The Rocky Mountains Lander’s Peak, Albert Bierstadt, 1863
1,810 thoughts on “Open Thread – Weekend 21 Jan 2023”
Scene outside my local pub, earlier on this evening
“Mate, that sticker, you’ve got on the back of your car, “Don’t welcome me to my own country”, anyone ever tell you it’s racist?”
“Used to be a free country, man’s entitled to an opinion.”
“That’s where I’m coming from, where do you get those stickers? Oh. you’ve got a couple spare? Cheers, thanks!”
It’s the little things you do, in the name of reconciliation…….
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Consequently, there is still no love lost between the Russians and the Finns.
In more recent events, the finding of rare earths in the Swedish portion of Lapland is also likely to raise old Sami tensions about ownership and land rights which have simmered since Norway, Sweden and Finland established borders that interfered with the Sami’s transhument seasonal raindeer economy of wandering for pastures. This completely changed the Sami reindeer farming economy. The rare earth discoveries might act as iron ore, natural gas and uranium do on Aust Ab sensibilities. Give us your munny? But to which tribal group? And against what opposition?
3
The problem with trying to judge whether ChatGPT is intelligent is that actual human wokists generate unintelligent output. e.g. I asked what Big Al would think about the Voice.
ChatGPT: I am not sure what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would say about the specific suggestion of a separate Aboriginal Voice to Parliament in Australia as I am not aware if he had ever made any comment or statement about it. However, generally speaking, Solzhenitsyn was known for his criticism of totalitarianism and his support of individual freedom and human rights. As such, he would likely be in favor of measures that empower marginalized groups and give them a voice in the political process.
WokeGPT?
A more in-depth understanding of both the AVP and Big Al would deduce that he would be unlikely to support the AVP.
Firstly at a logical level, helping marginalised groups does not imply a racially-specific forum and club for their representation (as a mechanism).
Secondly, several of his quotes, such as
* “The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.”
* “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
* “The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.”
would suggest he would not hold as terribly important several of the the quality of life discrepancies that get talked about so much as indigenous community problems, and that differences in outcome are to be expected. On that basis, I reckon it is plausible Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn could have wondered if the Voice was a solution without a problem.
When I told ChatGPT that argument, it seemed to immediately wilt and start partially agreeing with me. It’s last sentence even said “He would likely have emphasized the importance of individual freedom and human rights, and would have been critical of any measures that reinforced racial divides.”, which is nearly the opposite of its first response. As it is still learning it is easily swayed one way or another.
Plus wokism itself isn’t coherent so poor old WokeGPT has a tough time staying consistent.
It seems to have some facts but it is not good at using priorities to rank the importance of some lines of deduction over others, so as to take sides in a robust way.
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Colonel Crispin Berka says:
January 23, 2023 at 10:38 pm
..
Ask it what makes an entity aware of it’s own existence.
1
I think I’ll have a Moccona coffee.
None of that cheap stuff like Nescafe…
And finish up with a Sarah Lee Cheesecake.
As flash as a rat with a gold tooth, am I.
9
Cohenite:
AI self awareness will not occur until P vs NP is solved. One of the best presentations of cinematic AI self awareness was in Forbidden Planet, which is a movie deserving of a remake.
Can you imagine the balls up Hollywood would make of that?
4
there is an overwhelming desire to assign some sort of ontological realism to your sensory model
I scroll, therefore I am
2
Let’s limit ourselves to sight.
What is the disease called when these things malfunction?
Hysterical blindness is one example of a malfunction in the reporting sensory apparatus. There is nothing wrong with the optic nerve, but some higher level subsystem is telling the brain it doesn’t work, although it actually does.
I believe there are other cases but consult johnH for details.
I want executions
and gibbets as a memory aid
3
and gibbets as a memory aid
… but only for the self-aware
1
Hysterical blindness is one example of a malfunction in the reporting sensory apparatus.
..
Ok. Now we’re moving.
So the “sensory apparatus” that posit is essential for self awareness can malfunction.
When it does so, does the patient lose self awareness?
Does he stop being aware that of the existence of a visual world?
Or do they see blackness, feel they EXIST in a world of darkness?
In other words, is there any evidence whatsoever that you can point to that sensory input is in any way shape or form required for awareness of self?
Bruce O’Newk:
Do not, repeat not, go too low in sodium. I think the anti-salt mafia have a lot to answer for.
That was a point I kept on making to my patients for nearly fifteen years of remote nursing in across the top end.
People need salt – it’s not just a matter of restricting it to keep your BP down, you need to replace the stuff you sweat out. Far too many times having to bung in a line and flood some silly bugger who’s been working outside for two days in 35 40 degree heat and having a few beers to ‘rehydrate’ in the evening. The deficit becomes critical in a very short time.
I did 3 inductions at Laverton Med Centre and day 3 was the classic pass out on parade for someone who had about 500ml intake in January. Sometimes you can just shake your head because strangling the idiots is not allowed – I think.
3
Once you have a model of the bit of the universe inside your skin, and you perceive that you have a model, you are self-aware.
I used to think I was a nice bloke, but then I did some things that convinced me that I was actually an evil bastard. So I updated my model, and I realised that I was updating my model. So I knew I existed.
More or less. All in the language, really, just a preferred way of talking about it, and naturally I preferred it, because it made me feel important.
rickw:
The experts are dumbfounded because they’re implicated in the biggest f’ck up in human history.
Their problem is the wheels are starting to fall off the coverup wagon, and there’s enough damage done to the experts to give the egos a damn good bollocking.
That’s the major problem for them – the data is in but they refuse to confront it.
7
self awareness is key obviously so, prolly wouldn’t work for some
… like sancho complaining about bad jokes
…or JC moaning about blow-hards
what do you do in situations like that?
send the squiddies?
9
In other words, is there any evidence whatsoever that you can point to that sensory input is in any way shape or form required for awareness of self?
*sigh* You’re doing it again. It’s very tiresome. It’s the large number of internal sensors that are inspecting your brain while it’s working that give you the basics for self-awareness. You also need to be able to model what your internal sensors are telling you about what’s happening inside your brain.
One by one the lamps are going out.
Qantas under Joyce can’t be too far off announcing that it won’t be marking Australia Day. When our national carrier does it you know we’re stuffed.
When that happens we’ll be like Bruce’s family member: lost our national sodium. Taught to be ashamed of our history. Memory loss.
Its nauseating that those who refuse to celebrate Australia Day give themselves a pat on the back and glow with pleasure at their own virtue.
13
Arky:
Hysterical blindness is one example of a malfunction in the reporting sensory apparatus.
I’ve only seen one example of that – as a 12 year old. One of the girls suddenly went blind at breakfast. No one knew what had happened, she just went blind. Lasted for an hour or so, we were all frightened as Hell because no one was able to let us know what happened. A couple of the younger kids went hysterical. Not a pleasant time.
6
It’s the large number of internal sensors that are inspecting your brain
..
You’re back to mysterious “sensors” that have no name, aren’t associated with any disease and that you can’t locate.
If what you really mean is that the areas of the brain that are designed to process sensory information also have some secondary function of self awareness or consciousness, say so.
If it’s sensors, like a thermocouple or a photosensitive cell, say so.
Where does this faculty reside?
strangling the idiots is not allowed
Correct, as that would miss an important opportunity for maaates to put in a tender for supply of boutique designer euthanasia equipment, and for the agents of the State to play judge, jury, and executionerassistant in dying, while spending up big on said boutique equipment on the basis that the public deserve only the very best… right until the last.
Robert Sewell says:
January 23, 2023 at 11:39 pm
..
Did you try beating it out of her?
1
Jorge,
when we are small, we just ‘are’
and as ee cummings put it ‘and down they forgot as up they grew’
remembering where you came from is one thing
and remembering why, is another.
the post-modern will destroy history, then you, and then finally it will destroy itself
and then we start again
5
Australian Open 2023 prize money
SINGLES – men’s and women’s
Per player (128 draw)
Winner $2,975,000
Runner-up $1,625,000
Semifinalists $925,000
Quarterfinalists $555,250
Round of 16 $338,250
Round of 32 $227,925
Round of 64 $158,850
First round $106,250
3
Let’s say we take a recently deceased (accidentally, NADT) Dr BG and plug him into the sensory input of 240 volts applied to his nads.
And as a result he jumps about, flailing and making squeaking noises.
Is this self awareness? The input has gone through his sensory gear and been processed and responded to.
Is this BG more or less self aware than the version lying quietly in a sensory deprivation tank dreaming of K’gari’s and dusky bints?
Cigars and dusky bints.
Not whatever spell thingo did there.
Compare and contrast an equally old culture.
Tamils in India produced high carbon steel around 500 BC and exported it far and wide.
7
You also need to be able to model what your internal sensors are telling you about what’s happening inside your brain.
If you define an organism as something with sensors, effectors, and the capacity for generating conditional probabilistic models of what it is likely to sense for any particular effector action, and if you suppose that the sensors can do a Bayesian update on the model, you can get quite a long way in describing cockroaches, cats, dogs and human beans. For human beans and possibly dogs and chimps, but not cockroaches, you need to posit the existence of internal sensors that give the brain some information about the organism itself, so it can try to predict its own behaviour.
The rest is general linguistic muddle which I try to avoid.
You might like to consider how a warship might be equipped with both internal and external sensors, including subprograms intended to detect and nullify interference with its own hardware and software, while having the capacity to learn from observations via its sensors. If it could talk to its crew and captain and could be taught to use the words I and me when talking about the program running on its computer, you might get some insight into the matter of self-awareness.
Article in the Weekend Oz by a guy who was writing a book on Julie Gillard but he decided not to.
That was pretty funny. Dude cancelled himself to help the lying slapper. Didn’t help much in the end. As Ol’ Leathery said, she just needed clear air.
you might get some insight into the matter of self-awareness.
And possibly not. But you are capable of thought, arky, so give it a shot and see what happens.
Don’t be silly. I would rather die than buy a prepackaged one.
Apologies. Lucky IT is not here,eh?
1
DrBeauGan says:
January 24, 2023 at 12:00 am
you might get some insight into the matter of self-awareness.
And possibly not. But you are capable of thought, arky, so give it a shot and see what happens
..
You go the ad hom, doesn’t add anything to your argument.
Notice I argued in good faith without insult.
You still have not pointed to a shred of evidence that awareness of self has ANYTHING to do with sensory perception.
No diseases, no cases, no comparisons of different states of consciousness.
Nothing.
On a serious not Bear, I’ve seen ads for Japanese concoctions. Have you tried any?
Compare and contrast an equally old culture.
Tamils in India produced high carbon steel around 500 BC and exported it far and wide.
Meanwhile, whilst sitting on some magnificent iron ore deposits…..
Actually, I was watching one of those DIY shows, apparently those little black balls that you commonly see around clay pans are actually iron ore and can be smelted into iron. Dude made an axe head. Came up with a very crude lump of porous iron and then slowly beat it into shape using some basalt rocks.
4
You still have not pointed to a shred of evidence that awareness of self has ANYTHING to do with sensory perception.
Awareness of self is about having a model of how the part of the universe inside your skin works, and being able to update it. That requires data. Data is provided by sensors.
Data is provided by sensors.
..
What sensors are providing the data when you dream?
1
You go the ad hom, doesn’t add anything to your argument.
I was praising you, arky. Most ppl either can’t or won’t think.
3
What sensors are providing the data when you dream?
No sensors, just muddled memories and a befuddled brain trying to impose some sort of pattern on them. At least that’s my guess.
1
No sensors, just muddled memories and a befuddled brain trying to impose some sort of pattern on them. At least that’s my guess.
..
So you are presumably self aware during a dream, and no sensory input is required.
Take the converse case of a deceased frog leg with a voltage applied.
Awareness of self is about having a model of how the part of the universe inside your skin works, and being able to update it. That requires data. Data is provided by sensors.
..
The voltage is data, the more the voltage the more vigororoes the movement. Presumably the frog leg is modelling the world insofar as the greater the signal the greater the movement required.
Is the frog leg self aware?
Is it more or less self aware than the dreaming beaugan?
One is processing data according to a model, the other having random experiences while absolutely minimising sensory input to enable those experiences in the first place.
1
So you are presumably self aware during a dream,
No. Not in any useful sense.
The frog’s leg is responding to an input, but I wouldn’t call what it does data processing. Would you?
1
No. Not in any useful sense.
..
Dreaming has no utility?
..
The frog’s leg is responding to an input, but I wouldn’t call what it does data processing. Would you?
..
It’s a simple algorithm for sure, but it is data processing.
You could probable make a logic circuit out of a few of them linked together.
1
Presumably the frog leg is modelling the world insofar as the greater the signal the greater the movement required.
You are confounding two things, information processing and the implementation by a nervous system. The remnants of the nervous system of the frog found in its detached leg may respond to a voltage, but it is not processing information.
1
Dreaming has no utility?
None that I am aware of, no.
2
The remnants of the nervous system of the frog found in its detached leg may respond to a voltage, but it is not processing information.
..
Sure it is. And how can you complain about me reducing processing to a simple on/ off relay type system when the whole point of your argument in the first place was to reduce something as inexplicable and complex as self awareness to simple sensors?
1
Anyway, we have bored the crap out of everyone and driven the readership away.
I’ll cop you later.
3
You could probable make a logic circuit out of a few of them linked together.
Please do so. I would like to see it.
You can make logic circuits out of all sorts of things. Brass gear wheels, for example. But there are clearly two distinct levels of description here, one is the jerk of the leg or the movement of the brass gear wheel, and the other is the information processing. It’s like describing a man writing his signature by the lower level description of the trajectory of the end of his pen, and the higher level description that says he is writing a cheque. Both are descriptions of what is in a sense the same thing, but the levels of description are different.
I don’t want to get into this, I would have to get into formal languages for even the beginnings of a discussion on the subject. I am not confident you would have the patience. I am not confident I would, either.
1
Unlike Rosie, we are not doing much in the way of cultural exhibitions on this trip. The Rovanieme one was just thrown in with the tour times. We met up with my grandson and his mother at the Tate Modern and did go through some of the galleries there after they had left us, but my feet were sore from the train strike hike I had to do, and we weren’t interested in much of what was recent and on display. In The Times at Hairy’s brother’s place (a paper as perennial as the garden flowers surviving the extreme frosts, I had noticed that an exhibition just finished in London was going to be shown at Carlisle in the North and I’d hoped we might pick it up on our way through to Scotland, as it was showing the major works of the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites who were entranced with the Arthurian legends and beautifully brought them to life in paint. Sadly when we got there we found The Times had got the Carlisle dates wrong and that exhibition, headlined as ‘returning King Arthur to Carlisle for the first time in one thousand five hundred years’, was now postponed until just after we leave in February.
I was pleased to see the northern nature of the Arthurian corpus being recognised, but not of the view that this legendary king was anything but legendary, as he was in my assessment the old All-Father god of the northern tribes, known by many proxy names, a mythic figure who became personified in a manner entirely traceable in old textual materials in Latin and Brythonic (proto-Welsh) if you know where to look (which I have published about in 2018 in Quadrant as an original contribution to the Arthurian debate).
Anyway, be that as it may, I do love the ensuing mythological apparatus that has survived in fanciful old tales, remnants of an older cosmology. The Pre-Raphaelites did it so well.
4
Anyway, we have bored the crap out of everyone and driven the readership away.
I’ll cop you later.
Ok. Anyway, I’m running out of charge on my phone.
If the readership can put up with the name calling of the stouches we get on this site, they’re pretty tough.
9
Sorry.
Also chickens with the head cut off.
They’re doing quite some processing there, with the leg coordination and balance. So there’s that. All without a brain connected.
But probably not self aware.
I’ll leave it there.
Night.
3
The Times – a perennial at Hairy’s brother’s place, I should have made clear. Delivered and read every morning without fail, the ‘authorised source’ for all news and commentaryin that household.
It really is a rag containing mainly lifestyle magazine features and only left-slanted news.
But even in that, you can see a certain turning of the worm. Last time I picked it up at Hairy’s brother’s place, they had a moderately ok review by Matthew Paris of a new book fighting the ‘woke’ culture of anti-colonialism (can’t recall the author’s name). It was by an Oxford don who was deplatformed (now replatformed) for his course on Ethics and Colonialism. The book argues for a good side to the British Empire. In this Times’ review of it, even though the word ‘right wing’ was used disparagingly and as not something that is ‘us’, there was a quality in the review that suggested extreme ‘woke’ viewpoints about the Empire and other things were not those of the reviewer nor were they something for any sensible person to endorse.
The New Castle is more or less worth a visit, the civic art gallery has some interesting works though quite a few in a sad state of repair with no apparent attempts to maintain them in a good environment. There are also the 15th century bronze doors complete with holes and what looks to be a metal cannon ball stuck in it.
Great vista of the port, Capri, Sorrento, Vesuvius from the third floor balcony.
There is a also beautiful baronial hall up stairs and Roman ruins below, which are currently not accessible except via walking over one of those glass/clear plastic viewing areas which I am terrified of.
Did see a skeleton though I’ve read several novels where local merchants/ dignitaries/lords are invited en masse to something only to be executed, here it happened in real life.
4
Rosie, one of the myths of the evil ‘Vortigern’, who was said in legend to have encouraged the Saxons into Britain, was that the he organised a meeting with the key Saxon leaders, inviting all of the Britons’ leaders to attend a goodwill feast with the Saxons: who once the Britons were disarmed of their swords and seated promptly drew knives and slaughtered them to a man. So frequent is this sort of treachery in semi-legendary accounts that folklorists have called it one of their folkloric ‘motifs’.
I’d suspect in many cases, as in your link, there was a pretty solid background of reality to support the historical memory and any folkloric elaborations.
3
Archie and Beaugan, self-consciousness is all very well, and it obviously has something to do with our senses but also of our ‘interior’ brain. However, one suspects there may be a consciousness of some sort lurking behind your own self-consciousness. It’s easy enough to send your head into a spin of endless regress thinking of a time when you will not be thinking at all but here you are, capable about thinking about not thinking, and capable of thinking about not thinking about thinking.
We don’t really know what ‘thought’ is, nor what its limits are with regard to ourselves.
Juniors as yet in the field of understanding, so I couldn’t be so definite as to be an atheist.
That just seems too easy an out.
3
You may recall that we are driving a hired royal blue Audi A5, the shaped lines of which somewhat rival an Aston Martin, as it is set low, difficult to get into, and can go like the clappers with Hairy at the wheel. I have hated it from the start. Arky’s mention of hysterias above just brought it top of mind to me again. When we first got it we picked it up from a dark underground carpark and we couldn’t find a number of the controls, including the seatback adjustment wheel and the heated seat buttons (no electronic seat adjusters, so that was a minus immediately, and Hairy’s heated driver’s seat was on full pelt and burning him up in ways unmentionable). We spent the trip from Heathrow to Richmond (3o minutes) with my head and shoulders pushed awkwardly forward and Hairy in the hot seat till we found the way to change it all the next morning. There was no printed manual as it now presented on the dash screen, hard to bring up in the dark and impossible to navigate quickly without ‘knowledge’ of how they’ve organised it. Thus we started off badly with this vehicle.
The next morning we are bringing out the suitcases to put in the car, and Hairy and his brother’s wife are standing talking as Hairy puts our gear into the rear hatch/boot. It is freezing so I sit in the car, Hairy wants a cup of coffee for the road and I think his brother’s wife has made him some, for they both go inside. As they go off, I decide to get out and join them rather than wait in the car.
I FIND I CANNOT GET OUT. I cannot open the door. I am locked in. I have no key. They have left me here, and I start to feel a mounting hysteria. I am locked in this dragon of a car, it’s so low, so airless, maybe it’s electric and will burn me up, maybe it’s watertight and thus airtight and I will suffocate. I can’t even open a window. Hairy’s brother’s wife appears at the window and seems to be saying am I coming inside too, but I can’t really hear her and she can’t hear me. I gesticulate and yell that I am locked in and she attempts to placate me as I am clearly and unusually tres agitated. GET HAIRY, I yell, feeling a strong sense of panic and hysteria overcoming me. She races off, alarmed, and finally returns with Hairy and THE KEY.
I am freed in a trice and feel quite stupid. I’m sorry, I say, but ever since I became stuck in a tiny lift in Italy for over an hour without a phone and couldn’t raise any help and seriously thought I’d suffocate in 30 degree heat under arc lights, I haven’t been able to be in enclosed spaces when I know I can’t get out. Lifts are now quite difficult for me, though I do manage them now if I have a phone with me.
The A5 is now known by me as The Beast and you couldn’t give me one. No car should lock someone in, says Hairy, pointing out that the back was a still bit open anyway. Stupid software idiots, he says.
4
Hairy thinks the problem was that he’d walked off with the key, the back wasn’t properly closed and so the car decided to ‘freeze’ until the key was once more within its electronic ambit.
Cold comfort for me, and imagine if it happened to a child who was in the vehicle.
I hate these ‘smart’ things which try to take over my life by gauging (incorrectly) my intentions.
2
Anthony Albanese is set to visit Alice Springs on Tuesday after facing growing calls to travel to the embattled town amid a roaring crime wave.
Look like the extant Aboriginal Voice To Parliament is already functioning perfectly.
A Northern Territory Labor MP has declared “the Voice couldn’t be further from people’s view up here”
Yet more proof that the Aboriginal Voice To Parliament is Peter Dutton! 😀
1
“Consciousness has been shown to be “non-local”.”
Any creature that hunts has an evolutionary advantage if it is self aware, because it will learn to be patient (“better to hide here where it can’t see me until it’s too late for it”), and if it can plan attacks based on it’s own assessment of its own capabilities (as well as the prey’s) it will be more likely to be successful. Such planning (based on your own capabilities) obviously requires you to be aware of yourself and your own limitations.
The idea that sentience and/or consciousness is somehow unique to humans is clearly incorrect. What makes humans unique is the ability to communicate subtle and complex abstractions AND to make a record of them (writing) – that leads to technology. Plenty of creatures use tools (crows and monkeys for a start – hell, even fish!), but no other species has “technology” – they continue to use the same tools, and they never use tools to make other tools (not even monkeys). And plenty of species use communications in complex ways for a purpose. But no other has the equivalent of writing, and this means technology. Indeed, in human cultures without writing, we see stagnation rather than progress towards more complex tools.
Given we have no objective way to determine even intelligence, let alone consciousness, that a human created machine might one day become conscious is not (currently) beyond the realms of the possible – after all, we are ourselves made from material things (matter), so why not on some other “platform”, and why can we not create something conscious? Not saying we have, as yet – but I see no reason we couldn’t, at least in theory.
And who knows? Perhaps God’s greatest gift to us may be that we are able to create not just a new species, but a new ecology of artificial, intelligent and conscious creatures. How we treat these and how they treat us, would reveal a great deal about ourselves, to ourselves. God is a very clever fellow, isn’t He, so why not?
The school run this morning, walking or pillion riding, all primary school children, even those who must be eleven or twelve have pinafores under their jackets, plain or gingham, but it’s always blue for boys.
Back in the olden days we wore pinafores at secondary school, with winter wool tunics and jumpers I suppose it was a necessity.
Finally in a part of Naples I recognise, in the historical centre. Going to do the underground tour we missed last time because of extremely long queues.
I’m still just scratching the surface of the many things to visit here.
Vesuvius and Capri will have to be ‘next time’.
The port area where I am staying is very similar to La Centrale Storica, except a bit seedier, but not as seedy as say El Raval or Genoa, though I haven’t been out and about in the late afternoon to test that theory.
I’m still just scratching the surface of the many things to visit here.
Vesuvius and Capri will have to be ‘next time’.
That’s the problem with travel, Rosie. You can never see it all, so there always has to be the idea of a ‘next time’. The dreaming of it never ever ends … although of course it does in reality, because you can never really get to see it all, it would take many lifetimes and in covering just a fraction of it you’d need the funds available to Bill Gates, who does much more stupid things with his time and money.
Happy travelling though while you can. They say it broadens the mind while it diminishes the wallet. I’ll go along with that. 🙂
Scene outside my local pub, earlier on this evening
“Mate, that sticker, you’ve got on the back of your car, “Don’t welcome me to my own country”, anyone ever tell you it’s racist?”
“Used to be a free country, man’s entitled to an opinion.”
“That’s where I’m coming from, where do you get those stickers? Oh. you’ve got a couple spare? Cheers, thanks!”
It’s the little things you do, in the name of reconciliation…….
Consequently, there is still no love lost between the Russians and the Finns.
In more recent events, the finding of rare earths in the Swedish portion of Lapland is also likely to raise old Sami tensions about ownership and land rights which have simmered since Norway, Sweden and Finland established borders that interfered with the Sami’s transhument seasonal raindeer economy of wandering for pastures. This completely changed the Sami reindeer farming economy. The rare earth discoveries might act as iron ore, natural gas and uranium do on Aust Ab sensibilities. Give us your munny? But to which tribal group? And against what opposition?
The problem with trying to judge whether ChatGPT is intelligent is that actual human wokists generate unintelligent output. e.g. I asked what Big Al would think about the Voice.
WokeGPT?
A more in-depth understanding of both the AVP and Big Al would deduce that he would be unlikely to support the AVP.
Firstly at a logical level, helping marginalised groups does not imply a racially-specific forum and club for their representation (as a mechanism).
Secondly, several of his quotes, such as
* “The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.”
* “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
* “The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.”
would suggest he would not hold as terribly important several of the the quality of life discrepancies that get talked about so much as indigenous community problems, and that differences in outcome are to be expected. On that basis, I reckon it is plausible Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn could have wondered if the Voice was a solution without a problem.
When I told ChatGPT that argument, it seemed to immediately wilt and start partially agreeing with me. It’s last sentence even said “He would likely have emphasized the importance of individual freedom and human rights, and would have been critical of any measures that reinforced racial divides.”, which is nearly the opposite of its first response. As it is still learning it is easily swayed one way or another.
Plus wokism itself isn’t coherent so poor old WokeGPT has a tough time staying consistent.
It seems to have some facts but it is not good at using priorities to rank the importance of some lines of deduction over others, so as to take sides in a robust way.
..
Ask it what makes an entity aware of it’s own existence.
I think I’ll have a Moccona coffee.
None of that cheap stuff like Nescafe…
And finish up with a Sarah Lee Cheesecake.
As flash as a rat with a gold tooth, am I.
Cohenite:
Can you imagine the balls up Hollywood would make of that?
I scroll, therefore I am
Hysterical blindness is one example of a malfunction in the reporting sensory apparatus. There is nothing wrong with the optic nerve, but some higher level subsystem is telling the brain it doesn’t work, although it actually does.
I believe there are other cases but consult johnH for details.
and gibbets as a memory aid
… but only for the self-aware
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Ok. Now we’re moving.
So the “sensory apparatus” that posit is essential for self awareness can malfunction.
When it does so, does the patient lose self awareness?
Does he stop being aware that of the existence of a visual world?
Or do they see blackness, feel they EXIST in a world of darkness?
In other words, is there any evidence whatsoever that you can point to that sensory input is in any way shape or form required for awareness of self?
Bruce O’Newk:
That was a point I kept on making to my patients for nearly fifteen years of remote nursing in across the top end.
People need salt – it’s not just a matter of restricting it to keep your BP down, you need to replace the stuff you sweat out. Far too many times having to bung in a line and flood some silly bugger who’s been working outside for two days in 35 40 degree heat and having a few beers to ‘rehydrate’ in the evening. The deficit becomes critical in a very short time.
I did 3 inductions at Laverton Med Centre and day 3 was the classic pass out on parade for someone who had about 500ml intake in January. Sometimes you can just shake your head because strangling the idiots is not allowed – I think.
Once you have a model of the bit of the universe inside your skin, and you perceive that you have a model, you are self-aware.
I used to think I was a nice bloke, but then I did some things that convinced me that I was actually an evil bastard. So I updated my model, and I realised that I was updating my model. So I knew I existed.
More or less. All in the language, really, just a preferred way of talking about it, and naturally I preferred it, because it made me feel important.
rickw:
Their problem is the wheels are starting to fall off the coverup wagon, and there’s enough damage done to the experts to give the egos a damn good bollocking.
That’s the major problem for them – the data is in but they refuse to confront it.
self awareness is key obviously so, prolly wouldn’t work for some
… like sancho complaining about bad jokes
…or JC moaning about blow-hards
what do you do in situations like that?
send the squiddies?
*sigh* You’re doing it again. It’s very tiresome. It’s the large number of internal sensors that are inspecting your brain while it’s working that give you the basics for self-awareness. You also need to be able to model what your internal sensors are telling you about what’s happening inside your brain.
One by one the lamps are going out.
Qantas under Joyce can’t be too far off announcing that it won’t be marking Australia Day. When our national carrier does it you know we’re stuffed.
When that happens we’ll be like Bruce’s family member: lost our national sodium. Taught to be ashamed of our history. Memory loss.
Its nauseating that those who refuse to celebrate Australia Day give themselves a pat on the back and glow with pleasure at their own virtue.
Arky:
I’ve only seen one example of that – as a 12 year old. One of the girls suddenly went blind at breakfast. No one knew what had happened, she just went blind. Lasted for an hour or so, we were all frightened as Hell because no one was able to let us know what happened. A couple of the younger kids went hysterical. Not a pleasant time.
..
You’re back to mysterious “sensors” that have no name, aren’t associated with any disease and that you can’t locate.
If what you really mean is that the areas of the brain that are designed to process sensory information also have some secondary function of self awareness or consciousness, say so.
If it’s sensors, like a thermocouple or a photosensitive cell, say so.
Where does this faculty reside?
Correct, as that would miss an important opportunity for maaates to put in a tender for supply of boutique designer euthanasia equipment, and for the agents of the State to play judge, jury, and
executionerassistant in dying, while spending up big on said boutique equipment on the basis that the public deserve only the very best… right until the last...
Did you try beating it out of her?
Jorge,
when we are small, we just ‘are’
and as ee cummings put it ‘and down they forgot as up they grew’
remembering where you came from is one thing
and remembering why, is another.
the post-modern will destroy history, then you, and then finally it will destroy itself
and then we start again
Australian Open 2023 prize money
SINGLES – men’s and women’s
Per player (128 draw)
Winner $2,975,000
Runner-up $1,625,000
Semifinalists $925,000
Quarterfinalists $555,250
Round of 16 $338,250
Round of 32 $227,925
Round of 64 $158,850
First round $106,250
Let’s say we take a recently deceased (accidentally, NADT) Dr BG and plug him into the sensory input of 240 volts applied to his nads.
And as a result he jumps about, flailing and making squeaking noises.
Is this self awareness? The input has gone through his sensory gear and been processed and responded to.
Is this BG more or less self aware than the version lying quietly in a sensory deprivation tank dreaming of K’gari’s and dusky bints?
Cigars and dusky bints.
Not whatever spell thingo did there.
Compare and contrast an equally old culture.
Tamils in India produced high carbon steel around 500 BC and exported it far and wide.
If you define an organism as something with sensors, effectors, and the capacity for generating conditional probabilistic models of what it is likely to sense for any particular effector action, and if you suppose that the sensors can do a Bayesian update on the model, you can get quite a long way in describing cockroaches, cats, dogs and human beans. For human beans and possibly dogs and chimps, but not cockroaches, you need to posit the existence of internal sensors that give the brain some information about the organism itself, so it can try to predict its own behaviour.
The rest is general linguistic muddle which I try to avoid.
You might like to consider how a warship might be equipped with both internal and external sensors, including subprograms intended to detect and nullify interference with its own hardware and software, while having the capacity to learn from observations via its sensors. If it could talk to its crew and captain and could be taught to use the words I and me when talking about the program running on its computer, you might get some insight into the matter of self-awareness.
That was pretty funny. Dude cancelled himself to help the lying slapper. Didn’t help much in the end. As Ol’ Leathery said, she just needed clear air.
And possibly not. But you are capable of thought, arky, so give it a shot and see what happens.
Apologies. Lucky IT is not here,eh?
..
You go the ad hom, doesn’t add anything to your argument.
Notice I argued in good faith without insult.
You still have not pointed to a shred of evidence that awareness of self has ANYTHING to do with sensory perception.
No diseases, no cases, no comparisons of different states of consciousness.
Nothing.
On a serious not Bear, I’ve seen ads for Japanese concoctions. Have you tried any?
Compare and contrast an equally old culture.
Tamils in India produced high carbon steel around 500 BC and exported it far and wide.
Meanwhile, whilst sitting on some magnificent iron ore deposits…..
Actually, I was watching one of those DIY shows, apparently those little black balls that you commonly see around clay pans are actually iron ore and can be smelted into iron. Dude made an axe head. Came up with a very crude lump of porous iron and then slowly beat it into shape using some basalt rocks.
Awareness of self is about having a model of how the part of the universe inside your skin works, and being able to update it. That requires data. Data is provided by sensors.
..
What sensors are providing the data when you dream?
I was praising you, arky. Most ppl either can’t or won’t think.
No sensors, just muddled memories and a befuddled brain trying to impose some sort of pattern on them. At least that’s my guess.
..
So you are presumably self aware during a dream, and no sensory input is required.
Take the converse case of a deceased frog leg with a voltage applied.
..
The voltage is data, the more the voltage the more vigororoes the movement. Presumably the frog leg is modelling the world insofar as the greater the signal the greater the movement required.
Is the frog leg self aware?
Is it more or less self aware than the dreaming beaugan?
One is processing data according to a model, the other having random experiences while absolutely minimising sensory input to enable those experiences in the first place.
No. Not in any useful sense.
The frog’s leg is responding to an input, but I wouldn’t call what it does data processing. Would you?
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Dreaming has no utility?
..
..
It’s a simple algorithm for sure, but it is data processing.
You could probable make a logic circuit out of a few of them linked together.
You are confounding two things, information processing and the implementation by a nervous system. The remnants of the nervous system of the frog found in its detached leg may respond to a voltage, but it is not processing information.
None that I am aware of, no.
..
Sure it is. And how can you complain about me reducing processing to a simple on/ off relay type system when the whole point of your argument in the first place was to reduce something as inexplicable and complex as self awareness to simple sensors?
Anyway, we have bored the crap out of everyone and driven the readership away.
I’ll cop you later.
Please do so. I would like to see it.
You can make logic circuits out of all sorts of things. Brass gear wheels, for example. But there are clearly two distinct levels of description here, one is the jerk of the leg or the movement of the brass gear wheel, and the other is the information processing. It’s like describing a man writing his signature by the lower level description of the trajectory of the end of his pen, and the higher level description that says he is writing a cheque. Both are descriptions of what is in a sense the same thing, but the levels of description are different.
I don’t want to get into this, I would have to get into formal languages for even the beginnings of a discussion on the subject. I am not confident you would have the patience. I am not confident I would, either.
Unlike Rosie, we are not doing much in the way of cultural exhibitions on this trip. The Rovanieme one was just thrown in with the tour times. We met up with my grandson and his mother at the Tate Modern and did go through some of the galleries there after they had left us, but my feet were sore from the train strike hike I had to do, and we weren’t interested in much of what was recent and on display. In The Times at Hairy’s brother’s place (a paper as perennial as the garden flowers surviving the extreme frosts, I had noticed that an exhibition just finished in London was going to be shown at Carlisle in the North and I’d hoped we might pick it up on our way through to Scotland, as it was showing the major works of the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites who were entranced with the Arthurian legends and beautifully brought them to life in paint. Sadly when we got there we found The Times had got the Carlisle dates wrong and that exhibition, headlined as ‘returning King Arthur to Carlisle for the first time in one thousand five hundred years’, was now postponed until just after we leave in February.
I was pleased to see the northern nature of the Arthurian corpus being recognised, but not of the view that this legendary king was anything but legendary, as he was in my assessment the old All-Father god of the northern tribes, known by many proxy names, a mythic figure who became personified in a manner entirely traceable in old textual materials in Latin and Brythonic (proto-Welsh) if you know where to look (which I have published about in 2018 in Quadrant as an original contribution to the Arthurian debate).
Anyway, be that as it may, I do love the ensuing mythological apparatus that has survived in fanciful old tales, remnants of an older cosmology. The Pre-Raphaelites did it so well.
Ok. Anyway, I’m running out of charge on my phone.
If the readership can put up with the name calling of the stouches we get on this site, they’re pretty tough.
Sorry.
Also chickens with the head cut off.
They’re doing quite some processing there, with the leg coordination and balance. So there’s that. All without a brain connected.
But probably not self aware.
I’ll leave it there.
Night.
The Times – a perennial at Hairy’s brother’s place, I should have made clear. Delivered and read every morning without fail, the ‘authorised source’ for all news and commentaryin that household.
It really is a rag containing mainly lifestyle magazine features and only left-slanted news.
But even in that, you can see a certain turning of the worm. Last time I picked it up at Hairy’s brother’s place, they had a moderately ok review by Matthew Paris of a new book fighting the ‘woke’ culture of anti-colonialism (can’t recall the author’s name). It was by an Oxford don who was deplatformed (now replatformed) for his course on Ethics and Colonialism. The book argues for a good side to the British Empire. In this Times’ review of it, even though the word ‘right wing’ was used disparagingly and as not something that is ‘us’, there was a quality in the review that suggested extreme ‘woke’ viewpoints about the Empire and other things were not those of the reviewer nor were they something for any sensible person to endorse.
no real mystery to Galleria Umberto I, not so close to the port area. The design inside and out is entirely uniform and no doubt the area prior to the 1880s was more or less identical to what you find up any of the streets leading off Via Toledo on the other side.
The New Castle is more or less worth a visit, the civic art gallery has some interesting works though quite a few in a sad state of repair with no apparent attempts to maintain them in a good environment. There are also the 15th century bronze doors complete with holes and what looks to be a metal cannon ball stuck in it.
Great vista of the port, Capri, Sorrento, Vesuvius from the third floor balcony.
There is a also beautiful baronial hall up stairs and Roman ruins below, which are currently not accessible except via walking over one of those glass/clear plastic viewing areas which I am terrified of.
Did see a skeleton though
I’ve read several novels where local merchants/ dignitaries/lords are invited en masse to something only to be executed, here it happened in real life.
Rosie, one of the myths of the evil ‘Vortigern’, who was said in legend to have encouraged the Saxons into Britain, was that the he organised a meeting with the key Saxon leaders, inviting all of the Britons’ leaders to attend a goodwill feast with the Saxons: who once the Britons were disarmed of their swords and seated promptly drew knives and slaughtered them to a man. So frequent is this sort of treachery in semi-legendary accounts that folklorists have called it one of their folkloric ‘motifs’.
I’d suspect in many cases, as in your link, there was a pretty solid background of reality to support the historical memory and any folkloric elaborations.
Archie and Beaugan, self-consciousness is all very well, and it obviously has something to do with our senses but also of our ‘interior’ brain. However, one suspects there may be a consciousness of some sort lurking behind your own self-consciousness. It’s easy enough to send your head into a spin of endless regress thinking of a time when you will not be thinking at all but here you are, capable about thinking about not thinking, and capable of thinking about not thinking about thinking.
We don’t really know what ‘thought’ is, nor what its limits are with regard to ourselves.
Juniors as yet in the field of understanding, so I couldn’t be so definite as to be an atheist.
That just seems too easy an out.
You may recall that we are driving a hired royal blue Audi A5, the shaped lines of which somewhat rival an Aston Martin, as it is set low, difficult to get into, and can go like the clappers with Hairy at the wheel. I have hated it from the start. Arky’s mention of hysterias above just brought it top of mind to me again. When we first got it we picked it up from a dark underground carpark and we couldn’t find a number of the controls, including the seatback adjustment wheel and the heated seat buttons (no electronic seat adjusters, so that was a minus immediately, and Hairy’s heated driver’s seat was on full pelt and burning him up in ways unmentionable). We spent the trip from Heathrow to Richmond (3o minutes) with my head and shoulders pushed awkwardly forward and Hairy in the hot seat till we found the way to change it all the next morning. There was no printed manual as it now presented on the dash screen, hard to bring up in the dark and impossible to navigate quickly without ‘knowledge’ of how they’ve organised it. Thus we started off badly with this vehicle.
The next morning we are bringing out the suitcases to put in the car, and Hairy and his brother’s wife are standing talking as Hairy puts our gear into the rear hatch/boot. It is freezing so I sit in the car, Hairy wants a cup of coffee for the road and I think his brother’s wife has made him some, for they both go inside. As they go off, I decide to get out and join them rather than wait in the car.
I FIND I CANNOT GET OUT. I cannot open the door. I am locked in. I have no key. They have left me here, and I start to feel a mounting hysteria. I am locked in this dragon of a car, it’s so low, so airless, maybe it’s electric and will burn me up, maybe it’s watertight and thus airtight and I will suffocate. I can’t even open a window. Hairy’s brother’s wife appears at the window and seems to be saying am I coming inside too, but I can’t really hear her and she can’t hear me. I gesticulate and yell that I am locked in and she attempts to placate me as I am clearly and unusually tres agitated. GET HAIRY, I yell, feeling a strong sense of panic and hysteria overcoming me. She races off, alarmed, and finally returns with Hairy and THE KEY.
I am freed in a trice and feel quite stupid. I’m sorry, I say, but ever since I became stuck in a tiny lift in Italy for over an hour without a phone and couldn’t raise any help and seriously thought I’d suffocate in 30 degree heat under arc lights, I haven’t been able to be in enclosed spaces when I know I can’t get out. Lifts are now quite difficult for me, though I do manage them now if I have a phone with me.
The A5 is now known by me as The Beast and you couldn’t give me one. No car should lock someone in, says Hairy, pointing out that the back was a still bit open anyway. Stupid software idiots, he says.
Hairy thinks the problem was that he’d walked off with the key, the back wasn’t properly closed and so the car decided to ‘freeze’ until the key was once more within its electronic ambit.
Cold comfort for me, and imagine if it happened to a child who was in the vehicle.
I hate these ‘smart’ things which try to take over my life by gauging (incorrectly) my intentions.
Look like the extant Aboriginal Voice To Parliament is already functioning perfectly.
Yet more proof that the Aboriginal Voice To Parliament is Peter Dutton! 😀
“Consciousness has been shown to be “non-local”.”
Any creature that hunts has an evolutionary advantage if it is self aware, because it will learn to be patient (“better to hide here where it can’t see me until it’s too late for it”), and if it can plan attacks based on it’s own assessment of its own capabilities (as well as the prey’s) it will be more likely to be successful. Such planning (based on your own capabilities) obviously requires you to be aware of yourself and your own limitations.
The idea that sentience and/or consciousness is somehow unique to humans is clearly incorrect. What makes humans unique is the ability to communicate subtle and complex abstractions AND to make a record of them (writing) – that leads to technology. Plenty of creatures use tools (crows and monkeys for a start – hell, even fish!), but no other species has “technology” – they continue to use the same tools, and they never use tools to make other tools (not even monkeys). And plenty of species use communications in complex ways for a purpose. But no other has the equivalent of writing, and this means technology. Indeed, in human cultures without writing, we see stagnation rather than progress towards more complex tools.
Given we have no objective way to determine even intelligence, let alone consciousness, that a human created machine might one day become conscious is not (currently) beyond the realms of the possible – after all, we are ourselves made from material things (matter), so why not on some other “platform”, and why can we not create something conscious? Not saying we have, as yet – but I see no reason we couldn’t, at least in theory.
And who knows? Perhaps God’s greatest gift to us may be that we are able to create not just a new species, but a new ecology of artificial, intelligent and conscious creatures. How we treat these and how they treat us, would reveal a great deal about ourselves, to ourselves. God is a very clever fellow, isn’t He, so why not?
The school run this morning, walking or pillion riding, all primary school children, even those who must be eleven or twelve have pinafores under their jackets, plain or gingham, but it’s always blue for boys.
Back in the olden days we wore pinafores at secondary school, with winter wool tunics and jumpers I suppose it was a necessity.
Finally in a part of Naples I recognise, in the historical centre. Going to do the underground tour we missed last time because of extremely long queues.
I’m still just scratching the surface of the many things to visit here.
Vesuvius and Capri will have to be ‘next time’.
The port area where I am staying is very similar to La Centrale Storica, except a bit seedier, but not as seedy as say El Raval or Genoa, though I haven’t been out and about in the late afternoon to test that theory.
That’s the problem with travel, Rosie. You can never see it all, so there always has to be the idea of a ‘next time’. The dreaming of it never ever ends … although of course it does in reality, because you can never really get to see it all, it would take many lifetimes and in covering just a fraction of it you’d need the funds available to Bill Gates, who does much more stupid things with his time and money.
Happy travelling though while you can. They say it broadens the mind while it diminishes the wallet. I’ll go along with that. 🙂