sage92 (u/sage92) - Readit News

sage92 commented on The Seven-Year Rule macsparky.com/blog/2025/0... · Posted by u/thecosas

satisfice · 4 months ago

Consciousness is a phenomenon, but not an illusion. An illusion is something that seems to be there, yet is not. But consciousness is a self-evident experience.

However, there are gradiations of consciousness. The experience we have on the edge of sleep is qualitatively different than the experience even five seconds after waking up to a cat attack in the middle of the night (I have experienced that).

sage92 · 4 months ago

You’ve stated this so matter of factly that I imagine you have knowledge that somehow has alluded most people.

You mention gradients, which implies you can measure the delta/change of conscious, which implies you have a solid working definition, AND a static still point that does not change which this “consciousness” gradually changes.

From my perspective, which is first person pov, if I can detect changes in my “consciousness”, then where am I looking from to _notice_ this change? Is consciousness not the requirement of change detection?

sage92 commented on The Seven-Year Rule macsparky.com/blog/2025/0... · Posted by u/thecosas

pcthrowaway · 4 months ago

Well if you believe there's something magical about consciousness I could see why you'd believe the same person's consciousness at different points in time is the same consciousness.

If you believe consciousness is a function of sentience and self-awareness, and presumably that AI can one day be conscious (not saying it is right now), then I don't see how you can believe consciousness is persistent.

If the AI is copied/moved to a different server, is it the same consciousness? Or in Star Trek when you get beamed up are you the same consciousness?

sage92 · 4 months ago

Safe to say you tend to lean towards your second presentation of consciousness.

I tend to lean towards the idea that conscious is akin to a field in the sense of an electron field - that what we can measure are simply “excitations” of a more subtle field. Not a perfect metaphor, but it’s the closest thing to what matches my meditative experiences. IMO, it’s illogical for me to let another subjective being define what my substrate is, so I primarily rely on meditation and then supplement with objective observations.

All in all it really depends on what you define as consciousness. The issue that I have with most “objective” interpretations of consciousness is that we can only measure the excitations of this mysterious “life” thing is. If there is more to us than can be measured, e.g, that there are first person experiences that can be felt subjectively but not measured objectively, then any objective measure of consciousness will likely be limited. Consciousness seems from my pov to be the Achilles heal of the axiomatic assumptions of our scientific paradigm (at least in the west)

In response to your question, it depends on your definition of consciousness. Is neural activity the source of consciousness, or is neural activity the result of consciousness? How can we know for sure which?

sage92 commented on The Seven-Year Rule macsparky.com/blog/2025/0... · Posted by u/thecosas

pcthrowaway · 4 months ago

The person above meant "the persistence of consciousness"

Yes, we are conscious (or at least I am, I'm assuming y'all are too).

But consciousness isn't static. My consciousness today is not my consciousness of 5 years ago.

sage92 · 4 months ago

Begs the question: by what metric are you using to track the change/staticity?

I don’t see how one can concretely come to the conclusion of whether it changes or stays the same, when the presence of consciousness itself is a prerequisite of making that very claim

sage92 commented on All Placebos are not created equal (2021) samstack.io/p/all-placebo... · Posted by u/sebg

ses1984 · 5 months ago

Placebos do have side effects, it's called the nocebo effect.

sage92 · 5 months ago

Would you really call that a side effect? Nocebo is more akin to the opposite effect. We wouldn't say negative is a side effect of positive

sage92 commented on The Einstein AI Model thomwolf.io/blog/scientif... · Posted by u/9woc

alex77456 · 5 months ago

Human progress is driven by a small percentage of the population

sage92 · 5 months ago

The human body is driven by a small percentage of the overall genome. It remains to be seen if that small percentage really doesn’t play a part… we tend to remember those who scored the goal, but often forget about what it took for the scorer to have a shot in the first place…

sage92 commented on Lamini Memory Tuning: 10x Fewer Hallucinations lamini.ai/blog/lamini-mem... · Posted by u/galeos

vessenes · a year ago

Woww, very creative and interesting idea: I understand it as: train a bunch of fact-based LoRAs to zero loss (they mention 100k different ones), then use RAG to pick the appropriate Loras for a query.

So cool. The only moat I can think of for such a company would be proprietary fact loras- basically licensing a modern ai encyclopedia.

Anyway, really nice idea.

sage92 · a year ago

They mention "tuning millions of expert adapters", not 100k

sage92 commented on Fungus breaks down ocean plastic nioz.nl/en/news/fungus-br... · Posted by u/gmays

swagasaurus-rex · a year ago

> breakdown of PE by P. album occurs at a rate of about 0.05 per cent per day

At what rate does all the plastic in the world start to soften and crumble?

sage92 · a year ago

```

total_plastic = 8.3e9 # total plastic in tons degradation_rate = 0.05 # degradation rate per day in percentage

# Calculation of daily degradation in tons daily_degradation = total_plastic * degradation_rate / 100

# Estimation of time taken to degrade all plastic in days total_days = total_plastic / daily_degradation

# Conversion of total days to years total_years = total_days / 365

# Print the result print(f"It would take approximately {total_years:.2f} years to degrade all the plastic.")

```

It would take approximately 5.48 years to degrade all the plastic.

sage92 commented on Passwordless: a different kind of hell? jcarlosroldan.com/post/31... · Posted by u/juancroldan

hcurtiss · 2 years ago

How are you populating non-SMS 2FA codes automatically?

sage92 · 2 years ago

If you use BitWarden paid version ($10/yr) then after an autofill of username/password, the totp is automatically added to the clipboard.

sage92 commented on What does the cerebellum do? sarahconstantin.substack.... · Posted by u/scrambled

helboi4 · 2 years ago

I mean yes, people with disabilities often have a unique contribution to offer and a unique perspective. They often excel at very specific things. However, implying that it is so advantageous to be disabled that we would all evolve to be that way is ridiculous. Thinking things through slowly step by step may reveal errors others have glossed over...But it's perfectly possible for someone without a severe disability to do that. Meanwhile, the person with minimal to no cerebellum is totally incapable of stepping up to the task when, like a lot of the time, speed and intuition is important. If I wasn't able to rely on context and intuition at all I wouldn't be able to do my job, or even day to day tasks, with enough efficiency to get anything done. Furthermore, someone without a cerebellum will also have to learn to not smash themselves in the face when they're trying to eat and have to deal with constant sensory processing issues. This is not advantageous. It's a disability. So it's not going to be picked up by natural selection.

sage92 · 2 years ago

The premise that needs to be scrutinized is whether what we are deeming a “disability” is actually that. Thinking in systems, a component’s calibration (whether it is able or not) to a system can change due to the system as a whole changing (political, economic, cultural pressure).

One example is how the change from hunter/gatherer to agricultural lifestyles may have rendered the strengths of the hunter’s brain a weakness in an agricultural society.