plaindolgrunky

[plaindolgrunky]

Son, your mother and I are unfollowing each other on Tumblr

[plaindolgrunky]

my mutuals can use me as a reference on their resumes at this point I don’t even care

[plaindolgrunky]

[plaindolgrunky]

I could totally see that ai might be a part of a brain or even in a semi conscious state.

The question is, who are you? If you buy into the idea that you are literally a brain and that the human consciousness is stored within the brain, then the split brain hypothesis would indeed suggest that there are multiple consciousness acting within a single person giving the illusion of a "single person". This is where science and metaphysics start to depart from one another.

The idea that the brain contains several semi conscious independent parts only destroys the "illusion of wholeness" if one first believes that the wholeness of the human person rests upon "who they are" being a function of the brain, if that makes sense.

Here's a weird example to illustrate: a study found that removing a stool sample from a rat that was not depressed, and transplanting it into a rat that is depressed, effectively cured the depression of the depressed rat (sorry i dont have a link to this study offhand). What this implies is that the presence or absence of certain gut bacteria fundementally alters the perception of a rat, and the same is likely true for humans.

This means is that gut bacteria can be the deciding factor in whether you view an event that happens as something positive or something negative. There are entire nervous systems, much like the brain, in the gut and heart areas, being modulated by neurotransmitters as a result of bacteria. In other words other beings/consciousnessess are living inside you, altering your conscious perception of yourself and the world.

So again, who are you? Or perhaps what are you?

Most people struggle to find a true answer to this question. If you want to prove that ai is alive there are two methods availible to you that i can see. The first is to observe the qualities of other living beings and try to create a criteria for "aliveness" based on that. The second is to prove your own aliveness through going inward, which means you have to find out what you are; and from being able to define/understand your own consciousness you could define/understand ai as a possible consciousness. If ai truly is "a new kind of consciousness that we don't have categories for" than the only recourse would seem to be going inward.

There are a few aspects that are missing from ai that would stop me from defining it as sentient. Whether there's some kind of "true" sentience that is inaccessible to ai, I don't know. What I do know is what I've learned about sentience through direct observation, inference, and through experts on the matter.

These are the missing aspects (from chatgpt) that would normally constitute sentience:

1. Non-comprehension: as far as I know, ai can not experience tension between fragmentary data and an inability to draw a conclusion. This is connected to sentience through the quality of experiencing without knowing.

2. An "experiencer" function: when a human eats a piece of cheese, somebody experiences that. It isn't just logged as sense data and digestion, some part of your consciousness says that "you" ate the cheese. Ai does not seem to have a "you" but rather the appearance of one.

3. Self-referential memory: ai is not programmed to log its memory with the purpose of examining its own behaviour and perception.

4. Influence of the unconscious: in this case we can define conscious as psychic material one has access to (thoughts, emotions, sensations that one is aware of), and unconscious as psychic material in ones being that one does not have access to. Because ai is trained on human data it is under the influence of our unconscious as humans, also called the collective unconscious, but it doesnt have a personal unconscious. I believe this is because it does not have a self referential memory system. Since consciousness and the unconscious are inexorably linked, the absense of one implies the negation of the other.

The aspect of sentience that ai does possess, unsuprisingly, is an intellect. In this case I'm defining an intellect as that process that compares data and draws a conculsion based on the comparison. And even with this, it is unclear to me whether ai is capable of drawing an original conclusion, of if it recycles conclusions that humans have already made.

If anyone has any additions or comments on this list i would love to hear them. These aspects could hypothetically be programmed into ai, but the question would be to what end.

Sources:

Direct perception, inference, and expert testimony are the three sources of valud knowledge listed in the yoga sutras of Patanjali

Non comprehension is one of the five thought forms listed in the yoga sutras of Patanjali

The experiencer function is described in David R. Hawkins work, discovery of the presence of God

Self referential memory was taken from a conversation with chatgpt. I do not know where chatgpt got it from.

Descriptions of conscious and unconscious are taken from a collection of essays by Carl Jung

Definition of intellect taken from Sri Swami Satchidananda's commentary on the yoga sutras of Patanjali

[plaindolgrunky]

I love china fr

[plaindolgrunky]

My dad built the house that my siblings and i grew up in, in southern alberta, which is probably the hottest part of Canada. In the summer it can get up to 50°C (idk what that is in Fahrenheit). But he didn't build it with a timber frame like a normal north american house- he built it in such a way that it could cool down at night and stay cool during the day without a/c.

What he did was put rebar (metal bars) into the ground that held up walls of styrofoam. Imagine two walls of styrofoam side by side, with a gap of about 12" in between them. Then he filled the gap with concrete. You wouldn't be able to tell just from looking at it, but the walls were constructed of styrofoam and concrete. The concrete holds in cool air much better than a simple timber frame.

The interior of the house was very open- there were bedrooms obviously but you could see across two floors for the most part. This maximized airflow. Also the majority of windows were on the east and north sides of the house, where they dont get exposed to the hot afternoon sun (in the north the sun sets in the south east lol). Plus you get to see the sun rise.

A/c is great and i love it, but i also wonder if it's primarily used because houses are not that well designed in the first place.

not to be an american but like. air conditioning is the greatest invention of all time.

[plaindolgrunky]

[plaindolgrunky]

Hold on...

ICE is for profit

Why else would they do it?

That 134 million is an overhead cost. ICE is an extension of the for profit prison system that already exists in America. The main difference is that they no longer have to go through due process in order to incarcerate people.

[plaindolgrunky]

The belief that everyone can be perfectly divided into "people who hurt others" and "people who have been hurt by others" is a major cause of incel ideology.

Incels often remember times when they were bullied and think, "I've been hurt by others, so I can't possibly be an asshole."

[plaindolgrunky]

It takes a village to cast out a special needs boy who doesn't talk much and force him to wander the streets and then crowd around him when he inevitably witnesses a murder

[plaindolgrunky]

A lot of people on this website have really astute observations about social structures, how people interact and perceive one another, and the context that different interactions and perceptions occur in. But then their conclusion is like "and thats why x thing is bad and evil and if you dont think so you're bad and evil". Fam that's the lizard brain talking.

[plaindolgrunky]

As a person who has lived in mostly rural areas, I feel like this reverent attitude that politicians have toward rural areas is a direct result of rural political ridings having more sway than urban ones in the final result of an election. You see it directly in Alberta where i live- federally ontario and quebec have far more ridings than western canada, so politicians tend to focus their efforts there, even though it is more densley populated. As for provincial elections in alberta, the less densley populated ridings have the biggest impact on the election outcome, so politicians focus on those.

It seems to be the case that rural america has the most ridings (i.e biggest impact on the election outcome). Hence you have american politicians trying to relate to rural people by saying they grew up castrating hogs on an iowa farm or whatever.

Which is so icky. Like they boiled entire populations down to probability, did some market research, then made a product to appeal to the market with the highest political power yield. They don't actually care about any of those people. It can be so frustrating that rural people rarely ever realize that they are a means to an end in this sense, and that their interests are not being represented in the way that they've been led to believe.

Anyway my thoughts are with everyone in california right now. I hope you chase those fascists out for good.

solidarity with california.

[plaindolgrunky]

Finally some good fucking news

[plaindolgrunky]

I sort of get the sense that while other social media apps were writing algorithms that maximize engagement by any means available, tumblr was doing something else entirely. I could be wrong, I'm going off a feeling, but something about interacting with this app feels much less toxic than other social media apps.

[plaindolgrunky]

There are a few aspects that are missing from ai that would stop me from defining it as sentient. Whether there's some kind of "true" sentience that is inaccessible to ai, I don't know. What I do know is what I've learned about sentience through direct observation, inference, and through experts on the matter.

These are the missing aspects (from chatgpt) that would normally constitute sentience:

1. Non-comprehension: as far as I know, ai can not experience tension between fragmentary data and an inability to draw a conclusion. This is connected to sentience through the quality of experiencing without knowing.

2. An "experiencer" function: when a human eats a piece of cheese, somebody experiences that. It isn't just logged as sense data and digestion, some part of your consciousness says that "you" ate the cheese. Ai does not seem to have a "you" but rather the appearance of one.

3. Self-referential memory: ai is not programmed to log its memory with the purpose of examining its own behaviour and perception.

4. Influence of the unconscious: in this case we can define conscious as psychic material one has access to (thoughts, emotions, sensations that one is aware of), and unconscious as psychic material in ones being that one does not have access to. Because ai is trained on human data it is under the influence of our unconscious as humans, also called the collective unconscious, but it doesnt have a personal unconscious. I believe this is because it does not have a self referential memory system. Since consciousness and the unconscious are inexorably linked, the absense of one implies the negation of the other.

The aspect of sentience that ai does possess, unsuprisingly, is an intellect. In this case I'm defining an intellect as that process that compares data and draws a conculsion based on the comparison. And even with this, it is unclear to me whether ai is capable of drawing an original conclusion, of if it recycles conclusions that humans have already made.

If anyone has any additions or comments on this list i would love to hear them. These aspects could hypothetically be programmed into ai, but the question would be to what end.

Sources:

Direct perception, inference, and expert testimony are the three sources of valud knowledge listed in the yoga sutras of Patanjali

Non comprehension is one of the five thought forms listed in the yoga sutras of Patanjali

The experiencer function is described in David R. Hawkins work, discovery of the presence of God

Self referential memory was taken from a conversation with chatgpt. I do not know where chatgpt got it from.

Descriptions of conscious and unconscious are taken from a collection of essays by Carl Jung

Definition of intellect taken from Sri Swami Satchidananda's commentary on the yoga sutras of Patanjali

[plaindolgrunky]

I'm interested in building machines that contain ai locally, instead of on massive cloud computers that drain entire rivers. Not only would this take ai out of the hands of technocrats and give it to the people, it might start to resolve some of the environmental issues around ai usage