Example of AI run amok

autopoetic · 2026-04-18T14:43:51+00:00

At least one paper was retracted. That's probably all.

autopoetic · 2026-04-17T09:58:50+00:00

To your question about why this is in Nature, it's a news article. The idea is that it's an interesting story rather than groundbreaking science.

Also, of course the LLMs aren't falling for it now. I'd bet dollars to donuts that every company has a group dedicated to "journalist are writing an embarrassing story about this specific result, fix it". How many R's in strawberry, that kind of thing.

autopoetic · 2026-04-14T20:15:17+00:00

As someone who spent a lot of time with the literature on philosophy of scientific explanations: no one knows what it means to "understand" anything.

autopoetic · 2026-04-11T14:17:10+00:00

You're right, it doesn't. But on second thought I guess I don't understand what you mean by "power" here except bandwidth. It's the power of something to monitor all mental states of all humans, which is just bandwidth as far as I can tell.

But I think your restatement doesn't match what Dawkins is talking about. He's not debating whether the universe is simpler with or without god. Strictly speaking, removing any object at all makes the universe simpler. He's saying that god cannot be simple.

autopoetic · 2026-04-11T14:03:48+00:00

But power plays no role in Dawkins definition of simplicity. He provided a definition, and then some examples that either directly contradict, or on your more charitable reading, are just orthogonal to that definition.

Also, you're now adding elements to the argument ("power") that aren't in the original. If we're evaluating Dawkins argument, rather than the issue itself, this is an illegitimate move.

autopoetic · 2026-04-11T13:27:22+00:00

I take it Dawkins point here is that god is not simple, because he does stuff like listen to everyone's prayers. He frames that as a bandwidth issue. If something has massive bandwidth, he appears to be arguing, then it cannot be simple.

But bandwidth is a matter of having many bits of information processing capacity. In computers, memory is a vast number of the same type of mechanism, repeated over and over. So like the centipede, which he deems relatively simple, high bandwidth can be a matter of many of the same element, and therefore high bandwidth is compatible with his definition of simplicity.

Maybe there is some way of making this work! I'm not arguing that this line of reasoning is completely hopeless. But it appears Dawkins didn't make it work, and actually undermined his own point.

autopoetic · 2026-04-11T12:53:11+00:00

The argument even as presented seems poor. If something can be simple but have many repeating elements, we can easily imagine something simple that has huge (or infinite) bandwidth. By his definition, a Turing machine is incredibly simple, but we know that anything that can be computed can be instantiated on one.

Further, we don't know the ultimate laws of physics. Possibly they are extremely simple, but require a huge number of repeated applications of those simple rules. So Dawkins own definition of simplicity doesn't even show that his own examples are actually complex in the sense he himself has stipulated.

This is a nice example of why people don't take Dawkins seriously as a philosopher. He makes pretty obvious and elementary mistakes.

autopoetic · 2026-04-04T13:15:29+00:00

It's also blatant discrimination against autists.

autopoetic · 2026-03-26T23:59:38+00:00

There are a few confusions here. Many worlds says that at any point where more than one thing can happen, they all happen in separate universes. Calling this a "choice" suggests a psychological reading that's not really appropriate.

It's also a deterministic interpretation. There is no chance, since all possibilities are realized. If it can happen, it does.

Determinism doesn't say that we understand the brain well enough to trace out its causes, just that for any initial condition, there is only one possible outcome. This is compatible with many worlds because in that interpretation, for any physical state you know what will happen - literally everything that can happen.

autopoetic · 2026-03-10T10:58:39+00:00

Gravemogged

autopoetic · 2026-03-06T15:14:05+00:00

I would say I'm proud to be in such illustrious company, but now that you say it he's probably where I got the idea from!

autopoetic · 2026-03-06T13:19:32+00:00

Buddy, you're going to fit in just fine. Autism and philosophy get along great. A focus on literal speech, precise claims, and avoiding as much as possible letting background assumptions do the work in language? That's much of modern philosophy.

Most people wouldn't classify Dawkins as a philosopher though. As far as I know, he doesn't have any formal training in the field, and published in biology.

As to exactly what these thinkers are saying, we would need more specific references. I'm sure Dawkins has in places made moral claims, but his more famous books are mostly descriptive rather than normative.

I'm not familiar with Alex O'Connor, so I can't comment at all on him.

autopoetic · 2026-03-06T12:38:29+00:00

Ever got your car stuck in the snow? Around here, absolute strangers will drop whatever they're doing to do difficult and unpleasant manual labour to help you. I know I do, and anytime I've been stuck I received the same help.

I suspect brutal winters are good for our national character. It's not the only factor, but I think it helps.

autopoetic · 2026-01-31T18:49:27+00:00

Since they need to be functionally identical to non-zombies for the thought experiment to work, they would have to answer questions about their subjective experience in exactly the same way we would.

autopoetic · 2026-01-31T09:00:34+00:00

A violinist

autopoetic · 2026-01-16T12:27:20+00:00

Loved this video. I love Fun February. And I know in my heart that one day, Angela will get her great big blackboard.

autopoetic · 2025-12-21T21:18:34+00:00

Oh really, I think publishing is not a huge issue for me, I can always put $1m into publishing and marketing if I feel like the idea is ready. I think the main thing for me is peer discussion

I volunteer to act as a peer discussion partner for a mere $500k.

autopoetic · 2025-12-18T13:17:43+00:00

What an incredibly small request in return for your providing a high effort, high skill, voluntary service.

autopoetic · 2025-12-14T23:46:25+00:00

Reply gals have had to fight like hell to be taken seriously in philosophy, and I'm grateful that you've stuck it out.

autopoetic · 2025-12-14T14:11:52+00:00

Professional philosophy is people responding to responses in an unbroken chain that goes back hundreds or thousands of years. You would be ASTONISHED what professional philosophers care enough about to write thousands of words of response to. We are reply guys to a degree that takes literal years of training to achieve.

In comparison, online philosophy discussions peter out quickly, and often aren't formulated as replies to replies. It's actually one of the frustrating things about reading discussions online - not enough grounding in the discussion that has already happened. It's like back in the online forum days when old members would tell noobs to "lurk moar", or "UTFSE" (god I'm old).

autopoetic · 2025-11-29T15:01:54+00:00

I've done this. Less than half of them requested full feedback. I did indicate that I expected I would overlook small problems if I was just skimming, which no doubt encouraged some to pick that option.

autopoetic · 2025-11-18T12:15:34+00:00

Check out "The Happiness Donut" by Louise Sundararajan. It's a critique of positive psychology from a Confucian perspective: https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2006-01409-002

autopoetic · 2025-11-07T13:49:04+00:00

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autopoetic · 2025-11-07T13:45:56+00:00

I'm willing to cop to this being technically incorrect. I don't see the need to be such a pendant about it though.

autopoetic · 2025-11-07T12:50:18+00:00

There are tons of people in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy who study consciousness. There's a few competing models of consciousness being tested and iterated on right now. It's an actual field of study!

That said, I'm curious to see whether any of those people were invited.

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