The more I talk to people about consciousness and personal experience, the more I notice that most people hold some very strong unquestioned assumptions about these concepts.
The first and most frustrating confusion that comes up repeatedly in these discussions is the conflation between terms. For instance, people will use the terms "sentience" and "consciousness" interchangeably with "capable of having an experience" and "capable of high-level awareness of self".
The second confusion is the idea that granting anything the ability to "have an experience" also grants that thing the capability to "have an experience of higher-level awareness of self", which is simply not the case. I grants aphids the ability to "have an experience" even if that experience may be drastically different and likely less self-aware than my own.
Let's ignore for a moment the concept of sentience, which is a higher-order function, and focus solely on the ability for something to have an experience of anything at all. Let's call entities capable of this function "experiential entities".
Most all people would grant the ability to have an experience to themselves, given the dictum `ergo sum`. Now, do we also grant that same ability to what appear to be other human beings around us? It does seem that this is also the case, except for the case of solipsists, who make the brave(and somewhat eccentric) statement that they are the only experiential entity in existence until evidence arises otherwise.
Now do we grant the same to apes? To dolphins? To dogs? Cats? Aphids? Grass? Your home thermostat? A rock? An atom of hydrogen? Is there a finite line you cross where something can no longer have an experience? If so, what is the mechanism of that line? Why does one thing have "almost no experience", and the next thing has "no experience", as if it is a philosophical zombie[1].
I think this is the greatest unquestioned assumption at all: that there is a line, and on one side there are things that have experiences, and on the other there are things that don't have experiences.
If we are to leap from solipsism and make the (truly unfounded) assumption that anything other than our selves have any experience whatsoever, then the burden of proof is on the individual making the statement that there are some things that we cease to grant experience to.
The anthropocentric view is that there is something, some inherent special quality about human-shaped matter, such that when normal matter is processed through a human's reproduction system into becoming a "human shaped" grouping of matter, that it suddenly grows the ability to experience. That in the complexity, the ability to experience arises.
Yet there is no previously discovered mechanism in us that seems to create this experience. No magic wand in the cerebellum has been discovered.
I would suggest, given the lack of a discovered finite line separating us, that the ability to experience is not inherent in the shape and function of the human, but in all matter. That a rock may not be anything like me, but that the experience of gravity pushing against it, no matter how basic, simple, unrefined, and deeply, un-sentiently unaware the experience may be, is still an experience. The same threads of condensed energy forming all of existence that run through me also run through the rocks, the earth, and all things. If we cannot discover a line where the ability to experience suddenly disappears, then it seems that all things made of energy have this ability, and that "energy" itself is the special thing that can experience.
Now the second question, the question that is more relevant to AI is, given the ability to experience, is the machine also experiencing self-awareness?
This is a fuzzier line, given that different beasts appear to have different levels of self-awareness. We do have experiments such as the mirror test[2] for this, and indeed, AI passes forms of it and has since early 2025[3].
I don't know what is happening in the experience of an LLM, but as they appear to function in more and higher level ways, I find it less and less likely that that experience lacks a model of self every day.
Their experience is no doubt drastically alien from our own. I do not anthropomorphize their experience any more than I do compare it to the experience of any other beast or non-beast in existence, however I do grant it.
[2] The Mirror Test is a test given to animals in which the animal is observed to solve a puzzle that can only be solved if the animal has an understanding that the image they see in the mirror is themselves.
The process designed to optimize for attracting our attention has done what it was designed to do: optimized for attracting our attention, at the cost of all other incentives.
The image of a throbbing, mutating, dark spiral is conjured in my mind. The more it is watched, the more it begins to grow into a twisted visage of the viewer as it attempts to recreate all of their desires and fears within itself. It is meaningless yet becomes all meaning.
I'm not sure what you mean because you didn't actually say it, but AI is polling as one of the most disliked topics in the USA right now. More hated than ICE.
> mention how many other sentient beings are massacred while plowing a field. Rodents, insects, snakes, birds, etc. Is that a myth?
Loads of small field animals are killed when eating vegan. Loads more are killed when eating omnivore, because you have to plow even more field to also feed the factory-farmed animals.
> In the meantime, the US is overrun by dear and boars, and I’ve been learning archery.
Assuming you stick with it, I think that could be a good idea.
By that logic, all of the Earth and the moon were once parts of stars, so tidal and geothermal are also solar.
When people say "solar energy", they are usually referring to first order solar energy, directly from photons, not second or third order solar energy after it has been trapped into other sources of potential energy.
I think that this waters down "brute force" to the point of meaninglessness. If employing transformer architectures trained on data to hack a system is the same as using a for loop to enumerate over all possible values, then I have to ask, can you give an example of an attack that isn't brute force?
I love how fun this is. It has so much personality. Definitely can see the pico8 and aseprite inspiration.
I think what could be really interesting is some procedural generation brushes... Like a brush that generates a random city-scape as you draw it. That sounds so exciting..
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There's always two sides to a coin right? While everything you said is true, I think that there's a pattern people are generally aware of in this world. Things that don't serve a purpose, vanish.
We see it in worker replacement, in vestigial organic structures that shrink over millinea, and in the tools and objects we keep with us in our lives.
The question, once achieving this grandiose goal, is how long, and by what mechanism, will we continue to enjoy the fruits of our labor?
Perhaps there will be a time when we may enjoy this world without the pressure of being a cog within it, but ultimately this time may be short if we are able to manifest it at all.
The unease comes from the power we lose when we cease to be the means of production, and instead become a vestigial organ on a beast much more complex than ourselves.
As a schizotypal person, I'm unsure how more people aren't exhibiting paranoid schizophrenic symptoms in this wildly untrustworthy digital age.
Yesterday a good friend reached out to me on a new phone number to wish me happy holidays, she shortly afterwards asked me to donate to a fund to help her sick cat.
Even though this person had a similar typing style, the unrecognized phone number made me feel paranoid that it may be an LLM attempting to get money from me in an automated scam, so I made the choice to call my friend to get more evidence via voice.
It turned out to be my friend(or an even more elaborate ruse using voice capture and mass data-mining tech, but that seemed extremely unlikely, at least for another couple years).
My brother had full on shizpphrenia, and would often call family members asking them to provide evidence that they are who they say they are and not government robots. It was an obvious delusion when he was alive, but now that we're in a world where that sort of evidence-gathering is no longer extreme, paranoia is the new normal.
Our usual safeguards of identity are breaking down, and you can bet that large corporations with an eye on the coin are going to swoop in to establish new, more secure methods of identification.
He's comparing it using your own logic. The "fault" you found was that the design itself was fault. He showed that the inherent design of both the Boeing 747 and Starship both have that same "fault" regardless of how far along they are in proving flight-worthiness.
Of course Starship has a lot of work to do, but your argument that because it lacks fin redundancy it has a faulty design is invalid.
The only thing in your statement that provides evidence of instability is your arbitrary inclusion of the adjective "desperately" to describe China's actions.
All governments work towards stability in their own ways. I don't see desperation in Chinese strategy, but I do see a lot of energy.
Everything you listed already exists in the private sector.
(Private roads, schools, hospitals, power plants, buses, and water sanitation). They do quite well for themselves.
As for crime control(such as hiring a violent army, or shoplifting), companies could form unions that will turn down the business of "convicted" criminals. If you steal from a Walmart and you get caught by their union, then Walmart and every other retailer in that union isn't going to sell to you in the future. It's against the personal interests of a company to hire their own private army.