I don't know about anyone else, but I am definitely not concerned with the mechanics, in the sense that a consciousness could be implimented in anything. There is nothing magic about biology, go ahead and Ship of Theseus every biological construct and sub process with some analog made out of other materials or even pure energy and the result is still the same consciousness. And I do not believe in any kind of actual soul in the religious sense.
That does not mean there is no difference between what conscious beings do, and what any mechanistic process does. Mechanistic does not mean "made of electrical signals" or made of anything in particular. A purely imaginary algabraic equation is not made of anything, yet is a mechanistic process. A thought is either made of nothing or made of biology depending on how you wish to think about it, yet is not a mechanistic process.
Even though a consciousness can also perform a mechanistic process that looks the same from the outside. An axle can turn because an electric motor turns it, or that same axle can turn the exact same way because you turned it. There is a purely exterior effect that is identical in both cases. Put the motor in a box with only the shaft sticking out, and put yourself inside the same box so the outside observer can only see the box and the shaft. Since everything is the same from the outside, I guess that proves that electric motors are conscious. They decide to turn shafts for internal reasons not all that different from the reason you decided to. Or it proves that neither the motor nor yourself are conscious or thinking.
It is unutterably stupid to confuse a person with a painting of a person. LLMs are nothing but paintings of people. People wrote everything it spits back out, and the mixing that it does is entirely explicable and reproduceable by plain mechanistic process.
Take all the words and write one each onto ping pong balls.
Add slightly different weights to the different balls so some are heavier than others.
Add slightly different magnets to each, so that some are slightly more attracted or repelled to others.
Change the shapes of the balls so that some fit up against others better than others.
Glue together a few balls to form a question you want to ask.
Toss the question and all the other balls into a tumbler and shake it all up for a while. Remove all the balls that didn't stick to the question.
What you have is not a "thought".
You have something that looks like a thought because it reflects actual thoughts that people did have, which all got encoded into the rules that made up the whole aparatus.
People created the alphabet and vocabulary written on the balls.
People created the associative meanings and encoded it into syntax and grammar rules, the weights, magnets, and shapes of the balls.
A person somewhere had a thought that there is a thing they will call the sky, and a sensation they will call blue, and an association that the sky is blue, and another association that "the sky is blue" is an assertion, and that another type of communication is a query, and that an assertion is a reasonable response to a query.
That is all represented in the construction of the balls. Out of all the purely random possible results, it's slightly more likely for the shake-up to produce "the sky is blue" because it fits a little better than other things against the seed crystal of your question.
This bingo tumbler produced a communication yet did not have a thought.
Most, maybe all? communication is some form of mechanistic encoding of thoughts. It's always possible to copy it or fake it, because it's not the consciousness itself, it's just something the consciousness caused to happen.
Some writing on a paper is not a thought, it's a picture of a thought.
The picture can be reproduced without the original thought occurring again. A new piece of paper can have a new instance of the writing spring forth without any conscious process behind it.
If you write something on a piece of paper, that was a person expressing a thought.
Now that piece of paper with writing on it lays on top of another peice of paper in the sun long enough for the sun to brown both papers. But the shadow from the ink transfers a duplicate inverse image onto the underlying paper that doesn't yellow as much.
That was a communication being reproduced. The written message on the 2nd paper did not exist, and then it did exist. What created it? Where did it come from? Is the first paper conscious and decided to communicate it's thoughts to you?
The first paper did not speak a thought via the 2nd paper, even though you can read the 2nd paper and interpret it as being the result of a coherent conscious thought. Neither the 1st nor 2nd pieces of paper thought anything. Merely ultimately a consciousness did cause the first paper to have an encoded representation of their thoughts on it, by writing them there.
That is the only reason the 2nd removed copy looks like a message. It is a message, but it's not a message from the piece of paper itself.
Even though the piece of paper is made out of complex carbon compounds "just like humans ZOMG!!!!!"
How is the human brain also not a stochastic process? I still don't see what makes it so categorically different from a computer program or even an LLM.
The man and the future llm are equivalent from outside. There is no way for me to determine this ill defined thing of them being "conscious". If we are unsure llm is conscious, then by the same standards we are unsure other humans are conscious. If both are the same outputs for the same inputs, they I don't care about some magical indefinable soul. Even current LLMs are I believe on some spectrum of what many people would call conscious.
I could throw out some ignorant basically random and meaningless guesses like "emergent property arising from sufficient threshold complexity" or "quantum effects" but these are just bullshit examples that are nothing more than filler noises to say in place of "a thing we don't know". It's more honest to just say we don't know. There are infinite things we don't know and there is nothing wrong with that. The unknown does not have to be filled in with fiction, it can and should remain simply unknown until some actual observation or reasoning can supply something real.
Obviously biology includes simple processes. Your elbow is a simple hinge and any number of chemical reactions are simple chemical reactions that will happen exactly the same way all by themselves without being part of a biological construct. This is not interesting and doesn't prove or disprove anything about any other kind of process or phenomenon. The mechanics of biology are irrelevant.
And yet the tumbler of pingpong balls and the piece of paper are contemplating their own exitence? They communicated because they have a thought and then a desire to communicate the thought? Are you saying that?
You aim to suggest that I am failing to stick to the hard facts of reality by imagining something we can't put our fingers on in a consciousness, but I say that imagining that a bin of pinpong balls thinks is a rather more egregious example of unsubstantiated faith.
If you mean the opposite (more likely I assume), that you yourself are not doing anything different than a bag of pingpong balls when you engage in this discussion with me, well I have nothing to say to that. But then I don't have to say anything to that because I don't owe a bag of pingpong balls any consideration at all. It can emit text all day and it means nothing to me and warrants no response. Even if it emits text that says "What biggoted chauvanistic discrimination! Just because I am made of pinpong balls that means the veracity of my arguments don't matter and I'm not a person?"
Correct, I haven't yet seen any evidence humans are nore than what you call pingpong balls. You are a bunch of ping pong balls. So if the inputs and outputs are same as a person, there is no way to know whether this so called consciousness exists or not. If you are being consistent, its equally impossible to say from outside if another "human" is "conscious" as it is for an ai or the piece of paper. If the inputs and outputs are same then I don't give a shit about meaningless ill defined terms like that.
>Obviously biology includes simple processes. Your
So tell me again what is this aphysical magic thats missing? And tell me why you believe in magic when nothing else in the universe has needed magic till now.
We know that, that's what the article is about. The things you said are vague and contain no information. What does 2KB have to do with "what we think counts as human" ?
Not sure where you are getting this information. Where there are trains, people take the trains far more.
In Tokyo, the vast majority of passengers rely on the extensive and efficient train system, which is often considered the best in the world. Cars are less commonly used due to high parking costs, traffic congestion, and the convenience of public transportation options like trains and subways.
Transportation Options in Tokyo
Train Passengers
Rail Network: Tokyo has the most extensive urban railway network in the world, with 40 million passengers daily.
Frequency: Trains run every two to three minutes during rush hours, ensuring minimal wait times.
Accessibility: Major stations are equipped with elevators and clear signage in multiple languages, making it easy for tourists to navigate.
Car Usage
Driving Conditions: Driving in Tokyo can be challenging due to narrow roads, heavy traffic, and limited parking availability.
Parking Costs: Finding parking can be difficult and expensive, with many areas lacking sufficient parking lots.
Rental Considerations: Renting a car may incur additional costs such as tolls and drop-off fees, especially if returning the car to a different location.*
I don't think so, I think you're just getting a high end that isn't in the original audio. In the places where there are high frequencies the aliasing and the hiss just gets in the way.
The artifacts weren't a conscious design decision, they were a constraint. We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice.
> The artifacts weren't a conscious design decision, they were a constraint.
Of course the artifacts were a constraint. Whether consciously considered or not, constraints influence design decisions.
> We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice.
Maybe Frédéric Chopin would have written his etudes and nocturnes for the Roland SC-55 Goblins instrument patch if that choice had been available to him, but it wasn't. What we do know of are the choices he actually made facing the constraints that he actually faced.
Similarly, maybe a GBA music composer would have preferred for the music to be a high fidelity recording of a full piano arrangement if that choice had been available to them. But it wasn't, so they didn't.
We can speculate all we want about what creative choices might have been made if the people behind them were dealt a different hand, but in reality choices don't exist in isolation of constraints, and I think any line of reasoning trying to divorce the two is futile.
The idea that sound designers on old games were totally siloed and ignorant of how their compositions would sound on final consumer hardware is completely wrong. Most of these composers were programmers themselves and knew exactly how to get the final hardware to make the sounds they wanted, even when they composed using more advanced tech.
Programmers using devkits (more powerful than the consumer hardware) likewise.
I don't understand what you mean. Nobody said they didn't know how their compositions would sound, my argument is that at least some of these composers would have chosen the more advanced interpolation method, if it were available.
I guess it's hard to stop my originalist tendencies from boiling over into other topics...
What you're saying to me is like someone saying, well, if the piano had more octaves then existing compositions would have been better. But those pieces were composed with the current amount of octaves in mind in the first place...
Maybe there's an analogue with the harpsichord-to-piano transition, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about that yet.
Haha, my first gut reaction to reading your second paragraph was "No, it'd be better to compare it to compositions written for harpsichord and played on piano".
I guess history has shown that most composers (and listeners) preferred the piano sound over the harpsichord sound the majority of the time.
That may be true, but the sound designers were still making the best of what they had. They could probably imagine how the same composition would sound better.
When you play e.g. Gamecube games in an emulator, do you run them in 480p or do you render at a higher resolution? The former is clearly what the designers were targeting, but I think there’s rarely any benefit to eschewing higher resolutions. It just looks even better.
You say that, but it was quite common to "allow" a bit of aliasing in sampling back when we had very limited equipment, to introduce a bit of "sparkle" into percussive sounds that would otherwise be lost by low sampling rates.
Given its spectral complexity can you even tell if a hihat sample is aliased?
>I don't think so, I think you're just getting a high end that isn't in the original audio. In the places where there are high frequencies the aliasing and the hiss just gets in the way.
I don't get this, are you saying that this aliasing is just an artifact of the emulation? Like the GBA speaker/headphone jack itself would also be affected by the same aliasing right? And in that case the song was composed for that, right?
I don't think it would be right to go as far as to say that there's a huge strong interplay in every single GBA title's song with the hardware (I'm sure some stuff was phoned in and only listened to by the composer in whatever MIDI DAW thing they were using) but at one point the GBA was the target right?
So weird seeing comments like this on HN. AI is the most revolutionary technology in programming and computing, perhaps since the first programs were made. Of course it's going to be the most talked about topic.
I remember all the other "most revolutionary technologies" too. It isn't just the most talked about topic, almost every single link is some point release or random blog entry about "my journey".
I'm not sure a 6 month window with a squished Y axis to make the graph a perfect 45 degree angle line means much. How it compares to currencies and other assets would be more interesting.
I see, you don't know what I'm talking about. My apologies, I assumed a common background. Here's some introductory materials on Bayesian vs frequentist interpretations of probability:
Bayesian and frequentist reasoning in plain English
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