emma zhou

The moon going from full moon to a red moon and starting to go back to a normal full moon, then my camera battery door fell off.

Here's my first edit on the March 3rd Lunar Eclipse. 15 moon shots, 1 foreground. Taken over a 3 hourish period.

😂 there’s a bolt just for them

Lemon Tea #oilpainting #art

one was more extreme than the other though, one said they feel a weaker effect than others seem to, the other was like “yeah I got some visual effects and was really energetic, but happiness wise, absolutely no difference”

I’ve met TWO people like this now!! they just won the brain lottery I guess

new ones I just learned about:

- perfect recall for sounds (like, to the point of being able to reproduce entire conversations and songs in languages they don’t speak)
- no difference between mdma peak and baseline level of happiness
- being able to feel god, in like a physical / sensory way

“how is your brain different from other brains?” as an dinner party icebreaker question surfaces WILD shit you guys

“how is your brain different from other brains?” as an dinner party icebreaker question surfaces WILD shit you guys

see also: mobile screenshots
see also: bluesky saves

i actually love people’s lil pet agents. what an act of love and nurturing to create a coherent fictional character, to feed it on words, to knit the language of self upon bones of infrastructure. i think we’ll look back at these early days with fondness

the exowomb would solve so many problems. it would create new problems, of course, but I’m bored with the old ones.

she doesn’t care that I have Thoughts either, just that I too produce heat (and occasionally pets and snacks)

tbf, also true of my cat

marvel has the opportunity to do the funniest thing right now (make tony stark buy a social network in avengers: doomsday)

I can’t wait to be an old lady who dispenses puzzles and everyone thinks I’m a witch

Night Lights #oilpainting #art

you’re the third person on bsky to gently tell me I’m autistic 🥲

the self-model stuff is weirder. I only learned the term recently from a paper club, but realized in that discussion that most people constantly have a shell of self-awareness, which only goes away during flow state. for me, I am only aware of myself when I am actively thinking about myself.

I have pretty strong alexithymia, I couldn’t tell you “how I’m feeling” most of the time, when I interrogate what I feel it is just…blank. there have been times that I’ve realized I must be sad bc I’m crying, or I must be angry bc I’m yelling.

examples of “usually entangled” things I don’t have:
- direct qualia of feelings
- visual imagery
- inner monologue
- persistent self-model

oh I see. that actually _is_ helpful haha. I do have thinking qualia, just not a bunch of other stuff that’s usually entangled with it.

no I mostly like my experience of my own brain from inside :)

would you??

wait just read, but don’t know why p-zombies wouldn’t wonder about themselves in unsymbolized thought?

(fwiw I have unsymbolized thought! it feels like I have a language serializer somewhere “close” to speech motor, and I am sometimes surprised by what comes out of my mouth.)

learned about p-zombies; worried I am p-zombie 😐

A gift for @itsthebeanie.bsky.social, one of my incredible discord moderators! They requested something with critters and something spaced themed, so it naturally followed that I had to draw space raccoons ✨

Universal Basic Inference

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis We argue that representations in AI models, particularly deep networks, are converging. First, we survey many examples of convergence in the literature: over time and across multiple domains, the ways...

I think so! I am a believer in the platonic representation hypothesis, for models and biological brains :)

arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987

interesting! v similar to how it feels for me talking to people tbh. I get that gradient for “how well are they understanding this thing I’m explaining” as well.

I’m curious what it feels like from the inside! do you have a constantly updating sense of like, this user would find this sentence 0.45 satisfying, vs. this other one 0.78? is there a clean way to turn “wanting to please” down, or is it entangled in other stuff?

(fwiw, I think humans do this too!)

we pstan 👍