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For a moment I thought it was a version of goatse. Once burned...

There's some Pynchon in these times too.


Exactly. I'm seeing pullback more and more.


The body is the mind's interface with the world. Why couldn't a digital mind "feel sensations", subjective as they are, on its own interface with it? If it's assumed to not be a subject, then how could it be a mind at all?


I didn't say AIs couldn't be conscious, only that mimicking behavior (or speech) is not a way to become conscious.


I'm sorry, then what was that "more scientific" reason you gave for?


Lack of sensory organs due to lack of a body. A sophisticated enough robot might be able to have conscious experience. That gets into the harder problem that Ned Block laid out where we don't know whether consciousness is biological or functional.


For that to be reductive there had to be something to reduce. What would that be, without resorting to tautology?


I agree, but this is getting lost in the weeds.

The simpler issue is that "mimic" doesn't apply to LLMs in the domain of biology. That would be like saying a digital recording of a bird's flight mimics the bird.

Whether or not the plumage on the bird is red (in both life and the video) is an entirely different question.


Unless you don’t know I’m talking about (various kinds of reductive materialism), it sounds like you’re doing exactly what I’m saying is the main rhetorical move in reductive approaches to consciousness.


Mine was a straight question you should be able to answer directly for any debate to go forward, not any "rhetorical move" nor any "approach" involving anything. Any rhetorical moves or approaches of mine, reductive or not, conceding or refuting, would come after your answer but couldn't come before it because your point needs this disambiguation.

So again: please, without resorting to tautology from which anything could be implied, define what consciousness is to you in a way you don't consider reductive, so we can clearly see what there would be to reduce at all.


Consciousness is identical to the presence of qualia, that there is something rather than nothing, that the lights are on.

‘Reductive’ means the assumption that all phenomena reduce to what represent them in an external model or linguistic description.

Science, language, and reason are fundamentally reductive. So in practice the reductive assumption is just denying that things have an existence which is not identical to our models of them. And since these are the respected modes of thought most people are unaware that they are committing to a non-trivial reductive assumption when reasoning about consciousness.


The problem with non-reductive definitions such as the one you just gave there is that they don't have much information at all. What are those "lights" that are on when you say there is consciousness, apart from the presence of consciousness itself, the same thing that should be defined by that phrase? The presence of qualia is only possible, by definition, when there is already a consciousness that experiments them, but what is this? What is that something that you contrast with nothing, and how is it different from any other somethings like rocks, if at all? That just avoids defining at all.


>reductive approaches to consciousness

There 100% must be reductive approaches to consciousness because consciousness lives on a gradient.

If your definition of consciousness exists on as a point like an electron, something that only exists as a whole, then you've already flunked out of the study of consciousness. It is wildly complex. Has a great number of pieces. Manifests itself in different ways in different animals. You have to explain what consciousness is in that framework, and not from your own subjective experiences.


Right if my view was some ridiculous position you just invent to try to embarrass me then it would be ridiculous. Brilliant logic.

I don’t think you know what reduction means here and you don’t actually engage with what I write here and on other posts so I don’t care to explain.


Hello, fellow Dendron user. I haven't found good-enough alternatives either.


Hm, maybe we should go make one.

I am not a power user for Dendron, I mostly just use it for journaling, keeping track of who is who and what is what, and organizing architecture / ideas before they find a home somewhere else. Mostly a journal.

I do like that it’s in VS Code and I can leverage those tools and now, AI, to help.

The main functionality I use is the new daily journal from template feature. Do you use more surface area from it? What is the most useful features for you?


They're loud because silence is not a priority in their design and their fans run non-stop.


Yes. One might want to take care of the main stuff the usual way at least in part before passing on to the bidet, though, so as not to risk soiling. Source: Argentina, land of bidets.


That would be a reimplementation of the venerable HP 95LX palmtop.


Too bad its UI is ugly and its update procedures make me nervous. It needs a rewrite.


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