the best definitions I like of consciousness is: it’s the way information feels when we process it.”
Demis Hassabis

I like using Bohemian Rhapsody's screwball transitions to illustrate the need for a notion of identity as 'processual continuity', rather than 'preservation of invariants'.

So its cool to discover music modellers analysing this as the "Bohemian Rhapsody problem" eceweb.ucsd.edu/~gert/papers...

“You won’t lose your job to a tractor, but to a horse who learns how to drive a tractor.”

This is such a funny (and insightful) take on the, “You won’t lose your job to AI, but to someone who uses AI.”

I wish I knew who to credit.

A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition - Nature A computational model called Centaur, developed by fine-tuning a language model on a huge dataset called Psych-101, can predict and simulate human nature in experiments expressible in natural language...

A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition?

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I enjoy using AI. But honestly, do you actually know anyone in real life who’s used it to create something you’d pay for? It makes cute pictures, corporate sounding emails, and slightly wobbly code. But nothing I’d spend money on…yet. Is it round the corner or a long way off?

ChatGPT is still terrible at maps.

Why doesn’t OpenAI just link it to Bing Maps via an API?

Are we waves on the sea?

How wide is the “now”?

Is it diffused or discrete?

Is the next stage of AI models where they contact you, instead of you opening them?

E.g. ChatGPT notifies you out of the blue: ‘Hey, you know you love that band? They’re playing in the city next month. Want me to buy tickets?’

Is the universe a verb, not a noun?

Nothing is, everything becomes?

Is reality made, moment by moment, by the relational co-activity of agents, environments, and time?

What do you think?

Is metaphysics a prism, not a mirror?

Has there ever existed a person who has a “to read” pile who has actually finished that pile before adding to it? Or is it the case that if you have such a pile, it is prohibited by some law of nature for it to ever go down to zero?

Everyone talks about the hard problem of consciousness.
But what’s the hard solution?
Serious question.
Philosophers, AI devs, mystics - what’s your best shot?

Has anyone actually used ChatGPT to code a game or app that runs on iPhone - no servers, no subscriptions, just opens and plays on the device? How did you do it? What tools, steps, or tricks? I’m looking for real examples. Please share 👇

Has anyone used ChatGPT to create a code for a game or app that works on an iPhone? How?

What’s the hard solution of consciousness?

Thank you so much, @scottmcf.bsky.social! I had a great time talking about consciousness research at the Breakthrough Discuss conference in Oxford - such an amazing event! (apologies for the thumbnail 🙈)
youtu.be/AtZBzRzwiIo?...

Thank you. It was a brilliant talk.

Free thinking

Yours for only $10 a month

I use AI regularly and mostly enjoy the interactions. But you can certainly tell when an image is AI generated. ‘Slop’ is the term often used for it.

Is there anyone using AI to generate images that aren’t ‘slop’?

Link to the report:

www.turing.ac.uk/sites/defaul...

‘Understanding the Impacts of Generative AI Use on Children’ - new paper from The Alan Turing Institute.

“52% of children attending private schools report using generative Al, as opposed to 18% of children in state schools.” (of 780 children).

Mortal Computation

Only what can die can dream

To what extent do you agree?

YouTube video by Breakthrough Rony Hirschhorn – The Quest for Consciousness: Why Should We Care? Breakthrough Discuss 2025

Link to @ronyhirsch.bsky.social’s presentation:

youtu.be/AtZBzRzwiIo?...

Conscious AI?

“It may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious.” Ilya Sutskever

“…in the same sense that it may be that a large field of wheat is slightly pasta.” @mpshanahan.bsky.social

This was from @ronyhirsch.bsky.social’s excellent talk on consciousness.

Is it more accurate to see ourselves as a ‘process’ rather than a fixed ‘thing’?

Are we ongoing stories made of steps that mattered?

Would you ever pay for an AI generated piece of art?

For example, a painting, sculpture, novel, poem, movie, piece of music?

“I Watch The Rain (And The Rain Watches Back)”

A panpsychist song/poem/novel/movie?