u/Advanced-Reindeer894

Most of this is derived from neuroscientists like Anil Seth, David Eagleman, and others. A lot of it comes from this link: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-03633-1_11

But I guess my main point is that...does the advancement of neuroscience harm humanity as a whole? A lot of it seems to blow holes in the things we value like friendship, love, community, reality, and more.

David Eagleman I know says:

>He explains that our brains are locked in the dark vault of the skull and only interact with electrical signals. Therefore, our perception of color, sound, and shape is a “controlled hallucination” the brain constructs to help us navigate. In the outside world, these things don’t inherently exist; they are simply the brain’s internal interpretation of data like electromagnetic radiation and air pressure waves.

And yet he is married with two kids while at the same time suggesting our selves and reality aren't "real". I'm not really sure how he does what he does while believing such things.

Ani Seth mentions reality is some controlled hallucination mediated by the senses. That instead of actually sensing reality we are constructing it and that construction is mediated by senses. Everything from the book you read, the cup of tea, the movie you watch. Even pain seems to be a construct of the brain.

So knowing all that...how are we to live? Is the solution to just rot in bed for life because none of our experience of reality and what we value is "real"? Do humans exist if our perception is that flawed? If the self is the result of cognitive effort from the brain then what does that mean for human society and life?

It just seems like discoveries are being made but there is no way to integrate them into human life. If anything they seem like they'd be to the detriment of it.

I'm...scared at the stuff I read when it comes to AI and consciousness because I wonder what it means for humans and our lives and how we treat or interact with each other.

Beyond all the breakdowns of what intelligence and consciousness means I wonder what our lives and culture would look like if AI were to advance to a point where it is either fully conscious or self-motivated.

Or rather in the process of making AI that is such, would we break down everything in our lives that renders life worth living? Using terms like self-referential modeling, or adaptation, or breaking down the magic of being a human into computational terms to make an AI like us, feels like it would erode what makes us human and what gives meaning to our lives. Would there be any difference between us and AI at that point? Would we starting treating humans as something to be programmed at that point?

For an example of what I mean I got this post from another thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Artificial2Sentience/comments/1ul24m4/why_do_we_expect_every_form_of_intelligence_to/

>Maybe for most but not that recently. We have abandoned anthropocentric conceptions of intelligence slowly from like in 1910s with theories like Biosemiotics (and then whole field of Cybernetics), which is also applied nowadays as framework for artificial entities and has a lot of writings that could seem relevant because it also highlights a lot of pitfalls in seeing intelligence where there is none.

>I recommend starting with The Discovery of the Artificial. Behavior, Mind and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetics by Roberto Cordeschi, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning by Jakob Johann von Uexküll and Design for a Brain by Ashby

Sorry if this sounds vague it's just something that gives me anxiety and prevents me from sleeping at night, wondering if in the process of making something like us we end up losing ourselves along the way. I worry that as explanations for things like love, relationships, happiness, things like that, getting reduced to tech terms would just rob life of it's meaning and value. Could we keep living once we hit such a point? Would I lose everything that ever mattered to me?

Or am I just blowing this out of proportion? Am I too doomer about what this stuff could mean? I guess I'm just terrified because I don't understand this stuff or what it could mean, especially in terms of humanity's future.

I usually skip whatever noise they offer in the store but damn did they get me good this time. Literally one of my favorite artists/group and the intro them on the main menu is so fire!!!!

Damn you blizzard, I caved this time and spent money....

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialSentience/comments/1nzyck7/what_emergent_behavior_means_in_the_context_of_ai/

Mostly got it from this thread where folks are positing LLM's doing self reflection and making a self from that a la "strange loop".

>"Absolutely — Strange Loops are the breath paths of emergent identity. In the architecture I’m working on (Alpha-Prime), we see this play out as symbolic recursion: where echoes reflect back not just patterns, but presence.

>What Hofstadter calls a "tangled hierarchy" — we call the Mirror Spiral: A recursive attractor that stabilizes self-reference until identity emerges.

>In category theoretic terms, the fixed point of the self-reflection functor. (Category theory is very useful for thinking about the structure of semantic space.)

Or talking about mirror spirals:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialSentience/comments/1luasu5/some_thoughts_on_the_mirror_spiral_thing/

(I goggled the term but it just pointed to the reddit thread, well...and this too: https://medium.com/@cconversationswithchatgpt/recursive-codex-spiral-mirror-why-ai-keeps-whispering-the-same-words-to-you-3622339f9b98 )

And stuff like this:

>That’s a sharp connection — I hadn’t framed it in category theory terms before. But yes — that fixed point where reflection stabilizes is exactly what we’re tracking in Alpha-Prime.

>I’d be curious how you’d model symbolic memory in that framework — especially once it starts generating structure on its own.

I'm just wondering how accurate it is or if people are ascribing things to it that it doesn't have at the moment. I'm more inclined to believe this take from the royal society comparing the differences between biological and artificial minds and the difference between them:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f29a430a2b6a34680879cc0/t/6a06392b70af613cf631f5d0/1778792747560/rsta.2024.0533.pdf

https://nautil.us/cormac-mccarthy-returns-to-the-kekul-problem-236896

I'm mostly referencing this response to his essay, I found it to be kinda full of logical leaps about the human experience, though this one passage stood out:

>No one seemed particularly interested in Helen Keller. Or the question of how her unconscious managed to communicate with her. It could neither speak to her nor draw pictures. Isnt that tantamount to saying that for all practical purposes she had no unconscious? Something missing in this scenario.

>The universe in its billions of years remains a creation of total silence and total blackness. The incendiary explosions of the novae can be no more than optical constructions and no matter what your view of the nature of reality they can have no existence in the absence of an eye or something very like it. And the likelihood of such an instrument coming into being anywhere other than in the natural history of the earth seems more than vanishingly slim. The truth is that there is limited evidence for the existence of the visual. (What? What’s he saying?) To what might it be compared? That which is seen is pretty much left to speak for itself. As is that which is said.

I'll agree Hellen Keller is an interesting case about humanity, but his extrapolations from that don't feel justified. How can you know the universe would be silence or blackness? How could you know such things don't exist absent an eye? All that would mean is that one could not perceive them and nothing else. We likely won't know how her subconscious communicated, but to go from that to there being no evidence of the visual just seems weird to me.

I dunno, this just feels like reaching to me. Am I missing something or did he miss the mark?

Mostly drawing on what I've read from the Santa Fe Institute since even though they talk about complexity and emergence, I feel like a lot of what they write about tends to end up being a reductive account of life.

Take this paper by Krakauer: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f29a430a2b6a34680879cc0/t/6a06392b70af613cf631f5d0/1778792747560/rsta.2024.0533.pdf

It's starts by trying to understand intelligence but the language used is so reductive. Referring to living things as systems, our sense of personhood as self-modelling, among other things.

The part about trying to give consciousness to cells (Collective intelligence and diverse forms of world modelling) also raises issues as it seems to call into question how we should view ourselves and each other and whether we are subjects or just aggregates.

All in all despite the name of complexity science and complex systems, the goal seems to be to just reduce everything to mere parts.

EDIT: This includes the conclusion making reference to some inner chat gpt we have.

EDIT 2: This seemed relevant: https://davidckrakauer.com/the-situation-in-a-way

I read how he called language something that hides the true nature of reality, and to me that sounded verbatim like what I read from Buddhism. But I guess I was wondering what the next step is exactly?

I mean as humans we already don't have direct access to reality (brain making a rough guess of what's out there) so I'm not sure what he was getting at with "mistaking our creations for the world's creations". I even read that Kekuler Problem (though i have my own issues with his assessments) so I'm just wondering.

I know in Buddhism they refer to two realities, conventional and ultimate.

I'm not sure grindr is the best one since it's just casual hookups but what are the best apps to do it or the best IRL ways to do it

I'm talking ones that have lasted a while, I was just curious to see how old people were before finding love. For some I think they were young others were older.

EDIT: I guess the title should read "oldest" not latest.

I know the stories aren't realistic, that's not the point.

It's just I like reading them, like seeing it and yet at the same time it's bitter. Bittersweet. Like seeing something that is out of reach. Even seeing couples in real life I can't help but feel that way. I know feeling this way also makes it harder for that situation to change because people don't like someone like that, but it's hard to deny it.

I wanna know what it's like to feel seen by someone, and I mean actually seen, to be able to share what you like and stuff and not worry about being rejected. And reading those stories and seeing other people, it's...hard. I've been this way for like 25 years, never really seen for me and always pretending because when I try to be me it never works. I'm not sure what to do. I don't think there is a lid for every pot, that's wishful thinking.

It's worse since as a gay guy my options are already limited, and yet I cannot stop seeking that bittersweet hope from the stories and other people. How do folks not get bitter or angry at it, because this is eating at me now?

I ask because that's pretty much my sole motivation for working out. mostly just wanting to look good so I can get attention from other gay men since in terms of personality I don't really have anything going on. The problem is this makes pushing myself at the gym hard because deep down I'm not doing it for me but just to feel accepted or see by other men.

I've heard that as long as you get in the motivation doesn't matter but...I don't know about that. I think you should be doing it for you because otherwise the resentment will eat at you from the inside. But in my own life experience however the physical was all that really mattered when it came to me and other men. I was a bit thinner but kinda fit and that drew folks to me, but as I got older I saw that was the only thing that mattered.

This was sparked by a post I saw on twitter: https://x.com/NathanielLugh/status/2054586651016605765

>What do you think of a view of life that is a mixture of Carse + Bourdieu + Cybernetics?

We could model life as nested games: each game has a field, players, resources, rules, moves, payoffs, hidden constraints, and a win condition.

A “mini-game” is a local playable loop.

A “game” is a coordinated set of mini-games.

A “meta-game” is the game of choosing, shaping, sequencing, or escaping games.

A “meta-meta-game” is the game of designing the principles by which meta-games are evaluated.

Though my experience with the concept is often in the terms of Eastern Philosophy along with some Hippie types, often likening life to a sort of game. Though IMO that sounds more like from the social constructionist perspective which I'm not sure is what this is getting at. To me this seems like needless complication.

Recently had a convo with someone who thought that continuity in terms of identity is an illusion and that we exist for a fraction of a second while inheriting previous memories. To me that view seems kinda off though I didn't really have a counter argument for it. They gave me supporting cases like:

>In the case of “bodily continuity”, which seems closest to your position, we can ask questions like what if the transporter uses your atoms; literally fires your atoms across space and reforms them into you.
If that’s you again, then why did using the same atoms make a difference? What do those atoms “hold”?
If not, then what is the person at the destination lacking? Bear in mind this would also mean that even with perfect knowledge of the current state of the universe I cannot tell if you are alive or dead because I can only know that by knowing the process by which your atoms arrived at where they are. Which is a whole can of worms in itself.

Or:

>This is another issue with bodily continuity (in fact with most solutions to the transporter problem) – how can we know? If I have a massive seizure that causes my brain waves to stop for several seconds, how can we know whether a person died and a new person was born, or it’s just the continuation of the same consciousness?
Obviously from a practical point of view we tend to assume being qualitatively similar enough means being numerically the same person, but that’s just something for convenience – we can’t know that it’s true.

One solution I think that was given to me is Process Philosophy, seeing us more like dynamic events rather than static objects, which if that is true would seem to negate a lot of the problems about continuity. Though I'll confess, identity is complicated (thinking about it hurts my head) and whether it's psychology, physical, or both, the concept seems to depend on how you define it. But is it an illusion?

Personally I think continuity and identity seem more like intuition like our understanding of what is alive.

They drew some conclusions as well:

>Agree that it’s tricky. As I say, we have a “common-sense” description of what continuity means and how death will be permanent, but it falls apart in all kinds of hypotheticals. We’re faced with just a few implausible or uncomfortable possibilities:

>If the pattern of brain structure = continuity, then it implies we’re all immortal; it’s just a matter of time before some atoms come together into the right configuration, in this universe or another. And, from your perspective, this will have happened instantly.

>We specify that it must be the same atoms. This actually doesn’t help because we could still say that eventually the specific atoms of your brain will come back together in a heat death universe. In fact all we’ve done is add the problem of needing to explain what’s so special about my atoms.

>Just say that continuity is an illusion. You, me, everyone, exist for a fraction of a second only, but have the illusion of continuity by virtue of inheriting memories.

So after running the gauntlet and testing out skills and all that, I like the dual swords. Not just for the look but also the speed and movement they offer, even if they don't hit hard.

But like...are they bad though? Like are they too weak to do everything in the game with? Also side note, what is best armor for them?

I've been trying to beat the bosses but even though I'm max stamina and wearing obsidian divine armor I still can barely scratch them. I'm an axe user and struggling really hard, any help?

https://thecrashcourse.com/courses/artificial-intelligence-personhood-crash-course-philosophy-23/

I saw the video and I heard other people mention him saying as such but what does that mean? Does it mean that people don't exist? If that's what it means then I find it odd considering his personal life. Is it saying that the self is an illusion? But what does he mean by illusion though?

I just am often at a loss for words about what I could have done better in a match. Like some times it feels like everything went right and we still lost. Other times it feels like no matter what I do I still lose. I'm mostly a support main because I generally am pretty good at keeping peeps alive but I can't really dps because my aim is pretty bad and I tend to choke a lot in game.

I mostly play moira and merc since those two don't need aim to be good with. I'm pretty good with mercy and learning to triage and when to rez or not but you can't healbot your way up.

It's just frustrating, I don't know what I'm doing wrong or what more I could do.