If I’m a woman and the only women I see doing professional sports are equivalent to Shaq then why would I even bother trying unless I’m a genetical freak as well.

There’s also the concept of consciousness without memory. What’s that like? Being able to experience the current moment but having no memory of any past experiences - including your experience one second ago.

Or here’s a scary thought: what if general anesthesia doesn’t actually switch off consciousness but simply blocks new memories from forming? You could experience the full horror of being awake during surgery but remember none of it. From the perspective of “now,” that would be functionally the same as never having experienced it at all.

Then there are those extremely weird recordings from split-brain studies. Back when grand mal seizures were treated by cutting the corpus callosum - the bridge between the two brain hemispheres - to stop the “storm” from spreading. On the surface these patients seemed completely normal after the operation, but some really strange stuff shows up when you start testing them properly.

There’s a way you can communicate with each hemisphere independently without the other one knowing. The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, the right hemisphere the left side. You can flash text on the left side of the visual field (which only the right, non-verbal hemisphere sees), then hand them a pen and let the left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) answer questions by writing. Turns out that the two halves often don’t agree on things. Ask the right hemisphere what it wants to do for a living and you’ll get a different answer than what the left hemisphere says out loud. Or you can give the right hemisphere a task - “go get a glass of water” - and when you ask the left hemisphere why it did that, it just makes up an explanation. “I was thirsty,” it’ll say, even though the researchers know that’s not true. It genuinely seems like there are two separate consciousnesses running in the same brain at the same time. The big question is: were they there all along, or does the second one only emerge once the connection between them is cut?

And yeah, this is all stuff I’ve absorbed from podcasts covering these topics - mostly from Sam Harris. I’m just naturally really curious about the human mind, and I’m pretty experienced with meditation as well, so I probably pay attention to my day-to-day conscious experiences about 1% more than the average person. I’m however not in any way expert on this. It’s not even remotely related to what I do for living.

As a man, I don’t really care if a woman comes into the same bathroom as me or faces me on the football field. Whatever “threat” they might pose to me, men already do that times five.

What I worry about is the reality it leads to. I’m afraid that in sports it ends up with only men’s teams, and the only women who qualify are genetic outliers that the vast majority of women in the world can’t relate to at all. It’s like me looking up to Shaq O’Neal and thinking someday I’m going to be like him - not going to happen.

Men have nothing to lose here, whereas women have everything to lose.

I can only assume a fetus likely has some faint level of consciousness while a rock has none, but again, this is all just speculation. I couldn’t possibly know for sure. Consciousness and qualia are entirely subjective experiences. There’s no evidence of them in the universe outside our own direct experience of it. If I wasn’t conscious myself, I wouldn’t even have any idea that such a thing exists.

What it is - I have no idea. If I had to bet, I’d say it’s an emergent feature of a sufficient level of information processing and therefore a physical process, but that’s just my speculation. Nobody actually knows.

Illusions are experiences. That’s why I say consciousness cannot be an illusion: the very fact that you’re experiencing the illusion proves that the space where that illusion appears exists - and that space is consciousness.

I’m also not talking about any human concepts we layer on top of feelings, nor the thoughts we have about those feelings. I’m only talking about the raw sensation itself that our brain then interprets as hot, wet, green, bitter, and so on. The fact of experience itself. If I were to switch places with a bat it would most likely still feel like something to be that bat but if I were to switch places with a rock it would be equivalent to dying. The lights would go out because there’s no consciousness. It’s like nothing to be a rock (probably).

The sense of self implies some kind of center of consciousness or thinker of thoughts. I don’t buy that. Thoughts just appear - nobody is authoring them. I speak of “me” or “I” as a being in the universe, but that’s just because it’s the only way I know how to refer to these things. I don’t know how accurate my view of the universe really is. Like I said: I could just be a mind living in a simulated universe. I don’t think I am, but it would be perfectly compatible with my experience.

How can we know it’s like anything to be anything

Because it undeniably feels like something to be in this very moment from the perspective of my subjective experience. In fact, I’d even go as far as to claim that it’s the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion. I could be a mind living in a simulated universe on an alien supercomputer, with every person I’ve ever interacted with just being a convincing AI, or I could be a Boltzmann brain - but what remains true despite all that is that something seems to be happening.

I think the closest we can get to true unconsciousness that you can still come back from is general anesthesia. It’s nothing like sleep. It’s like that period of time doesn’t even exist. It’s like the time before you were born.

It’s the fact of subjective experience - the warmth of a campfire, the bitterness of lemon, the greenness of green. We’re essentially talking about consciousness here. The fact that there’s something it is like to be.

While nobody knows what consciousness is or how it comes about, what I mean by it is best captured by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his aforementioned essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

Nagel argues that consciousness has an essentially subjective character, a what-it-is-like aspect. He states that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism.

I can only suppose that of other people as well. There’s no way to measure consciousness. The only evidence of its existence is the fact that it feels like something to be me from my subjective perspective. Other humans behave the way I do so I assume they’re probably having similar experiences but I have no idea what it’s like to be a bat for example.

However, answering the question “what it’s like to be” is not relevant here. What’s relevant is that existence has qualia at all.

They won the Nobel prize for it.

If only…

How Alpha Fold Solved the Protein Folding Problem and Changed Science Forever

Edit:

In 2020, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2. With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified. Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries. Among a myriad of scientific applications, researchers can now better understand antibiotic resistance and create images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.

Source

Consciousness (the fact of experience) doesn’t necessarily need to be linked to intelligence. It might be but it doesn’t have to. An LLM is almost definitely more intelligent than an insect but it most likely is like nothing to be an LLM but it probably is like something to be an insect.

Few of countless dictionary definitions for intelligence:

• The ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge.
• The ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations
• The ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests)
• The act of understanding
• The ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason
• It can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information; and to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.

There isn’t even concensus on what intelligence actually means yet here you are declaring “AI is not intelligence” what ever that even means.

Artificial Intelligence is a term in computer science that describes a system that’s able to perform any task that would normally require human intelligence. Atari chess engine is an intelligent system. It’s narrowly intelligent as opposed to humans that are generally intelligent but it’s intelligent nevertheless.

But they already switched to Android when Apple removed the headphone jack. Oh wait, that’s right - nobody did.

Every post with “AI” in the title turns into a “here’s what I think about AI” thread thanks to the high concentration of anti-AI NPCs on this platform.

If only there was a community for serious, dispassionate conversation about technology…

Using the term “NoFap” in the title is a bit like putting “AI” in there - it pretty much guarantees zero productive conversation in the comments and instead acts as a bug light for certain people to just chime in with their personal views on that one thing.

I don’t even bother writing a response to the actual question because I don’t want to spend the rest of the day defending views I don’t even hold.

“We’ll only agree to peace if you let us occupy the land behind your defensive lines - the ones you’ve spent years building that we can’t break through with force. But rest assured, we won’t advance any further if you just do this first.”

This is like a burglar trying to negotiate that you open the lock and just let them step into the hallway.

I’m trying. I almost never post here anymore because every time someone tells me it’s too interesting.

Often it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

I suffer from a chronic inability to throw things away if there’s even a slim chance I might need them one day. I’ve developed a system I call “deep freeze”: I take the item, wrap it in food wrap and packaging tape, write what’s inside and the date it was sealed, then add it to the pile of other stuff I’ve put into long-term storage.

This obviously doesn’t help if you literally don’t have the space for it, but in my case it’s more about trying to stay somewhat organized. This way I can forget about it without throwing it away, but also without having to deal with it again.

I didn’t see a sign explicitly telling me not to but I didn’t ask for permission either.

I was considering using the other for treated lumber off-cuts but I think if I did, it would end up like you described.