This was a bit hard to read. It would be good to have a narrative structure and more clear explanation of concepts.
Very intentional. Their response would be: “if you need narrative structure and clear explanation of concepts, yngmi”.
Readit Newssignal-intel commented on We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube ksagar.bearblog.dev/vjepa... · Posted by u/alexcos
signal-intel commented on Is being bilingual good for your brain? economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/Anon84
Thank you for the snark. I am sure this will work wonders to persuade more people to take their privacy seriously.
I’m quite sure nobody here knows what you’re point you’re trying to make.
signal-intel commented on Is being bilingual good for your brain? economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/Anon84
Already doing that, they don't really have a choice.
I still have to deal with the awful UX they've chosen to inflict on everyone by "valuing our privacy by selling our info to over 100 companies", and they can still sell data they collect directly.
Indeed. Blame the regulators that required this, and/or the engineers that have developed a system that gives away your data.
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signal-intel commented on Is being bilingual good for your brain? economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/Anon84
“User agent” is a technical term. what ingroup does it signal that you’re part of, by using the term correctly?
The most despicable group of the modern era: folks who expect their own software to act on their own behalf.
signal-intel commented on Is being bilingual good for your brain? economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/Anon84
>We value your privacy
>... Together with our 173 trusted partners...
In a full screen, multi-stage permissions pop-up.
Yeah how about no. No need to lie, tell me how you really feel, maybe "we will sell anything we can to anyone we can because we need the money".
(It is a very detailed pop-up tho, in a good way - breaks down each toggle with individual companies, and there's a search across all of them)
If your user agent is providing strangers with information you don’t want it to, find a better user agent.
signal-intel commented on How to Build Conscious Machines osf.io/preprints/thesisco... · Posted by u/hardmaru
I also lack an internal monologue and have strong aphantasia, so the idea that I might not be conscious made me a bit uneasy—it just felt wrong, somehow. For now, the best I can say is that my worldview, which includes self-consciousness, is abstract. I can put it into words, but most of the time, it doesn’t feel necessary.
Don’t get too worried, the evidence seems to point to our thought mechanisms being superior, at least in some ways. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44283084
signal-intel commented on How to Build Conscious Machines osf.io/preprints/thesisco... · Posted by u/hardmaru
I can’t say as I have an internal monologue and every word I’m typing echos here in my mind as I type it. But as someone with aphantasia who’s regularly bewildered by questions like “how do you spell” or “how do you get to the grocery store” I understand that people’s modes of cognition vary immensely. To think that you’d need to, or even be able to, visualize a word to spell it is as foreign a concept to me as not having an internal monologue.
At the core it seems to me there’s a strong difference between abstract thinking and any particular verbalizing or visualizing implementation of it. I’d even venture to say that visualizing and verbalizing are slower, less precise methods to approximate the optimal thinking strategy of “knowing the answer already”, as compared to the non-visual/verbal methods that aphantastics/anendophanstatics are forced to use (and if others use it to some extent, it must be without realizing it based on their inability to comprehend aphan/anendo minds).
Evidence for the claim? When HN user Lerc describes gameplay analysis: "They want to do this, but they feel like doing that directly will give away too much information, but they also know that playing the move they want to play might be interpreted as an attempt to disguise another action", it’s very clear that this sort of long winded verbalization of a thought process is not the ideal mental exercise, my impression is that Lerc’s mind is able to do that entire exercise much more quickly and simply know the answer, and know that it could be verbally justified if needed, without wasting the time to verbalize that a priori. This is that indescribable thinking approach.
Similarly, I personally am aphantastic and things like navigation come very easy to me, a surprise to many. (I’ll admit i’m not a great speller, but neither is my dad who has a very visual mind). Moreover, I’m a moderately talented hobbies woodworker and it’s very easy for me to think through the full construction details of most any project, going down to any level of detail required and coming up with solutions to any relevant corner/edge cases, all internally without any words or visualization. I don’t have many people to compare this act to as it’s a fairly solo endeavor, but I do know that one person I made a project for has a very visual mind and is able to do that full “solid works in my head” visualization process. However, when we talked through a project she wanted together I pointed out several conflicts and ambiguities that she did not understand until I drew up the plans on paper.
Also, it’s worth bringing up the classic “bicycle test” as evidence the standard “visualization” method is woefully inaccurate: nearly everyone has seen a bike at some point in their life, but when asked to draw it provide absolute nonsense. Aphantastics, in my experience, never fail to sketch out a fully mechanically sound contraption. Pointing again to the idea that we somehow are closer to that platonic idea though process of knowing the answer than typically visualizers.
signal-intel commented on How to Build Conscious Machines osf.io/preprints/thesisco... · Posted by u/hardmaru
Interesting stuff. I don't have time to read a dissertation so I skimmed his latest paper instead: Why Is Anything Conscious? https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14545
In it he proposes a five-stage hierarchy of consciousness:
0 : Inert (e.g. a rock)
1 : Hard Coded (e.g. protozoan)
2 : Learning (e.g. nematode)
3 : First Order Self (e.g. housefly). Where phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience, begins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Types
4 : Second Order Selves (e.g. cat). Where access consciousness begins. Theory of mind. Self-awareness. Inner narrative. Anticipating the reactions of predator or prey, or navigating a social hierarchy.
5 : Third Order Selves (e.g. human). The ability to model the internal dialogues of others.
The paper claims to dissolve the hard problem of consciousness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness) by reversing the traditional approach. Instead of starting with abstract mental states, it begins with the embodied biological organism. The authors argue that understanding consciousness requires focusing on how organisms self-organize to interpret sensory information based on valence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence_(psychology)).
The claim is that phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally functional, making the existence of philosophical zombies (entities that behave like conscious beings but lack subjective experience) impossible.
The paper does not seem to elaborate on how to assess which stage the organism belongs to, and to what degree. This is the more interesting question to me. One approach is IIT: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Integrated_information_t...
The author's web site: https://michaeltimothybennett.com/
Do you (or this paper) think consciousness exists in the humans out there who have no inner narrative?
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