It would be a valid argument if you could explain us what subjective experience and agency are. No one can explain this, so the arguments sounds like "AI doesn't have something I don't really know what, but they have to miss something, sure".

> But the truth is that we don't know.

Yes! This is the point. If we don't know how our minds work, how can we be sure that a machine doesn't work like our minds?

> I highly recommend people in the AI research space should read philosophy and modern linguistics.

Linguists are linguists, they don't know about consciousness, they specialists in language.

The main teaching of philosophy is to open your mind wide, and then still wider. So yes, we all should read more philosophy, but we should remember while reading, that philosophy is what we do, when we can't turn a question to a scientific one. I'd say that philosophy is more about finding the right question, than the right answer. Until there are no science branches like Subjectology or Consciousiology, and all you can find are TL;DRs written by philosophers and scientists from unrelated branches of science (like linguists or neurologists) you can be sure that the right question is not found yet. Therefore it is better to keep yourself uncertain. BTW it is the main lesson of philosophy: to open your mind wide and then open it wider still.

I believe, that all this philosophy is... well... philosophy. Meta-physics. It doesn't matter. What does matter is how we should deal with machines? Do we have to treat them as human beings? Should we accept that they have "human rights"? Can a machine be held accountable for its mistakes? Can we talk about "intentional" and "unintentional" mistakes of a machine?

Answers to these questions are important, they are imperative answers, they govern how we live our lives. But when people try to answer them, they somehow jump to talking about consciousness, and "are they really like us or not", and... etc. I personally keep myself uncertain. I'm pretty sure that current models do not deserve human rights. I cannot say about future models.

You see, there were times in history when smart and well-intentioned people were certain that some people deserve less moral considerations than others. We are smart and well-intentioned and we are certain that AI deserve no moral considerations. How it will play out in a future? Will my descendants think bad of me because I used slave labor of a local model on a GPU? I don't know, we don't know. Right now, I'm exploiting LLMs and I believe it is ok, but I'm not going to fall into this trap and to stick to my belief because of some philosophical or lingustic or neurological argument. I'm choosing epistemological humility, I clearly state that I don't know the right answer and I'm keeping an eye to it so I wouldn't miss it.

I do not claim the moral high ground. My moral is more flexible, than just "an eye for an eye" or "be nicer than the other side". I can do any of that depending on a situation. I'm starting any communication with the latter, it is a consequence of my upbringing, but if it doesn't work I may do anything. I want to note, I know that "be nicer than the other side" works oftentimes, people are entering into a communication in some emotional state and with some expectations, and these things can change during the communication. So I let my upbringing to try it first not just because of upbringing, but because I know the value of it.

> one can leave such situations without being rude back or making a scene.

One can. And I can. However there are situations when I just don't want to. A series of interviews that took my time just to end with the rudeness, so I just wasted my time is one of these situations. If they wanted to hire pushovers they could write it upfront in the requirements for applicants, I wouldn't bother them.

I had a dog, and I can say that the last statement is false. Moreover, I heard that Romans trained giraffes and other big animals to rape people, it was deemed as a kind of an entertainment for Colosseum. If they managed it, I think it is a child play to train dogs to do the same.

I have no opinion on Israeli training dogs to rape prisoners, I doubt it, but still I can't just reject it without any research. OTOH I have an opinion about the dog-expert: they are lying. Or maybe they are not so expert as they think.

Why didn't you answer, that it tells you that his camera is unfocused?

I don't understand how people tolerate this for so long, I'd start trolling the guy after his third question. If he wants to be rude, then I'd retaliate and make sure I have a laugh while he is wasting his time.

Can we say "no moving parts" if the deformation takes place and some parts are moving against others? It is probably an irrelevant philosophical question, but still.

It surprises me a lot. You can be a politician making a career on a hatred of immigrants, but your prosperity is bound to the prosperity of USA, so why to destroy it? It cannot be just malevolent, it is plain sheer stupidity. It seems to me even worse than roman elites fighting their civil wars while Rome itself was crumbling. They were in a situation of a tragedy of commons, stupid but understandable. But USA politicians really going against immigration is just something else. You can always look tough on immigrants while not hurting brain drain from all over the world.

There were dumb rumors that Trump is a Kremlin agent, but now I don't think they are so dumb. It is not enough to be a fool to inflict so much damage to USA.

I'd bet that they'll not try in-space refueling before they demonstrated in-space relight of an engine. So they need to fly at least twice. Or even thrice because to demonstrate refueling you need two Starships in orbit.

Maybe I have not enough fantasy and/or creativity, but trying to imagine it, I see just a bit more of oversight built into protocols of approving changes to repositories. I mean, it doesn't seem that improved security needs an approach "destroy everything and build it from scratch", some additions on top of existing structures would do. Am I wrong?

Are you arguing that the system may be more resilient than it seems? Like, maybe there is a conspiracy working on security. And they keep themselves secret so attackers would be susceptible to under-appreciate the real level of security and make mistakes that inevitable would caught?

It seems like a over-stretched explanation, doesn't it. Care to explain yourself?

With Gentoo I believe it is more fun, because of all the options gentoo provides out of a box. More kernels, more work to do.

    ls /var/db/repos/gentoo/sys-kernel/
    asahi-sources/       git-sources/         linux-next/          scx-loader/
    bliss-initramfs/     gnumach/             metadata.xml         udev-hid-bpf/
    cryptodev/           hurd/                mips-sources/        ugrd/
    dkms/                installkernel/       modprobed-db/        vanilla-kernel/
    dracut/              kci-dev/             pf-sources/          vanilla-sources/
    dracut-crypt-ssh/    kergen/              raspberrypi-image/   virtme-ng/
    genkernel/           kpatch/              raspberrypi-sources/ zen-sources/
    gentoo-kernel/       linux-docs/          rt-sources/
    gentoo-kernel-bin/   linux-firmware/      rumpkernel/
    gentoo-sources/      linux-headers/       scx/

You can run emerge -u sys-kernel/whatever-kernel-u-use, maybe followed by `cd /usr/src/linux; make bzImage modules install modules_install...` well, probably you'd use genkernel or something like that, instead of hand-crafted scripts.

The point is: `emerge -u @world` can run into issues esp. if you customized a lot, it can't be automated fully, but I've never run into any issues with updating the kernel, and it can be automated.

It is not so hard to upgrade kernel, the issue is with the reboot you need do automate. Or with live patching, which doesn't seem encouraging, as you say.

Attacks are still possible, but if we look at xz backdoor attack[1] it was insanely complicated attack and it still failed. Its fail doesn't look promising, attack could succeed just the attacker was unlucky. Still it shows that the success is not guaranteed.

Theoretically npm can be improved in this way, if there were a separate "distro" for packaged, with dedicated maintainers for packages, who don't write code, just pull it from a mainstream and review it. It is not being done because of tragedy of commons, not because it is impossible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor

> Scientific awareness does change the outcome; just not 100% and not all at the same time.

It is a pretty big claim. I don't see you (or anyone) can provide a single example for it. The trouble is science doesn't have tools to prove counterfactual "if science was unaware the outcome would be different". This problem affect my opposite statement too: we can't prove that outcome wouldn't be different. Still, I believe, that I'm right: I talked a lot with different people of different views, and I don't think that any scientific awareness can stop them to be anti-science. They have their own motives to be anti-science, any scientific awareness doesn't address their motives. In most cases people either invested in anti-science views somehow, or it is something deeper on the level on self-actualization, like they exercise their free will to prove to themselves they have a free will. Both reasons have nothing to do with the truth or scientific awareness.

I can't agree. If awareness doesn't change the outcome, then why to practice it?

It is a slippery slope. At the moment you started to avoid talking about some things because your political opponents could use your ideas to promote their agenda, you stopped being a scientist and became a politician. You thinking is no more scientific, it is political. You are not a scientist anymore, you are a politician.

I dramatize a bit, it doesn't happen all suddenly, but before you started to devise a strategy of censoring discussion due to political reasons, you should find a way to do it without inhibiting thought and free flow of ideas.

From the other hand, I don't understand the discourse at all. If you don't like what anti-scientific crowd says, just don't read them. They will find talking points with you or without you. I believe, people are mistaken that you can curb somehow anti-science movement.

Lets take for example that story with "vaccines cause autism". If the paper claiming that was not published, there would be no antivaxxers, oder? I believe it doesn't matter. They would find something else, the whole point of their ideology "science is a conspiracy which hides things". So not published paper comes into the category of hidden things. They always find something. It is dynamic system with a chaotic behavior, you can try as hard as you like to remove triggers created by science, but conspiracy theories would be spawn by something "smaller".

But in some cases it is not good enough. If you look for a better explanation and chose gradient descent as your strategy, then you'll come to a local maximum eventually, but not for another explanation.

Arguably, it is hard to look for better explanation if the current one doesn't have a backtrack of failed predictions. One of the possible ways out of this situation is to search for the predictions that fail.

But what I want to say is explanations are not just for prediction. They are needed to build a mental model that then can drive the research. And new model can be built (theoretically) from the first principles. I can't find clean examples for it though. If we look at Einstein for example, he started with a failure to predict. But what he came up at first was Special Relativity which failed utterly with the gravity. Einstein spent like 10 years rewriting gravity to make it work with SR? Failed predictions of his new shiny theory didn't stop him, and it is considered to be good.

> Predictability encodes understanding in a strict information theoretic sense, regardless of our ability as humans to access that understanding.

But it doesn't necessary implies the possibility to move forward. I'm not sure if an analogy with compressed data is a good one, but you don't work with compressed data, you unpack it, and maybe unpack some more and convert to a very inefficient format with regard to the disk space used.

Compressed theory is good to apply it as is, but to refine it you should probably prefer something else.

I'm not sure how VF works, but maybe the deficit of oxygen develops much faster, so it leads to complete blackout in seconds?

> there are 4-5 seconds of normal consciousness when I can try to make sure I fail safe. Like sitting down.

Fainting and workout take more time. Definitely more. When I fainted it took tens few minutes from the moment I broke my leg. When I ride my bike up to a hill with all my might, it takes a couple of minutes to see darkness in my eyes.