I got into reading about near death experiences and it seems a common theme is that we’re all one. Like each and every one of us is really just part of some omniscient god that’s so omniscient and great that god isn’t even a good enough name for it: experiencing what it’s like to be small. Sure, why not. That’s sort of intuitive to me. Given that I can’t verify the universe exists and can only verify my experience it doesn’t seem that crazy to say experience is fundamental.
But if that’s the case then I’m just left with an overwhelming sense of why. Why make a universe with three spatial dimensions? Why make yourself experience suffering? Why make yourself experience hate? Why filter your consciousness through a talking chimpanzee? If I’m an omniscient entity why would I choose this? Surely there’s got to be infinitely more interesting things to do. If we’re all god then surely we’d never get bored just doing god things.
So you can take the obvious answer that everything exists. But then you’re left with other questions. Why are we in a universe that makes sense? Why don’t we live in a cartoon operating on cartoon logic? Does that mean there’s a sentient SpongeBob? And then there’s the more pressing concern of astronomical suffering. Are there universes where people are experiencing hyperpain? Surely god wouldn’t want to experience I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. It doesn’t seem likely to me that there are sentiences living in cartoons, so I’ll use that to take the psychologically comforting position that not everything we can imagine exists.
But if that’s the case then why this? Why this universe? Why this amount of suffering? If there’s a no-go zone of experience where is it? I have so many questions and I don’t know where the answers are.
I understand. I’ll try to keep it more civil.
It’s not fear. It’s anger. Also good people are rare. The people you think of as good people are likely just friendly.
Sure. The people I’m talking about choose to care as much as they do. Good and courageous people can choose to not have hope and not care about others, but they choose to care.
I think a lot of people are confused by good and courageous people and don’t understand why some people are that way. But I don’t think the answer is that confusing. It comes down to strength of conscience. For some people, the emotional pain of not doing what they think is right hurts them 1000x more than any physical pain. They hate doing what they think is wrong more than they hate any physical pain.
So if you want to be an asshole, you can say that good and courageous people, otherwise known as heroes, do it out of their own self-interest.
I just don’t understand why the people there would lie about something like this. This isn’t even very believable. It looks like the guy who founded it was a bright ML PhD and if he’s not telling the truth why would he throw away his reputation over this? Maybe it’s real but I’m pretty skeptical. I looked at their Zochi paper and I don’t see that they offered any proof that the papers they attributed to Zochi were written by Zochi.
I think it leads to S-risks. I think people will remain in charge and use AI as a power-amplifier. The people most likely to end up with power like having power. They like having control over other people and dominating them. This is completely apparent if you spend the (unpleasant) time reading the Epstein documents that the House has released. We need societal and governmental reform before we even think about playing with any of this technology.
The answer to the world’s problems doesn’t rely on a bunch of individuals who are good at puzzles solving a puzzle and then we get utopia. It involves people recognizing the humanity of everyone around them and working on societal and governmental reform. And sure this stuff sounds like a long-shot but we’ve got to try. I wish I had a less vague answer but I don’t.
I think a lot of people here who are freaked out about LLMs would have a lot of their anxieties assuaged if they read a little bit about neuroscience and just trusted their vibe of the LLMs they talked to. To me it seems like the brain is doing something a lot more complicated than deep learning. If you read about CNET it looks like the human brain actually involves quantum effects (which opens up the exciting possibility of a causal mechanism for free will to exist).
This is related because if you just enter a conversation with Claude or ChatGPT and get to stuff like this, if you just imagined it was a person saying what the LLM was saying you would think they were a fucking moron.