[cmpalmer52]

This has been the plaguing my thoughts recently as well. When I analyze (or attempt to analyze) what’s going on in the black box of gray matter in my head, I’m increasingly aware that it’s nothing magical. I’ve stated to others that the real shakeup the latest AI successes may cause won’t be that we’ve created an artificial mind, but that our own minds may be nothing more than a collection of neural subsystems. Subsystems process our vision and pass it on. They process our hearing and pass it on. They process our senses of proprioception and pass it on. Then our cortex processes all these inputs and produces outputs, which may be speech, physical reactions, or just thoughts that loop back in as another input to the cortex. Maybe our consciousness is just a supervisory neural network that monitors what the cortex is doing and feeds in adjustments. But instead of prompt/response, it’s always running, feeding back on itself, trying to predict what’s going to happen next and adjusting its models based on what we observe. It explains a little too much and I start wondering if there really is a “me” that can be described as a conscious personality and I get a little creeped out. One consolation is that we’ve always equated some new technologies with “maybe that’s the way the mind works.” The mind is like a book. The mind is like a machine. The mind is like a calculating device. The mind is like a computer. And now we’ve reached: The mind is like a super LLM with assorted subsystems. The difference is, this time, we may be right since, for really the first time, we’ve started simulating it from the bottom up.

Maybe our personality and being is just a result of our training data with a few genetic quirks thrown in. And what am I really doing when I “decide” or “create” something? Is it that much different from a LLM’s generation of language? Or an AI image generator?

[JKCalhoun]

> the real shakeup the latest AI successes may cause won’t be that we’ve created an artificial mind, but that our own minds may be nothing more than a collection of neural subsystems.

It should be no surprise. I'd have thought most HN readers have at some point attempted to kill their own ego.

Maybe it started when you were younger and learned that society used to believe the Earth was the center of the universe. Perhaps you then considered that humans too are nothing special — maybe not created in God's image after all? Instead the latest evolutionary result in a long complex process.

Dashing geocentrism, anthropocentrism should have made many of us skeptics about anything considered special.

Why should consciousness be inscrutable, magical?

I've been sure we're little more than imperfect machines for some time now.

[gary_0]

When I was about 3 I learned that the world did not revolve around me. Eventually, I learned my country wasn't special, nor the culture I was raised in. I learned the Earth was just another planet, and humans were made out of meat just like other animals, all of it governed by the laws of physics. There are no special rules in this universe just for us. We are not special.

None of this struck me as a revelation, it just felt like growing up.

It's honestly a little sad that something so simple as an LLM is causing so many people to come up short against these basic philosophical assumptions. The human brain weighs about 1.4kg (most of that being metabolic or structural support), runs on about 12 watts, and it takes only 3.2 billion base pairs to make a new one with a default template and peripheral systems already included. It is not that special.

[eimrine]

> and it takes only 3.2 billion base pairs to make a new one with a default template and peripheral systems already included.

I am struggling to understand what is this quote about.

[gary_0]

The number of human DNA base pairs. The data to grow a starting zygote into a brain with a default neural template (to keep it alive and allow it to start learning), and peripheral systems (the body).

As binary data, 3.2B base pairs is 800MB.

[eimrine]

Oh, it looks like a tabula rasa theory. No mithohondrea DNA, no special places in parents' body, no special behaviour required from parents. Just an 80-minutes audio CD.

[fragmede]

The copying of human DNA to make a new one.

[syntheweave]

I don't find it hard to resolve, personally.

Cosmologically, the world can be full of special, beautiful, unique things AND be merely the result of some computation. That is what a fractal is, no?

So if your concern is with your mind being special, that's not a problem that needed to be addressed by saying "nothing else in nature possesses this particular fractal boundary". You merely have to be one point on the curve, somewhere, and to the extent that an AI could replicate it, it would still be an approximation of such. It might be a very good one, but it wouldn't have the same causal relationship to nature, and therefore would be special in a different way, for the same reason that when you turn over an hourglass, the grain of sand that was special for being the last to fall now becomes the grain special for being the first to fall - it's "just" sand, but it's also positionally different.

So the world could be deterministic, but the interpretive meaning of that might not be "chains of fate," but a perpetual explosion of color and possibility, in which I will never know for certain in what way I might be unique, but it is far more likely that I am than not.

[93po]

The average HN user is much less sophisticated than you think. There's plenty of anti-COVID vaccine discussion as one example.

There's reasons to be skeptical of things, but come on.

[Ekaros]

To me being sceptical of COVID vaccine is entirely reasonable. Looking back at how we evaluated vaccines before it should make it clear that something went wrong.

And when those pushing for it can not even have honest discussion of effectiveness like does it prevent spread or just worst cases? The first one has long been standard for vaccines, but this one was later. And then it seems even vaccinated did get the disease, so why did we use the vaccine status as metric, instead well more effective and certain testing?

[valianteffort]

Science is about question and understanding. But we should also continue to question what we think we understand, because the hubris of man has often lead us to believe we're more right than we are.

If you won't even consider the possibility that the covid vaccine is harmful, even only to an unknown subset of the population, you're not exactly one to be calling others less sophisticated.

[d1sxeyes]

That’s not what OP said. It is possible, indeed likely, that in some small subset of people, the COVID vaccine(s) do more harm than good.

However, the evidence suggests that the negative impacts of COVID itself outweigh by an order of magnitude the risks of vaccinating the whole population.

If we are able to identify those people for whom the vaccine is likely to be more harmful than protective, we can weigh up options sensibly, but without that concrete data, it is hard to justify maintaining a position that the “vaccines are not safe” as a generalisation given the overwhelming body of evidence that shows that the vaccines are effective at limiting community transmission, improving outcomes for those who are infected, and reduces the likelihood of infection in the first place.

The statistical argument should consider both the likelihood of infection when unvaccinated and the likely negative outcomes from such an infection and weigh it against the likelihood of an adverse reaction, the likelihood of infection post-vaccination, and the likelihood of negative outcomes from such an infection post-vaccination.

These factors are all changing quickly, especially the likelihood of infection as community infection rates drop, but based on my understanding, we have not yet reached an inflection point where the risk of a negative outcome post infection outweighs the likelihood of infection with negative outcomes without vaccination - at least on a community health level. Individuals may be able to further influence these factors themselves as well, reducing exposure by not using public transport, or not attending events with a high concentration of people, or wearing face masks, etc., which means that ultimately, it boils down to individuals trying to make informed decisions about their own health with incomplete information.

This is a very difficult thing to ask people to do, especially considering that half of the population have below average intelligence levels, and may struggle to interpret the data for themselves. As a result, advocating an “anti-vaccination” position likely increases the net harm done to the community, and is not at all conflicting with making a personal decision based on your own research and interpretation of evidence.

[93po]

This is basically what I meant. I recognize requirements to be vaccinated to enter a restaurant is stupid if you require it with the expectation that you're making other people safer. But as a whole we're all safer if we're all vaccinated because it was proven to put less strain on hospitals, and it's somewhat empty hope is what made people feel comfortable with getting back to "normal". Which is important because a lot of people did suffer in very real ways from lock downs.

I support and encourage skepticism, and especially with anything that has a profit motive (including vaccines). But it was pretty clear that COVID vaccines were more good than bad.

[andrewjl]

> Science is about question and understanding.

Science is inherently a social and norms-based process, so it is more accurate to state it is about _mutual_ questioning and understanding.

> If you won't even consider the possibility that the covid vaccine is harmful, even only to an unknown subset of the population, you're not exactly one to be calling others less sophisticated.

Curious how the "vaccine-skeptic" crowd only directs its skepticism in one direction.

[bheadmaster]

> Curious how the "vaccine-skeptic" crowd only directs its skepticism in one direction.

That's because the other direction is called "the narrative", not "skepticism".

[eimrine]

> There's plenty of anti-COVID vaccine discussion as one example.

Let's be honest, anti-COVID vaccine discussion is not the same as anti-vaccine discussion in general. Latter is ultimately stupid, but former... might be just a reaction about too severe government's reaction on some situation.

[flangola7]

Nay, they're the same and I will threat them the same.

[eimrine]

How about discussion about different anti-COVID vaccine from different sources - are you really treat Western vaccines and Russian ones as the same? These two give you kind of different political effects when you can visit one list of countries with one vaccine and another list of countries with another one. I do not remember any discussion like that with any other vaccines.

And by the way, there were a lot of changes of upvotes/downvotes near my comment, thank you for not being silent about such controversial topic.

[xet7]

We are created to God's image. Everything is like God designed, to be able to work at all.

What that long philosophical post is about, that thinking that much just leads to questions about existence, and Christian religion has answers.

Spending too much time with computers can cause thinking, that everything is a computer. It is not. Being a human has all feelings etc extra stuff. Watching Matrix movie too many times can make someone imagine we are in Matrix. We are not.

It is just, that world is going through hype bubbles, when everything at news is just about one topic: 1. Corona, 2. War, 3. AI.

AI is about pattern matching. Calling many old stuff with new name AI, just to sell stuff. Making it up as they go.

AI is just some hardware and software, human written answers, recognizing text/image/etc and matching it with some answers. But it only answers what it is asked about, and makes up something that may not be true. So there is need for humans that try to understand is that answer useful or not. Humans will be always needed, to help verify answers are not too dangerous.

If AI asks AI, that kind of system usually causes AI to hallucinate more and mess up usefullness of that AI model. If AI would "think something", it needs checking, is that useful at all.

AI can not take over the world, those thinking that has just watched Terminator movies too many times. Most important data is at offline local networks. Every online service is busy adding more security protections and trying to always stay online.

AI, as software, is useful for many purposes. It is a new tool. New tools helps in many kind of work. This has happened many times, like after horses there were cars, it can change what kind of work is needed. There is big need for more coders. Coders are needed to debug code, check does code have vulnerabilities. AI tools help programmers to figure out some syntax, like Bing AI helped me to convert SQLite SQL Query to MongoDB query. Just do not copy paste propietary code and secrets to AI chat.

There is no magic. Magic means, you are using some technical terms, and writing unclearly, just to hide something, to sell some stuff. The same can be written in easy to understand language.

[bheadmaster]

> We are created to God's image.

Stopped reading there.

If you assume the conclusion before you even start, it's easy to come up with a bunch of plausible-sounding rethoric to justify it.

[cheschire]

Treat it positively as a mindfulness exercise. None of the stress you experience daily is more than a series of trained micro-reaction chains. With enough training you can start to subvert the chain reactions in your own mind. You always have control, you simply have to accept a more abstract form of it.

[user249]

> I’m increasingly aware that it’s nothing magical

It's completely magical to me that I'm now aware that you think you awareness is nothing magical

> The mind is like a calculating device

How does that explain your self-awareness?

[JKCalhoun]

What's special about self-awareness? Could it be a trick of the brain?

It's like the story of Jimi Hendrix dropping acid and playing amazingly well. Or, rather Jimi under the influence thought so — until he heard the recordings.

[user249]

> Could it be a trick of the brain?

A "magic" trick perhaps? One that can't be explained by anything we currently know about physics? The materialist point of view is becoming increasingly incoherent and I think that's what angers many of them.

[throw74775]

If it’s a trick of the brain, who is being tricked?

[melagonster]

maybe our brains work like big matrix, but we do know yet. before someone resolving this problem, I hate people proclaim brain just another chatGPT.

[npteljes]

>we’ve started simulating it from the bottom up.

Not really though, as I understand it. Simulating from the bottom up would be akin to simulating neurons and such, or even the molecules that make up the brain and the connected systems. What we've done is creating a complex system whose emergent behavior's output is similar in specific ways to a human brain. And significantly more so, compared to the previous attempts.

And yes, many aspects of our existence is comparable to a machine. Which can be a very good thing, since we can apply many of the knowledge to get improvements, like we can train, debug, and fix some things. In fact I consider the realization you're having essential for personal development, because you can now leave behind things that you previously considered "you", now that they turned out to be not really "you" but just something you do, and most others do too, to get closed to what "you" really are. And do better in things that you think "you" are not!

[cmpalmer52]

Yes, I know it’s not modeling our neurons and connectivity directly, but it’s closer than traditional software or “expert systems” approach. And, lo and behold, we’re seeing emergent behavior that seems to resemble some of quirks of our meat network.

Even the mistakes it made seem like the kind of mistakes people make, not the kind of mistakes software usually makes.

[npteljes]

I agree it's remarkable. Both the theory, and the feelings it induced in me while conversing with it.

[2snakes]

LLMs are more like a natural language interface for computers that do symbolic calculation of bytes aka computer science. Statistical madlibs for text generation, but useful for understanding people. There is a deeper and simpler logic of nonphysical consciousness that is perhaps best outlined in George Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form. LoF can do boolean logic but goes beyond it as well, towards the resolution of antinomy paradox with the logic of distinction andedness. It is also an interesting philosophy when it comes to Systems Theory of Luhmann. As well as used to do other very interesting things. There is an intro on Youtube by Leon Conrad.

[carrolldunham]

>I get a little creeped out

Maybe you already know, but this 'it's all just a train of mechanical compulsions, there's nobody in here' is the very thing that meditation is intended to allow you to realize, it's the 'liberating insight'. The problem with just reaching it on your own is you don't get the other part, the viewpoint about the world that build the case that this is a good thing, a great thing (believing there is someone there is the cause of all the dissatisfaction you ever feel). So you could check into that if you want - ajahn brahm or suchlike

[jemmyw]

I met an artist not too long ago who showed me a time lapse of a painting he worked on. I commented that it looked an awful lot like what you get with stable diffusion if you view it step by step. Turned out he was really into the AI art stuff and his thought was that while SD is missing a kind of creative leap step, it does look like its taking a process quite similar to a human artist, or at least to the way he assembles work. He was also interested in the weird hands AI makes and was painting up a big cavas with weird hands, I thought that was pretty cool.

[melagonster]

when you say we just like AI, this imply people do not really care anything, they just mimicking human behaviour. we know this isn't true. besides, if someone scoff at your family, you will angry, this is a common/predictable behaviour. is it a bad thing?

[worrycue]

> When I analyze (or attempt to analyze) what’s going on in the black box of gray matter in my head, I’m increasingly aware that it’s nothing magical.

I hold the belief that we are just self-replicating biological machines. There is no “magic”, there never was.

[ChatGTP]

You must be fun at parties.

[ChatGTP]

I’m increasingly aware that it’s nothing magical

If none of this is magical, what do you call it, and what do you call magical?