a minute in, he’s got this really hot bit of glass and it keeps suddenly changing between yellow and deep red, what’s up with that?

it also took away the pockets from her outfit

I don’t understand the lift-build one. How is it beneficial to start construction from the top floor? It sounds overly complicated.

I finished Alien Clay

It was really good. Story about class struggle, political revolution, and the line between oneself and the overall biosphere.

because no reasonable investor would rely on such statements

is that a real legal classification? It sounds mythological. Like, there must be more credible sightings of Moth-man than there are “reasonable investors”.

I like it, but I like the name “gravity battery” even better.

this is how I feel when they voted the doctor who robit dog off of Weakest Link in the first round

You know what Tictok has that tumblr and facebook and twitter and pinterest don’t?

When you get the pop up asking you to log in to continue, Tictok has this great big friendly red button that says “continue as a guest”.

I love that this is our ruling class’s takeaway from the end of the first cold war. They were all completely blindsided by the collapse of the USSR. And yet now they’ve convinced themselves that they were integral to it and that China is destined for the same fate.

my ability to order water pistols on Alibaba, however, will ensure otherwise 🔫

the first production line to make Ford cars had ~150 individual jobs. In the first year, over 900 different people had worked one of those jobs and quit.

Didn’t mean to imply that unpredictability is necessary for a mind, just that minds seem to have different/more physical components than computation.

I suspect that consciousness is a combination of structures within nerve cells and the electrical/chemical signaling between them. One of the consequences of the anesthetics research has been using ultrasound devices to induce more microtubual formation within cells, basically just to see what happens. One guy wound up laughing uncontrollably for a few minuets.

Now there is the interesting question!

Yes, organic chemicals can produce a mind. Yes, they are determined by physical properties. What sets you and me and the dog apart from computers is which physical properties are in play.

Computer engineers use reliable physical properties to make predictable, deterministic logic gates. Doesn’t matter what programme you run (or, inversely, which computer you run the programme on) the gates always behave predictably. Make them too small, though, and quantum effects overtake the predictable properties. The machine stops being predictably deterministic and cannot function as a computer.

We don’t know how minds come about. Programmer types like to say it’s the interaction between neurons – that each cell behaves like a logic gate in a computer. That is pure conjecture. They want that to be the case.† And… reality doesn’t quite line up with that story. Anesthetics points to a deeper level of physical phenomena.

When a patient goes into surgery, it’s not ideal for them to be conscious during it. So we switch that off, with some good ol’ anesthetics! And I do mean “switched off” – anesthetized patients don’t even dream. How does it happen? For the longest time, nobody was sure. An anesthesiologist and some researchers decided to look into it. What they found is that anesthetics blocks the formation of these little structures inside cells, called microtubuals.

From what I (mis)understand, quantum physicists find microtubuals really interesting. Something to do with radial symmetry and interactions between the molecules that make up the tube? I don’t understand quantum. The point is, whatever explanation for consciousness we find, it looks like it’s gonna include some quantum-chemical properties that don’t gel well with computable mathematics. Which shouldn’t be all too surprising. Even photosynthesis depends on quantum phenomena to get the electromagnetic radiation into the cell.

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But if you think it is just a scam, gimmick, grift, etc I don’t need to hear from you right now

Too bad! :garf-troll:

I don’t think computers can have a mind. It’s a maths machine. Mechanically following a predetermined set of instructions, toggling switches as its rule-set requires. Everything else is abstraction. Desktops and programmes and widgets and websites are just patterns in the switches that people have agreed to peg meaning onto. Circuits and switches can no more hold a mind than the pulp and ink of a book.

The existential threat of “AI” is our leaders, both public and private, turning over decision making to what is essentially a complicated, yet brainless, abacus.