Im no academic, so apologies for the lack of substance. I mostly just get stuck in rabbit holes reading about philosophy and consciousness while I should be working.

Check out these theories for some interesting ideas:

• Information Integration Theory
• Global Workspace Theory
• Recurrent Processing Theory
• Higher Order Thought Theory

My summarized take is that modeling consciousness is akin to modeling the three-body problem or the double-pendulum. Even if the system is deterministic and capable of being modeled, you’ll forever be bottlenecked by finite precision in your model. The system itself is one where errors grow exponentially. For example, tiny differences in the double pendulum’s initial angle (like 0.000001°) rapidly amplify over time to produce wildly different trajectories. It is computationally intractable without unlimited precision — hence, this is why I said you’d need to model the entire universe. This is deterministic chaos, and we have no reason to think human-brains aren’t heavily dependent on its utility.

Information Integration Theory would suggest that phi (Φ) can be used to measure the degree to which a system generates irreducible, integrated cause–effect structure. The irreducible nature of something is exactly as you postulate: it cannot possibly be modeled mathematically. If it could, that would make it reducible to smaller parts.

You can describe the function of the human brain mathematically, of course… For example, some low hanging fruit might be:

• Define the system’s transition probabilities.
• Define its cause–effect repertoires.
• Define Φ mathematically.

But that’s not going to model human experience. The experience isn’t reducible. That, instead, models something closer to the quality of experience. Human rationality is derived downstream of human experience. So it’s just not a fair argument to say that a tool mimicking only the downstream patterns of human experience will somehow also possess the upstream experience capacity, or even a relatable sense of rationality at all.

I don’t think we’re going to get a deterministic explanation for human behavior, ever. Most likely just statistical truths. Unless you can somehow mathematically model the entire universe as well. Good luck, because now the endeavor sounds god-like.

Humans aren’t rational creatures though… we use rationality as a tool, but tools designed to mimic rationality aren’t actually mimicking humans. Human intelligence has a lot to do with being irrational, arational, and sometimes deciding to use rationality as a means to an end. Societies are emergent from the social patterns produced via agents with those particular behaviors. Social patterns like morals, religion, culture, … It’s really not the same thing as stuffing a bunch of LLMs in a box. The LLMs don’t have the same capabilities for growth, failure, awareness thereof, … nor any of the natural pressures that would even incentivize such awareness. They’re just little feedforward algorithms stuck in a feedback loop with each other.

We need a dumb browser.

This browser doesn’t work for most removed, making it the best browser available for most removed you actually need to do.

That’s a browser I can get behind.

Hmm… would be pretty neat if Playwrite could use the Servo engine too. I would start using that instead of the gecko driver, because why not?

Whilst people really shouldn’t use <tool> as a <form of research>, many do, …

removed, I know where this is going.

Quantum is a struggle for me to understand because, I feel like the current explanations don’t suffice why you can’t transmit information. To me, this still sounds perfectly viable for information transfer… just don’t encode information via polarization. You would encode it as a primitive derived from whether or not state collapse has happened yet or not.

Using the same/similar mechanism they can use to determine collapse happens to both entangled particles at the same time (faster than light), can they not also determine whether or not collapse has happened at all?

Maybe it’s that checking for collapse will actually cause collapse, thus ruining the information channel. But, perhaps then, you just add more entangled particles. Have some mechanism established with “throwaway” particles that can have their state collapsed either as a chain reaction or via the polling process.

Obviously I’m not the smarted person here… probably a lot wrong with my above assumption. But my point is really that explanations about quantum seem to be unsupportive to the claims they make about quantum.

Maybe the only good use of AI is someone automates reverse engineering drivers for mobile.

Yeah. Discord knows, Thiel and Palantir is their daddy (apparently).

Not really. Free speech is a cultural construct. It doesn’t exist without a huge swath of pre-agreed norms regarding rights, speech, freedom, … I’ll have you know, there are modern philosophers who argue against human rights. They would say human rights language pretends to be objective and universal, but it floats without a metaphysical anchor (unlike in the past) and in practice they only exist if a sovereign power recognizes them.

The internet has been out for less time than some people have been alive. Are we sure we, as a species, know how to be an adult on the internet yet?