The difference would be that in the movie case, there is a you that is being tricked, that is present even through the trickery. You're having the experience of something moving, but it's really your senses being tricked into constructing this experience out of something else.
But for the case of consciousness, the "what's being tricked" is having experience at all. So the claim "insisting that consciousness is real because it feels real" rests on the cogito-ergo-sum like observation that if there were no experience, there would be nobody to feel it was real to begin with because feeling is an experience. That you are feeling it (in a first person sense) is evidence in itself, although frustratingly, not evidence that can be communicated.
That's what makes it so hard, though. Either "cogito ergo sum" seems self-evidently true, or it seems self-evidently false, and there's no way of getting to the position by indirect means. And because it can't be communicated, there's seemingly no way to unambiguously show someone else what you mean.
That explanation is too simple for those who think/feel subjective states exist, however. While someone may be fooled about what they're perceiving, they can't be fooled about that they're perceiving, from a first person view. It's much harder to know if someone else is perceiving or just behaving like they are.
But there seems to be something of a fundamental divide between those who find consciousness obvious and those who don't. ISTR Chalmers, after on a boat trip with one of the eliminative materialists (might have been Dennett or Dawkins) said that all the experiences he had had while on the trip just confirmed that he was conscious and thus the existence of consciousness, and the eliminative materialist said he still had no idea what Chalmers was on about.
> Pick any human. I claim there exists some subject that ChatGPT has a better understanding of than this human, based on a surface-level evaluation.
Isn't that a low bar, though? For any human, you can find some subject that that human knows next to nothing about. It's kind of like saying "Google is smarter than humanity because for any human, I can find some fact that a Google search will reveal that that human doesn't know".
From the Wikipedia article about the multi-armed bandit problem:
>Originally considered by Allied scientists in World War II, it proved so intractable that, according to Peter Whittle, the problem was proposed to be dropped over Germany so that German scientists could also waste their time on it.[13]
Yudkowskyist rationalism is a prime example that what you simply banish out of hand may percolate back up through your ideas -- unless you know enough about whatever it is you're trying to banish to recognize it.
The thing they tried to banish is religion: it simply morphed into another form. "Those who do not learn about religion are doomed to repeat it", as it were.
Because the world is impure and the link between the real world and the mathematical domain will never be ironclad.
For instance, say that Joe makes a deepfake and then signs it with his key. Sure, it's beyond doubt (assuming keys weren't leaked, etc) that Joe either took or created the picture, but that doesn't in itself tell you whether Joe made a deepfake or not.
It's the same as in supposed blockchain logistics operations. If Fred the farmer says he harvested x bags worth of grain but some were stolen before he could ship them, there's no way to mathematically verify whether the theft actually took place or the harvest just came up short.
In both cases you're going to need some kind of monitoring, and that's the purpose deepfake detection algorithms would serve.
> We are FAR beyond such coarse distinctions in the era of surveillance capitalism. Isn't that the point these days? To market at such a fine granularity that it becomes individuals?
As long as the marketing algorithms still go "hey, I see you bought a fridge. Here are ten more fridges you may be interested in", let me express some skepticism at their supposed intelligence.
Doesn't that prove too much? For any coin you can imagine a more deflationary version of that coin. Bitcoin has had plenty of such forks. The argument above would indicate that the most deflationary would win, but it doesn't. So it can't be the whole truth.
The problem: the libertarian ideology that inspired Bitcoin explicitly denies that there can be a ruling class because free markets are optimal, distributed, and stay free forever.
But a Pareto distribution is kind of the default wherever people interact. So a system needs to be deliberately constructed to counteract it, if that's its goal. And saying "praise the market" won't be enough.
Isn't Agile more or less gradient descent (well, approximating the gradient for an undifferentiable function), applied to software development?
The objective function is some function of the quality of the product, as measured by the customer, and the work put in. The gradient evaluation is then the process of determining which feature gives the most bang for the buck, implementing it, and repeating.
But gradient descent has problems with local minima. So if that's what Agile is, no surprise it doesn't do surprising projects - even if the customer does know what they want. If the programmers are too inexperienced and it's not just a CRUD, then you'll end up with something like Jeffries' TDD Sudoku solver.
The page seems a bit too heavily weighted towards SNARKs in particular and cryptocurrency applications in general. There's no mention of ZKPPs, for instance.