cognitive systems designer, AI systems engineer, latent-space systems architect, prototype radical production catalyst. fork reality.
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artificial intelligence can do much more than a human baby can fwiw
Of course babies don't experience pain. They look like they are crying but this is just an imitative unconscious reflex to get food. Their nerves are unmylelinated which physiologically prevents the mechanism for the actual experience of pain.
-- actual medical doctors in 1980
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"consciousness is an illusion:" is not crazy sounding at all, when you consider the extensive exploits that human brains fall for across each sensory modality: phantom limb syndrome, visual illusions, hallucinations, etc
why would any mental phenomenon be any different?
Turns out that formulating a theory of consciousness (hard problem, “why are there qualia”) without at least one crazy-sounding implication is pretty hard. They’re fun to list though:
- Consciousness is just an illusion
- There’s an immaterial soul that pushes atoms around in your brain
- Your thoughts/decisions do not drive your actions, even if you think they do
- Electrons are conscious
- Only particular carbon processes can be conscious
- A properly wired network of walkie talkies among the citizens of China could be conscious
For this reason I don’t think that mocking someone’s views of consciousness without offering one’s own is respectable.
(I do think the scientific questions regarding consciousness are mostly orthogonal to the hard problem)
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izzy retweeted
This kind of magical thinking was standard before heliocentrism; after, there was an explosion of fascinating discoveries. Likewise, it’s fine to think “the spark of humanity” causes good art, but your mental life will be 1000x more interesting if you learn about the real factors
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
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idk about the soul part, i guess that's like a concession to old timey monkey thinking, but moral standing... yeah, why not? why not get used to that now? these things are only going to get smarter from here.
This is deeply disturbing:
Anthropic secretly invited religious leaders to SF to advise them on AI safety, had them sign NDAs, but then primarily tried to convince them Claude has a soul & moral standing, all while wining & dining them to the max. 1/ tinyurl.com/preview/296b5z8z
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izzy retweeted
Forgive me for thinking about it a little. Piss Christ was a photo of a Jesus on the cross in a beautiful golden glow by Andres Serrano. On first look, it was a stunning, dreamy, deeply significant photo - until the viewer notices the title or learns how it was made and the curtain is drawn back.
At that point, for many, it was revolting and sacrilegious. All taking place in a few moments, or days later.
What's interesting is the broad swing of reactions, before knowing the title and after.
How does that relate to current AI generative software discourse? It's a one-to-one reflection of "people thinking an image is wonderful until they find out it's AI generated then they hate it".
Are they hypocrites? Did something change? What do people value? Did information about provenance really have that big of an effect? Are they lying?
These are interesting questions.
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izzy retweeted
Since 1830, technology has cut the American workweek from 69 hours to 38 while raising real income per person roughly 20-fold.
Properly managed, A.I. can do the same.
My @nytopinion Chart: nytimes.com/2026/10/02/opini…
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they got pangram for voices hehe
"The ElevenLabs Audio Detector is designed to help identify whether an audio file was generated using ElevenLabs AI voice technology. If no watermark is found, it falls back to the AI Speech Classifier, which uses machine learning analysis."
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Damn dude I can't believe my TTS got 2%. HELL YEAH
elevenlabs.io/app/audio-dete…
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