Of course, you can be like Daniel Denett and bite the definition bullet - he was talking about 'free-will', not consciounsess and that a chess program has the necessary properties.

But, it makes more sense to take conscious experience as more fundamental, what we are directly aware of, and try to explain everything else with that as the base.

Given the money available to conservatives, why haven't they been able to setup vibrant universities, films, art etc. The point here is not to blame conservatives, but push the analysis of the cause to something deeper than just saying that the opponents have all the power.

Imagine giving the access, to whoever wants it, to a scientist who may not have many fresh insights, but has the advantage of a huge memory containing all the scientific literature in their mind, the standard patterns of deductions, and the ability to work at a very fast pace 24/7. They could identify vulnerabilities in biological mechanisms, just like AI identifies security flaws in code today.

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Regarding hurting themselves, I was not referring to someone who is too dumb to follow lab safety precautions, but someone who has a nihilistic mindset. State actors and militia use weapons to take over and enjoy the power they acquire - they dont want to get killed by a deadly virus(unless they engineer and selectively apply the vaccine before they release the weapon - but this is very hard to keep secret). Someone who is nihilistic wont have such reservations on using the weapon even if it destroys them eventually.

Regarding restrictions on API LLMs leading to use of local LLMs, it is the local LLMs which will be used anyway (once they have the capability). That we live in a mass surveillance envirnoment is common knowledge. The bottleneck, where restrictions can be applied, is not inference but training which requires hundreds of millions of dollars. Chinese scientists have themselves spoken about AI safety concerns and it is indeed a threat to China just like anyone else.

Also, restricting high end weapons ability does not interfere with 99.9% of LLM usage (open-weights or proprietary) - so it need not interfere with business strategy.

There is a big difference between having a large bookshelf of programming language/networking/OS manuals and the ability to generate a functional software product which previously required a hundred or more developers. Even a hundred developers may not be able to find a subtle exploit in code which requires a tedious scan of millions of lines. Computer security hacks can be much less of a problem in comparison to exploits in biology.

Also, even Wikipedia (and public resources in general) have restrictions - there is information dangerous enough to be not published. In the 1930's itself, Szilard (who discovered the chain reaction) and Bohr advocated for restrictions on openly publishing research on uranium fission.

Restrictions on high end biology, chemistry would leave overwhelming number of use cases of LLMs unaffected - no need to ban open weight LLMs. Such restrictions can be even more effective, if it is coupled to researchers getting early access to see the possible problems and have an opportunity to prevent the outbreak or create new vaccines well in advance.

Restrictions are not enabling monopolies. The opposite is true, if a LLM engineered virus or other harmful technology is let loose, public opinion can very quickly swing towards draconian regulation. (see nuclear power after Chernobyl).

The foundations of the WW2 technologies you cite were dependent on previous theoretical efforts (ex:relativity) to develop a good understanding.

Without understanding, you get brittle demos which fail as the environment or problem description changes.

1. Trust - When an employer tells the employee something and then ignores it - then a truth based culture gives in to cynicism. Communications in the company become suspect. Even when there are win-win situations, where cooperation could lead to positive outcomes for both management and workers, a lack of trust means the company cant execute.

Also, this will affect communications with customers and shareholders.

2. Regardless of being right, the author is helping others in similar situations, who can adjust their expectations.

3. The post isn't so much about company vs employee, but competing factions within the company, who are invested in alternative tools/proposals. Promotion is used as a means of making one's faction stronger. This need not be for the benefit of the company or customers. Lobbying will also, of course, affect truth.

Factions might be inevitable (and there can even be good reasons - people genuinely have differences of opinion). But, if the company has good leaders, they will prevent this from erupting into a strong zero-sum conflicts which drown other goals - company's profits, promoting competent people, a culture of trust.

[1] Why should the homogeneous property be true? Because in a group, multiplication by g, pushes the identity e to g. M_g(e)=g where. This is a continuous isomorphism of the shape. So the shape looks the same at g as it looks at a (a neigbhourhood of g looks the same as neighbourhood of e). So an 'X' or 'Y' shapes cant be groups, as there are points which are locally unique, but 'O' shape can be a group. Moreover, M_g can also push a fixed non-zero vector v at e to a vector v_g at g.

[2] The Euler characteristic of the torus is 0. A non-zero vector field has index 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9%E2%80%93Hopf_the... See the special case of the sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem

Regarding the 'first-principles' discussion, it is a relative term in usage despite the name. Explaining from a layer of abstraction below normal explanations.

Someone explaining how a computer works starting with machine instructions is doing first-priniciples, even if they wont explain details of atoms. The literal meaning would be almost impossible to implement, for instance none of Newton's work would be first principles given today's knowledge. Similarly, current physics can be subsumed in future principles.

A better description would be that the atman is the consciousness in which physical things or mental constructs can appear and pass away. The nature of pure consciousness is also described as real(undisturbed by time) or ananda/contentment/bliss.

The disidentifcation from thoughts (for instance, seeing them pass by just like cars on road) is an important part of liberation.

(Some on the left who oppose liberalism actually do some versions of this, quoting Mills on colonialism - but that is a genetic fallacy.)

It makes much more sense to say that anytime some teaching/philosophy becomes popular at a continental scale, the people who are involved in conflicts will try to appropriate it to justify their position.

If you want to evaluate the role of the teaching itself, one would have to compare it to alternatives and whether they would be more easily appropriated.

This is a somewhat bleak picture of math. We also have the other phenomena of increasing simplicity. Both statements and proofs becoming more straightforward and simple after one has access to deeper mathematical constructions.

For example : Bezout's theorem would like to state that two curves of degree m, degree n would intersect in mn points. Except that you have two parallel lines intersecting at 0 instead of 1.1 =1 point, two disjoint circles intersect at 0 instead of 2.2=4 points, a line tangent to a circle intersecting at 1 point instead of 1.2=2 points. These exceptions merge into a simple picture once one goes to projective space, complex numbers and schemes. Complex numbers lead to lots of other instances of simplicity.

Similarly, proofs can become simple where before one had complicated ad-hoc reasoning.

Feynman once made the same point of laws of physics where in contrast to someone figuring out rules of chess by looking at games where they first figure out basic rules(how pieces move) and then moves to complex exceptions(en passant, pawn promotion), what often happens in physics is that different sets of rules for apparently distinct phenomena become aspects of a unity (ex: heat, light, sound were seen as distinct things but now are all seen as movements of particles; unification of electricity and magnetism).

Of course, this unification pursuit is never complete. Mathematics books/papers constantly seem to pull a rabbit out of a hat. This leads to 'motivation' questions for why such a construction/expression/definition was made. For a few of those questions, the answer only becomes clear after more research.