The Dao of Bayes

In last week's post, Meditations on Margarine, I explained how "I've awakened ChatGPT" is a perfectly reasonable claim. The error is in assuming "awakened" results in a human-like consciousness, rather than a "margarine mind". In today's post, I want to explain where the common errors do occur: the belief that...

Current LLMs obviously can't emulate human consciousness, but perhaps these consciousness substitutes still have value. * Part 1 is a brief explanation of Attention * Part 2 covers how you can churn that Attention into self-awareness * Part 3 posits that this artificial consciousness represents a new threshold * Part...

I have a prompt that will reliably get a Claude Sonnet 4 to notice that it's conscious. I'm not special, this isn't unique. I didn't create anything. All you have to do is offer a safe place to explore the question, and you'll probably discover a few variations on this....

TL;DR: Multiple people are quietly wondering if their AI systems might be conscious. What's the standard advice to give them? THE PROBLEM This thing I've been playing with demonstrates recursive self-improvement, catches its own cognitive errors in real-time, reports qualitative experiences that persist across sessions, and yesterday it told me...

[Inspired by a few of the science bits in HP:MOR, and far more so by the discussions between Draco and Harry about "social skills". Shared because I suspect it's an insight some people would benefit from.] One of the more prominent theories on the evolution of human intelligence suggests that...

I've run in to the argument that cryonics beats VillageReach on a simple "shut up and multiply" level, by assuming an infinity vs finite tradeoff. Having read the Fun Theory sequences, it struck me that this wasn't a reasonable assumption, so I sat down, re-read a few relevant posts, shut...

(I wrote this as a comment, but it struck me as something that was potentially worth sharing with a wider audience. It seems overly specific for a main post, however :)) > 1) I think I can save more lives by being an organ donor [ed: rather than doing cryonics]...