@norabelrose Consciousness is first person perspective, it’s an irreducible part of our dual-aspect world
@teortaxesTex Nora often bullies me about rigorous definition of consciousness but this feels 100% correct
Moreover, I think ≈every thing can be meaningfully said to have such a “perspective”. The question of moral salience is: what is a person?
(Intuitively, not the persona Opus emulates)
@jd_pressman I think a lot of “can computers be conscious?” discourse is strange in that it’s a bit like if in 1965 we were having “can computers have video?” discourse which argued about whether CPUs implement the ‘true’ machinery for images rather than assuming a projector can be built.
@bryancsk Reinforcement learning and deep learning for “generating materials” in materials science is over-hyped and pointless. What we really want is Bayesian optimisation to save the time of experimenters.
i remember once, i was showing ilya the results of weeks’ worth of experiments with the conclusion that what we wanted to work wasn’t going to work. his instantaneous response was: “if you torture the data long enough, it will confess” by which he meant that the data would prove that my experiments were wrong. in the end he turned out to be right. that was one of the most important lessons i learned while at OA, which ilya exemplified: having courage and conviction in the right ideas compounded over time matters way more than you think.