-- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] On Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 12:13 AM Alan Grimes <[email protected]> wrote:
> Matt Mahoney wrote: > > > But it won't be uploads doing this. An upload is a robot that claims > > to be you. Your phone has already collected enough data to train an > > LLM to convince others, and you won't notice any gaps in your memory. > > You do understand that consciousness is an illusion, right? > > No, I do not have a working cell phone, and haven't had one in 13 years. > Resistance is futile. My dad held out with just a desktop computer and home Internet until shortly before he died last year at 93. But he needed to log into his bank and needed a phone so they could text him a code. Back in 2008 when I didn't have a cell phone either, I estimated that AGI would cost $1 quadrillion, mostly for human knowledge collection. People had to be willing to completely give up privacy for it to work. I imagined a distributed AGI made up of independent narrow experts and a communication network where all messages were public. It just didn't happen that way. Instead we have a few big tech companies that want to make a copy of your brain, and a population that is OK with it because they get free stuff. http://mattmahoney.net/agi2.html You are aware that there are people out there who have precisely the > opposite philosophy, that only consciousness is real and everything else > is illusory? > It's possible. Both quantum mechanics and general relativity are symmetrical with regard to time, but observers are not. Quantum mechanics describes a deterministic wave function whose solution is observers who see particles. Relativity describes systems where observers measure distance and time. An observer in either system is a device with memory. Writing to memory is not reversible because the old value is erased. So physics describes a universe that is completely different than what you see, where space, time, and matter are illusions. But if we accept these as real, my explanation is that consciousness is the feeling that you get when you think, a positive reinforcement signal that motivates you to not die, resulting in more offspring. I don't agree with either position but, from my point of view, there is > now one clique that will soon weild unimaginable technological power and > philosophicallly believes that they have unlimited license to do > anything whatsoever as long as they first make a backup copy. =| > > Why should I not be terrified? > > -- > You can't out-crazy a Democrat. > WhY aRe ThEy KiLlInG tEh ChIcKeNs? > White is the new Kulak. > Powers are not rights. > > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tb9db111bc59c6629-M32011e14670988a045f98572 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
