kasra

when you look for it you cannot see it; when you listen for it you cannot hear it; but when you use it, it is inexhaustible

[kasra @kasratweets]

there is a revolution taking place in biology before our eyes

I spent the past month reading the papers & interviews of @drmichaellevin, and wrote a long-form essay explaining his work and why it's important

https://t.co/Jzq1uPBf2P

[kasra @kasratweets]

@tenobrus so if people want to claim that LLMs are conscious while other kinds of deep NNs are not conscious, I can understand that distinction but would want to hear the principled reason for it. presumably it can't just be because "the input is text"

[kasra @kasratweets]

@tenobrus I'm not sure I follow. people like me would agree that brains can be structured in quite different ways (e.g. across species) and still be conscious. you can also have parts of your brain damaged or lesioned and still be conscious

[kasra @kasratweets]

@SamoBurja https://t.co/gAXx2F32Et

[kasra @kasratweets]

this is an interesting point in the new ted chiang piece – no one really claims that alphafold is conscious, or that sora or midjourney or dall-e are conscious

[kasra @kasratweets]

@livgorton at the risk of rehashing the same discourse that has been trodden a bajillion times, I do want to press on the "rich model" point

I am still compelled by the view that no matter how detailed your simulation of the sun, the simulation will not have the heat or mass of the sun

[kasra @kasratweets]

@livgorton I appreciate this answer. I agreed with a lot of his piece but also found his dismissiveness a little offputting

[kasra @kasratweets]

and to reiterate, I don't know how these differences cash out into capabilities

clearly artificial brains are capable of very impressive feats

and people are working on ways to bridge the differences between biology and silicon

but that's not where we are right now

[kasra @kasratweets]

"why would we be more than advanced biological neural networks?"

unfortunate how many people have been one-shotted by diagrams like this

[Thomas Van Riet @ThomasVanRiet2]

Pretty sure you can "program" curiosity and hence the ability to create. Humans are curious because it has advantages. Survival of the curious.

Why would we be more than advanced biological neural networks? (Question for atheists only)

[kasra @kasratweets]

sorry to be blunt about it I just really wanna keep beating this drum to encourage people to be thoughtful about the equivalencies they make between biological things and the artificial things that are modeled after them
https://t.co/mWYhKz03NS

[kasra @kasratweets]

for anyone else who is still stuck on "the body is just a very complex machine", I recommend this essay by philip ball

people who continue to say this either don't know what they're talking about, or they use the word "machine" in such a broad sense that it's vacuous

[kasra @kasratweets]

@unit_accord it's a great question. it kinda messes with me. because clearly we as individuals are a giant, distributed collective of cells. and we do have one unified conscious field. but the individual cells have their own conscious field maybe? something something combination problem??

[kasra @kasratweets]

@mllichti some people argue all life has some semblance of consciousness

[kasra @kasratweets]

@mllichti it's fascinating, people draw the line in many different places. some draw the line at humans, others at all mammals, still others at animals in general, and some people think all of life has some semblance of experience. I wouldn't be surprised if the latter were true...

[kasra @kasratweets]

@mllichti have the AI consciousness believers given their proposals for the minimum viable conscious AI? I understand it might be fuzzy but I'm curious where they draw the line

[kasra @kasratweets]

@tszzl you know what, fine. you all can have your conscious linear regressions if you'll allow me my conscious macrophages

https://t.co/71l24SjKbF

[kasra @kasratweets]

videos like this really put some intuitive force behind the idea of "agency all the way down"

the macrophage clearly has a "goal" of finding and devouring pathogens

[kasra @kasratweets]

@unit_accord ah. well. nevertheless,

[kasra @kasratweets]

@tszzl the poor line yearns to be nestled in its cocoon of data points

[kasra @kasratweets]

@VictorPontis I later realized I could've replied one of the luma emails from the event itself, which would give me the host's email. but this didn't occur to me in the moment

[kasra @kasratweets]

unmatched levels of flakiness being reached in SF today. commuted half an hour to a luma event and even the host didn’t show up

[kasra @kasratweets]

@VictorPontis thank you. I couldn't figure out how to contact the host in the moment. tried their social media links but DMs were closed. I was looking for a "contact host" button or a "comment on event feed" button like partiful has, but couldn't find one.

[kasra @kasratweets]

@NoBananaBB I am neither convinced nor not convinced

[kasra @kasratweets]

bringing back my woo theory on this

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Why are AI-generated replies so often framed as an opposition between two things? Is there a popular bot that does this? Are such tweets known to be especially engaging? Or is this just what an AI does by default when you ask it to write a tweet?