Something something Stallman was right (about this specific thing, anyway).

understanding where consciousness comes from

Again, to be clear, I don't think this is a fundamentally scientific question.

If you show a philosopher how a rose activates the retina and sends signals to the brain, you'll get a response like, "sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose"…

If you show a philosopher the retinal signals activate the optical processing capabilities of the brain, you'll get "sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose"…

If you show a philosopher how the appearance of a rose consistently activates certain clusters of neurons and glial cells that are always activated when someone sees a rose, you'll get a response "sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose"…

Show the philosopher that the same region of the brain is excited when the person smells a rose or reads the word "rose", and they'll say, "sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose"…

To the philosopher, they have posed a question about "what it's like to experience a rose", and I suggest that NO answer will satisfy them, because they're not really asking a scientific question. They're looking for, as the SEP puts it, an "intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or 'what it's like' consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain". But, science isn't under any obligation to provide an inituitive, easy-to-understand answer. The assemblage of brain & nerve functions that are fired when a living being experiences a phenomenon are the answer.

Well, it's a "problem" for philosophers. I don't think it's a "problem" for neurology or hard science, that's the only point I was trying to make.

To be clear, I don't think the fundamental issue is whether humans have a training dataset. We do. And it includes copyrighted work. It also includes our unique sensory perceptions and lots of stuff that is definitely NOT the result of someone else's work. I don't think anyone would dispute that copyrighted text, pictures, sounds are integrated into human consciousness.

The question is whether it is ethical, and should it be legal, to feed copyrighted works into an AI training dataset and use that AI to produce material that replaces, displaces, or competes with the copyrighted work used to train it. Should it be legal to distribute or publish that AI-produced material at all if the copyright holder objects to the use of their work in an AI training dataset? (I concede that these may be two separate, but closely related, questions.)

I hesitate to call it a problem because, by the way it's defined, subjective experience is innately personal.

I've gotten into this question with others, and when I began to propose thought problems (like, what if we could replicate sensory inputs? If you saw/heard/felt everything the same as someone else, would you have the same subjective conscious experience?), I'd get pushback: "that's not subjective experience, subjective experience is part of the MIND, you can't create it or observe it or measure it…".

When push comes to shove, people define consciousness or subjective experience as that aspect of experience that CANNOT be shown or demonstrated to others. It's baked into the definition. As soon as you venture into what can be shown or demonstrated, you're out of bounds.

So it's not a "problem", as such. It's a limitation of our ability to self-observe the operating state of our own minds. An interesting question, perhaps, but not a problem. Just a feature of the system.

There is a so-called "hard problem of consciousness", although I take exception with calling it a problem.

The general problem is that you can't really prove that you have subjective experience to others, and neither can you determine if others have it, or whether they merely act like they have it.

But, a somewhat obvious difference between AIs and humans is that AIs will never give you an answer that is not statistically derivable from their training dataset. You can give a human a book on a topic, and ask them about the topic, and they can give you answers that seem to be "their own conclusions" that are not explicitly from the book. Whether this is because humans have randomness injected into their reason, or they have imperfect reasoning, or some genuine animus of "free will" and consciousness, we cannot rightly say. But it is a consistent difference between the humans and the AIs.

The Monty Hall problem discussed in the article – in which AIs are asked to answer the Monty Hall problem, but they are given explicit information that violate the assumptions of the Monty Hall problem – is a good example of something where a human will tend to get it right, through creativity, while an AI will tend to get it wrong, due to statistical regression to the mean.

Yeah, I use the regular Youtube client more frequently, because my senses aren’t assaulted by a crapass load of thumbnails of dumb stuff.

He’s rich. First rule of being rich is never pay when you can borrow.

US Virgin Islands: nah we’re good

As someone who has geeked out on fonts since we were trading bitmap fonts for System 5 on the Mac, I can say that article is fine. Believe it or not, all of that actually matters to graphic design/text design people.

I’m gonna call this intentional satire:

limited by screen width in how many files it could sh…