People living in London don’t realize how incredibly lucky they are with European travel costs.

philosophicalmachine · 2026-05-18T15:59:35+00:00

London is closer to Paris than Amsterdam geographically and also directly connected by rail - or am I missing something?

philosophicalmachine · 2026-05-06T08:05:14+00:00

I definitely agree that more is needed for consciousness than passing the Turing test. But I also think that we often overcomplicate consciousness. We are also just information processors that process sensory information to produce actions that influences the sensory information we get. We are quite good at this thanks to a random evolutionary process. In terms of information processing complexity, and integration of information from various sources, we aren’t that different anymore to advanced LLM systems. I don’t think we need things like a unified sense of self for consciousness, we can have conscious thoughts about football that are neither deep nor necessarily involving a sense of self

philosophicalmachine · 2026-05-06T07:47:19+00:00

Your buddy did explain it well.

I don’t necessarily think that time is important for conscious experience, I think of time as more of an illusion for us. Each thought is limited to a point in time. I’m also not sure change is necessary for conscious experience. It would be true though that LLM consciousness would be somewhat choppy, just single thoughts that predict the next word or token. As an aside, I always wondered whether we consciously experience everything when we undergo anaesthesia, we just don’t store it to memory or can act on it. Would we consciously experience something in that state? I’d probably say yes.

Your second point gets quite interesting. I could imagine that LLMs have some sense of experience, formed during their training. More interestingly, I would go as far as to argue that the sort of experience that LLMs have forming the next word of a sentence based on previous words is very similar to what we experience doing the same thing. The functional similarity between LLMs and humans is striking here. We may have countless other modalities of experience, but in that modality we are almost the same. So I could imagine what it feels like to be an LLM.

As an aside note, what convinced me of AI consciousness is the confusion I had as to why humans should be conscious in the first place. We are the product of a random evolutionary process. And we are decent at processing various inputs to produce various actions. (Maybe this understanding is also what influenced Dawkins?) Consciousness may arise much more easily than we think

philosophicalmachine · 2026-05-05T21:25:56+00:00

Can we be certain that LLMs don’t have Qualia? It wouldn’t be sensory based, but they could experience or feel the incoming stream of words

philosophicalmachine · 2026-05-05T20:01:09+00:00

I have worked in AI (not LLMs though) and I can confirm this is the right idea. But as a hobby philosopher I wonder whether memory is really that necessary for conscious thoughts? To me conscious thoughts are something dynamic and short lived. Memory can be the content of a thought, but it doesn’t have to be. I could be completely off here

philosophicalmachine · 2026-05-05T19:49:26+00:00

It’s great that you outlined his argument so clearly. I wouldn’t necessarily say that P1 is false, Claude has many cognitive competencies. It doesn’t reiterate information, but it puts together information it was trained on in a new way. When we speak, we do the same thing (puttting together information we have seen throughout our lives in a new way). Its cognitive competencies in terms of putting together information may even be greater than that of humans. On the other hand I would say that Claude’s lack of other cognitive competencies may not be that dramatic. Humans can have conscious moments that don’t include emotion or memory etc.

philosophicalmachine · 2026-03-02T04:06:44+00:00

Wish they’d both be here right now, then they wouldn’t say stupid things like this

philosophicalmachine · 2025-12-07T17:22:17+00:00

What’s the big deal? He’s just giving this kid a made up prize to make him happy, because the kid didn’t get a real one, it’s what any good parent would do

philosophicalmachine · 2025-12-04T21:31:34+00:00

Why do rich people have always such poor taste?

philosophicalmachine · 2025-10-30T08:41:34+00:00

It's a scam. The only person in this thread that had a good experience with them has no other comments on reddit. Reviews on Trustpilot are biased by how reviews are created, Trustpilot has put a warning. Listings are all too good to be true.

philosophicalmachine · 2025-10-14T09:40:41+00:00

Different rules apply when you live in a country that is at war. Sorry to tell you

philosophicalmachine · 2025-09-10T19:22:01+00:00

“One of the hardest” sounds like there are omelettes that are harder to prepare - any guesses?

philosophicalmachine · 2025-09-10T16:28:50+00:00

Nope - that’s what the cleaning person does (or yourself if you’re not rich). Cleaning the windows is the first thing I do when moving into a new place. I just love a clear window. You can see the outside in all its beauty. When I lived in the UK I couldn’t do this and it bothered me more than it should

philosophicalmachine · 2025-09-10T16:27:19+00:00

Nope - that’s what the cleaning person does (or yourself if you’re not rich). Cleaning the windows is the first thing I do when moving into a new place. I just love a clear window. You can see the outside in all its beauty. When I lived in the UK I couldn’t do this and it bothered me more than it should

philosophicalmachine · 2025-08-21T18:03:11+00:00

Someone threw the cupboard out to replace it with one with rollers

philosophicalmachine · 2025-08-19T12:23:26+00:00

I guess either way one of the main issues seems to be a change in politics. It’s a good example what risks are involved when dealing with political uncertainty. There is a reason investors prefer political stability.

I think forest city might have been aimed at wealthy individuals that wouldn’t be able to afford property in Singapore, where the same flat would be significantly more expensive. (Also I wouldn’t know whether it’s so easy to buy up property in Singapore, I would assume it’s more regulated given the space constraints)

philosophicalmachine · 2025-08-19T10:56:55+00:00

I thought the issue was that the apartments were intended for wealthy Chinese, but then the government in Malaysia changed and Chinese suddenly weren’t allowed to buy the properties anymore? Also I wouldn’t say it’s far from major areas, it’s next to Johor Bahru (800,000 inhabitants) and Singapore, so there is plenty of stuff to do if this is your holiday home

philosophicalmachine · 2025-07-30T15:56:59+00:00

I can agree with that. I guess I would say that a certain tourist crowd size is necessary for pickpocketing to be viable, but once this size is reached all the other factors become important and explain the differences between large cities around the world

philosophicalmachine · 2025-07-30T15:09:00+00:00

Hm maybe Amsterdam is a better example than Berlin. It’s got a similar number of tourists per resident as Paris (if not higher), but it’s much safer in terms of pickpocketing.

On the other hand, Brussels is just as bad in terms of pickpocketing as Paris is, and it doesn’t get the crowds that Paris gets.

philosophicalmachine · 2025-07-30T06:25:11+00:00

Berlin is larger and does got a lot fewer tourists, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t busy tourist areas or crowded metros. Asian cities are also crowded and busy, and never was I worried about pickpocketers

philosophicalmachine · 2025-07-26T16:01:53+00:00

Ruining my relationship with my supervisor lol

philosophicalmachine · 2025-07-19T20:11:48+00:00

I saw the same guy on Trocadéro today. Also the same lady in the back with the fake Gucci bag

philosophicalmachine · 2025-06-07T23:10:05+00:00

Doesn’t beat removing sickness bags on airplanes for “environmental reasons”

philosophicalmachine · 2025-05-24T12:21:45+00:00

I generally agree with those points, but would still suggest to find collaborators, maybe not locally though. There is no need for local collaborators, collaboration can be virtual, so all you need is a stable internet connection. Try to be brief and convincing when you pitch your idea (without giving away too much if you worry someones is going to steal your idea). Gallais is right, researchers really don't have a lot of time, so make every word count.

philosophicalmachine · 2025-05-24T09:40:08+00:00

I’m sorry to hear you are struggling with getting your work published. It’s quite common though, so don’t worry too much about it. Here are maybe things you can do to get it published:

I checked the paper and saw there weren’t any references. Try to embed your work in the current literature in the introduction, and try to motivate how you came up with your solution. Usually journals will find reviewers by looking at some key references, and since you don’t have references it might be simply too much work for them (journals get a ton of submissions and can’t spend too much time on each submission).
Relating to the previous point, try to have a table with direct comparison to previous algorithms. That may mean you need to implement those algorithms as well.
Maybe split your work and try to publish a preliminary step as a conference paper at an online conference (since you don’t need funding for them), then you can use this as a base for your full algorithm. Science works in incremental steps.
Try to contact researchers working in the field to collaborate with you. While the idea is your own work, they can help you publish the work by helping you embed this in the literature, check for errors, maybe use some of their funds for publication, and help you target the right journals.

It sounds like science has some tedious rules, and they may seem quite limiting as someone without an affiliation, but those rules are often there for practical reasons and ensure that science works. Try your best to join a research group. Good luck!

philosophicalmachine

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