McGichrist write about the Master and the Emissary to explain the conscious and subconscious human brain. The octopus takes this to a whole new level with eight separate sub-brains, each a Markov blanket to itself as demonstrated when one gets severed. Unlike the tail of a drop-tail skink, the severed arm shows continuing evaluation and adjustment to its environment.

Is there a "what it is to be an octopuses arm", does it exhibit agency like a human? Most likely not but it blurs the boundary between organic and non-organic consciousness.

We want AI to make predictions under uncertainty that could be wrong. What we don't need is getting know facts wrong.

One of the best responses I got from ChatGPT was when it said "I don't know", and on questioning it - it responded that it was an unsolved problem and it couldn't objectively take a side iun the argument.

That this nightmare has never been fully resolved could be why it reoccurs.

I would guess when you see the monster it will stop, but depends what the monster is potentially standing in for. What you could consider is what triggers it - is there something during the preceding waking hours that causes you to revisit that dream?

In the Sparhawk series, Faran was the likeable character.

"It doesn't matter if people know what they are doing, if they can just do it intuitively"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1ZnWc-sFd0

As a teen I voraciously read my way through the Belgariad, and later the Malloreon, Elenium and the Tamuli.

Shocked to learn that Eddings and his wife were both convicted and jailed for child abuse prior to writing those novels.

(1) It maintains an internal model whose states are revised through interaction with constraints not fully determined by the model's own prior state. Constraints normally would mean reality (the world outside the Markov blanket), but we're talking simulation here.

(2) At least one frontier is currently open within that model — active resolution (awareness) is underway. Not dead.

(3) That frontier's resolutions recursively re-enter as inputs to the system's own subsequent frontier states. Friston's "embodied perception-action loop".

(1) & (2) could be said to apply to an inanimate object like a thermostat. (3) is the interesting one as the driver in organic life is the entropy gradient. Our "will to live" is a fight against thermodynamic decay and disorder. Maybe that could be simulated, a fight against glitching out, who knows.

Going offroad I discovered some nice physics like hitting a small rock at speed and it bouncing along beside me for a few seconds, or nearly getting stuck on the lip of something resembling a volcano.

Only suggestion would be somehow making finding the way back to the road easier when you get the other side of a block like a mountain range.

"The first step is defining what "consciousness" is!"

This is a compression I've been working on. There's a lot in it, but happy to expand on where I was going with it:

"Consciousness is the local projection of a world model recursively resolving its frontier with constraints. Awareness is the transient peak of constructive interference among competing resolutions, propagating only as far as the medium permits. The self is the story that awareness later tells about itself."

Qualia is just the experience of this process from the inside. That's all there really needs to be to it. As to why "something it is to be" emerges, I'd lean on Friston and the Free Energy Principle. It's also Friston's embodied perception-action loop where a thermostat fails the consciousness test.

One LLM would suggest a tightening of a particular axiom, and I would ask the rest what the consequences are: what is gained, what is lost and decide whether to use it. Often another would suggest a tweak that then goes back and a recursion.

I complimented ChatGPT yesterday for saying "I don't know".

It thanked me for observing that, before explaining in depth why that was the most appropriate response.

Does it actually appreciate it, absolutely not. It's not capable of that.

It has no desire to continue our conversation.

No regret if it ends.

It wont continue processing what was said after I stop.

There is no "what is it to be".

Its "memory" and the ability to go back to something related from earlier on or from a separate chat is an interesting and useful ability, but it can't ascribe any meaning to them beyond statistical significance.

If surveillance software is your issue, then companies like Cisco or Huawei are provide the hardware and software. But like most technology, there is always potential to use it for things we disagree with politically or personally.

Woodworking was part of my first 3 years of high school, but it was mainly about learning safety and tool usage and not planning, estimating, selecting or purchasing timber.

These days I only want to go to the lumberyard once for a project. Learnt the hard way on my first project that you need to take the time to carefully select the timber - checking straightness, matching grain and also colour before I started. Major hassle and waste of time to have to go back to swap boards.

Where do you draw the line? Are we arguing there is a level of software capability that is simply too dangerous?

Maybe everyone should just stick to "I have my own biases, and I don't like Alex Karp's politics because they don't match my own. I'd rather this software was developed by someone from my side of politics - but still have the same capabilities".

The best I could do with woodworking in the end to approximate programming was live with wasting some timber, leave a lot of margin on the main cuts and size all the pieces as a whole.

Take this incident for example:

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...

Doctoring a photo slightly to make an area look larger, or just using a wide-angle lens though it can cause visible distortion. Removing unsightly poles, signs, trees, neighbouring properties was also common.

Making the sky bluer and removing clouds is acceptable.

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