breckinloggins

I don’t think it would exclude non biological entities. If neurons are simply the way for such a structured field to be generated, sustained, and modulated, then presumably any physical apparatus that produced “that type of field” would produce experience.

Or a hybrid. We already know there’s a long range binding problem in neuroscience: how do physically separated neuron assemblies construct what we report as a gestalt experience.

This is a non spooky answer that also points to possible applications like cybernetic EM field modulators.

All of this is complete fantasy, of course, but the hypothesis at least has the virtue of not getting too far over its skis.

My hypothesis:

Sentience / consciousness is “hosted by” or “seated in” structured EM fields. Neurons are just the mechanism.

I’ve not yet thought of a way to falsify this hypothesis, but I continue to think there’s something to this framing.

One reason I like it is that it doesn’t completely succumb to total dualism. Also it doesn’t say WHY this would be the case, or HOW. It just says “that thing you call experience? That’s a special kind of structured EM field configuration.”

Yes. And for the same reason I still write in C or Common Lisp - by hand - in the age of LLMs.

It’s a hobby.

Interesting question. If the Waymo was driving aggressively to remove us from the situation but relatively safely I might stay in it.

This does bring up something, though: Waymo has a "pull over" feature, but it's hidden behind a couple of touch screen actions involving small virtual buttons and it does not pull over immediately. Instead, it "finds a spot to pull over". I would very much like a big red STOP IMMEDIATELY button in these vehicles.

I live in such an area. The route to my house involves steep topography via small windy streets that are very narrow and effectively one-way due to parked cars.

Human drivers routinely do worse than Waymo, which I take 2 or 3 times a week. Is it perfect? No. Does it handle the situation better than most Lyft or Uber drivers? Yes.

As a bonus: unlike some of those drivers the Waymo doesn't get palpably angry at me for driving the route.

I somehow doubt there is any future version of me that regrets joining The Long Now Foundation, and work like this is the main reason why.

If you're in SF you should pay them a visit and buy a coffee at The Interval; I think you'll find it worth the trip.

I am a former student and graduate of this department at Texas A&M. I just called The Association and informed them that I consider this completely unacceptable and will not consider donations to the university unless this policy is reversed.

I would encourage fellow like-minded Aggies to do the same.

Drs Austin and McDermott are surely spinning in their graves right now.

If it’s part of an otherwise coherent post making a larger point I have no issue with it.

If it’s a low effort copy pasta post I think downvotes are sufficient unless it starts to obliterate the signal vs noise ratio on the site.

Other resources I like:

- Eskil Steenberg’s “How I program C” (https://youtu.be/443UNeGrFoM). Long and definitely a bit controversial in parts, but I find myself agreeing with most of it.

- CoreFoundation’s create rule (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5718415/corefoundation-o...). I’m definitely biased but I strongly prefer this to OP’s “you declare it you free it” rule.

I am happy the author followed her curiosity. I remember feeling much the same “pull” when I moved to San Francisco in 2013.

Those of us who really vibe with the place seem to share a desire to get behind the city’s strange magic and discover the past souls and events that make San Francisco what it is - that make it feel this particular way that it does.

To the author and everyone else who has arrived here recently: welcome to San Francisco!

Holy cow... I signed up to HN 18 years ago. I am more of a behind-the-scenes guy in the tech world so I don't know most of you but I've enjoyed participating in this community over the years.

I hope you all have a Happy Thanksgiving; here's to the next 18 years! :)

Interesting critique. Care to elaborate?

Right. So do you flick it at ChatGPT? It's talking to you, after all.

(I honestly don't know. If there's any phenomenal consciousness there it would have to be during inference, but I doubt it.)

> How does the wand know what I'm flicking it at?

Magic! (i.e. not purely part of the thought experiment, unless I'm missing something interesting)

> What if I miss?

Panpsychism better be true :)

> Can I target the wand with itself?

John Malkovich? Is that you?!

Hey not fair!

While you're in there I have a few favors to ask...

Let's say a genie hands you a magic wand.

The genie says "you can flick this wand at anything in the universe and - for 30 seconds - you will swap places with what you point it at."

"You mean that if I flick it at my partner then I will 'be' her for 30 seconds and experience exactly how she feels and what she thinks??"

"Yes", the genie responds.

"And when I go back to my own body I will remember what it felt like?"

"Absolutely."

"Awesome! I'm going to try it on my dog first. It won't hurt her, will it?"

"No, but I'd be careful if I were you", the genie replies solemnly.

"Why?"

"Because if you flick the magic wand at anything that isn't sentient, you will vanish."

"Vanish?! Where?" you reply incredulously.

"I'm not sure. Probably nowhere. Where do you vanish to when you die? You'll go wherever that is. So yeah. You probably die."

So: what - if anything - do you point the wand at?

A fly? Your best friend? A chair? Literally anyone? (If no, congratulations! You're a genuine solipsist.) Everything and anything? (Whoa... a genuine panpsychist!)

Probably your dog, though. Surely she IS a good girl and feels like one.

Whatever property you've decided that some things in the universe have and other things do not such that you "know" what you can flick your magic wand at and still live...

That's phenomenal consciousness. That's the hard problem.

Everything else? "Mere" engineering.

No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

One of the primary issues with Nagel's approach is that "what is it like" is - for reasons I have never been able to fathom - a phrase that imports the very ambiguity that Nagel is attempting to dispel.

The question of what it would feel like to awake one day to find that - instead of lying in your bed - you are hanging upside down as a bat is nearly the complete dual of the Turing test. And even then, the Turing test only asks whether your interlocutor is convincing you that it can perform the particulars of human behavior.

Likely at least two reasons:

- People simply disagree with you, especially this line: “Who cares if you’re still replying to emails at 7pm if you can do this, right?”

That might work for you but I imagine it left a sour note for some because emailing involves entangling other people into your personal hustle. This can perpetuate “work for show” (especially if you have any power or influence). If you want to silently code into the night and save all the evidence of this for the next morning, that’s one thing. Visible evidence of constant work can be very stressful and draining to others, however.

- HN leans left, weekend HN even more so. This whole thing can feel like “shit you do because we live in a ruthless society that only cares about money”. I don’t agree with the modern left on many things, but I’m definitely coming around to this one. It was - though perhaps in a slightly different context - the original Leftist-owned meaning of “woke”. It’s the idea that you suddenly wake up to the shitty sewer water you’ve been swimming in all your life and look around astonished at everyone else, who all seem to think it’s a perfectly clean and clear place to swim. I suspect some of your downvotes are because of this.

So, in short: you’re entitled to your opinion but it’s phrased as a bit of a lightning rod for those whose values deeply conflict with your own.

I road trip frequently and it’s astonishing how much space there truly is.

Unfortunately our national attitude around population growth would need to change.

Adding on to existing cities in any direction other than “up” is frequently denigrated as “sprawl”.

New cities seem to be the sole purview of idealistic libertarian billionaires… which would be fine except they’re the only ones who even talk about it. Not that these ever get built.

Getting citizens and then the government comfortable with the idea of building nice new places would really help - in addition to all the heroics already being done in existing cities around zoning, transit, and housing regulations.

When this question is asked in person, though, the tone is frequently one of “WHY do you know how to do that? It’s not your job”.

The difference is easily discernible. Online, though, I do interpret it more generously.

My story is similar. I’ve been programming nearly every day for over 35 years and don’t see myself stopping any time soon.

Occasionally someone (usually at work) will ask “why do you know that?” or “how did you learn how to do that?” (where “that” is typically something outside of my direct job responsibilities).

I’ve been programming for so long and have dabbled or seriously worked with so many parts of the computing landscape - mostly out of simple curiosity and love of craft - that I admit to being somewhat annoyed at questions like this. I have trouble connecting with the premise.

But I don’t want to offend, and it’s not my place to judge when it feels like my interlocutor works in my field simply because the money is there. So I came up with a succinct way to answer those questions.

“I like computers.”

Thanks for your work on this. I’ve bookmarked several of these videos and used them as reference.

Learning assembly with a really good visualizer or debugger in hand is highly underrated; just watching numbers move around as you run your code is more fun than it has any right to be.

I really like Justine Tunney’s blinkenlights program. (https://justine.lol/blinkenlights/)

A version of that for AArch64 / RISC-V would be really cool.

Assembly is one of those things where setting your ambitions higher than is usually advised can be wise.

You could try writing a game (perhaps using Raylib) or a pixel art editor. Or maybe a little web application for your Homelab.

Simple C libraries (Raylib, libcurl, early win32 APIs) tend to be dead simple to use from assembly.

Most asm tutorials are either bare metal / OS or “we will talk directly to the kernel”, but there’s no reason you can’t interface with higher level libraries and make real apps and games. It’s simpler than it sounds because a whole lot of your code will just be moving things around between registers and memory in order to make function calls and bookkeep your program state.

I can think of several reasons:

1. You are primed to think that it is mysterious because that’s all you usually hear about assembly. (“Roller Coaster Tycoon was written in 100% hand crafted assembly… what an absolute wizard!!”)

2. The language’s textual format is odd - columns vs nested indentation. Actually really nice once you get used to it, but it’s definitely alien at first.

3. Mnemonics and directives have short, cryptic spellings. x86 in particular has arbitrary looking register names as well. RV, AArch64, m68k etc do better here.

4. Mnemonics are inconsistently overloaded and encode lots of stuff. SIMD instructions tend to look like a cat sat on your keyboard.

5. Manually laying out memory is technically simpler than the abstractions provided by higher level languages (structs and classes, fancy generic types, pointer syntax), but it’s fiddly and you have to deal with alignment.

6. You have to do a lot of bookkeeping yourself. It’s like malloc/free turned to 11.

7. Register allocation is a hard problem for computers. It’s kinda tough for humans, too.

8. Lots of books and online stuff discuss assembly for use with high performance code, tight compute kernels, raw hardware access, and fiddly CPU configuration for OS startup and virtual memory configuration. This requires even more specialized registers, arcane instructions, and bit fiddling. This stuff - along with reverse engineering and security research/attacks - gets lumped into what people think of as “assembly language”. The resulting concept surface therefore looks much larger than it actually is.

I highly recommend making a non-trivial program entirely in assembly at least once. I need to do it occasionally professionally but even when I don’t I usually have a hobby project or two cooking at home.

Becoming as proficient in asm as - say - C or Python is quite the lovely expression of craft. You feel like a wizard (see point 1) while simultaneously learning what’s really going on.

For people with a certain geeky disposition it pays lots of aesthetic, psychological, and professional dividends.

I wonder if some of it is a good old fashioned marketing problem. "Communes" in America seem to be far-left or far-right coded, with little in between (and always - it appears - with a subtle suggestion that you're getting a nice cult along with your little village).

I don't see any reason it has to be that way, though. It's more an accident of history.

I probably would have chosen to have children if I grew up in a culture where "a bunch of people living close together and helping each other out" was the norm. I didn't, though. I grew up in 1980s "Superman and McDonalds and the American Way" suburbs. Having kids in that environment always looked like a nightmare to me, so I didn't.

I also suspect this has an extrovert / introvert component. The super social people around me constructed these little "ephemeral villages" out of nought but thin air, smiles, backyard barbecues, and PTA meetings. Or so it seemed to me. I was always too introverted to do this, though.

I propose we stop using the term "discourse" to describe what amounts to mobs with ever-shifting alliances shouting at each other.

Not really sure what I'd call it instead, but in a perfect world "irrelevant" might be my top candidate.

And yes, I'm aware that this very comment is an example of such "discourse". But at least with sites like Reddit and Hacker News the "comment-ness" of these little thought droppings is part of the UI.

Microblogging sites, though... the thought droppings are the point. I remain unconvinced that this will be seen in the future as a societal advance no matter the underlying positions or values.

Didn’t the ancients define “sophistry” as (in part) exactly the kind of writing one does when influence is more important than truth?

It might be that it’s hard to create sophistry accidentally in one’s writing, but it’s certainly a possible - and common - trick.

The danger is when you convince yourself that what you’re writing isn’t sophistry… because - after all - it looks good.

Maybe we should appropriate the old DOS/x86 memory model names and give them “class-relative” sizes.

“tiny” can run on a microcontroller, “compact” on a Rpi, “small” on a phone, “medium” on a single GPU machine, “large” on AI class workstation hardware, and “huge” on a data center cluster.

I… didn’t say I saw no value in types?

I meant that there was a culture shift around program language research that had given advances in syntax a permanent back seat.

> My counter is that when it comes to language design, semantics—what the types mean—are easily 10 times more important than syntax

Sometimes I long for the days before type theory took over programming language research.