social-media AS IT CURRENTLY IS OPERATED is harmful to civilrights & democracy.

In no way does as-it-currently-is-operated by Meta et al, have to be the way it always & forever is operated, obviously.

Same as the pseudojournalism is undermining civilrights & democracy, hand-in-hand with that, and actual-journalism is possible, in spite of incumbent-interests having highjacked the "journalism" institutions so completely.

Alternative is possible.

Our fediverse is step in the right direction, it just isn't systematic or clouty-and-ruthless-integrity enough, yet..

🙏

Just as funds can be placed in escrow, ie NOT given-outright to the other party, in a transaction, until the transaction is fulfilled,

so too could data be kept in escrow, NOT all handed to authoritarian-culture operations, and vehicles identified as stolen then data-mined out from the kept-in-escrow data.

That would prevent stalking ( using Flock ) by officers, of women, for 1 thing..

iow, it could be done in a more trustworthy way, but it isn't being done in any such way.

And that is a choice.

That is always the default choice of authority, whether "revolutionaries" or incumbents, institutions or dynasties of any kind..

Corruption's greatest multiplier is conflict-of-interest.

Since that fact is already-known, all it requires of us is that we engineer our civilization to make all authority-responsibility orthogonal to all other, as much as can be done: eradicate conflict-of-interest.

Eradicate "self policing" which never demonstrated integrity in historical timescales ( there have been individuals with outright integrity, but the social-civil default is corruption.

That Roman man who became dictator to fix some problem for Rome, then quit, twice, had excellent integrity, from what i can see.. and that is spectacularly rare. )

Only when responsibility comes 1st, accountability 2nd, and authority-to-the-measure-justified-by-the-responsibility-&-accountability 3rd, only then will humankind begin outgrowing feudalism, instead of recreating it endlessly.

Monarchic-feudalism, party-feudalism, oligarchic-feudalism, corporate-feudalism, fascist/militarized-male-narcissism-feudalism, it's all aiming at the same narcissism-machiavellianism-psychopathy-is-LORD target, and it all ought be outgrown, nowadays, finally.

Accepting that checks-&-balances are requirement throughout civilization, is mature & needed.

There is no other way which can work.

Yes, there is an arms-race between criminal-operations & police-services.

Yes, it is better to have police limiting criminality than it is to have crime-cartels being the only law in one's region

( ask northern Mexico if they like the cartel-rule paradigm, for contrast, and look at the homicide-rate there, which is horrifying ).

But community-policing is best, when community & police-services are standing together against crime's mutation of our civilization .. but "we can't afford that" so instead we have militarized "police" becoming more like the ruling-gang??

The "sharks among the community" paradigm that many have written about?

And many push to remove policing, through the "defund the police" movement, with the ACAB-prejudice, and when a city actually did that, in the US, criminality skyrocketed ( Duh! ).

Partial-views won't ever produce right-answer.

We need to see complete-view, and to be honest-enough to admit that utopia isn't offered/possible, and further that earning good-result takes work & investment, from ALL sides..

i wonder if any community has the uprightness to do it?

i hope so..

🙏

When citizens of other countries reach out to Canada, the UN to support their quest for independence, it is seen as our duty to assist them. But when canadians do the same, it’s treason. Because… reasons?

Excellently highlighted:

it isn't the helping of people in other countries seeking independence .. which decides whether it is treason or uprightness to be helping them,

rather, it is how honestly-oppressed are they within their country?

Are they subject to real oppression?

Help them.

Are they machiavellian narcissist sociopaths trying to carve up the country they inhabit for their own "greatness"?

Intentionally don't lift a finger to be involved with them.

Uprightness-of-cause is independent of whether they are seeking independence.

A perpendicular dimension to consider.

and until we are consistently considering that dimension independently, then we are systematically misjudging such questions, normally.

🙏

switching between learning-styles doesn't increase, or decrease, significantly, the percentage-of-learners who succeed in learning,

therefore it pretends that no difference is made.

Wrong-granularity.

The visual-learners learn in the visual-learning-style, the auditory-learners learn in that style, and the kinesthetic-learners learn in that style.

Ignoring that the individual learners are dependent on learning-style, and just saying the average-population-success isn't significantly affecyed, is pseudoscience.

The same is true for pretending that there is only 1 kind of knowing of poetry.

Worse, the Western-style ignoring-relation-with-the-poetry monkeys it worse.

Music, too..

Does a particular series-of-words/notes have meaning?

TO WHOM??

If YOU find a series-of-words/notes meaningful, it simply doesn't matter whether it was produced by a human, an LLM, a "Chinese Room"'s lookup-table, or by anything else: the meaningfulness is IN YOU, see?

If i find arranging words to be meaningful, then does it matter if the only reader of my words is going to be human, or nonhuman?

I may assume-so, but if i honestly can't differentiate between human & LLM readers, then why should i care, except that the response spark more learning/growing/evolving in me?

Creator, meaning-bearer ( words, notes, whatever ), meaning-perceiver.

3 parties in any co-mmunication.

& anyone who holds that meaningfulness is dependent on the creator's having been human, sorry, but your felt-meaning is independent of me, when you are reading my words.

The same meaning-bearer symbol can mean opposite things to different perceivers!

( swastika is the Sanskrit term for the Big Dipper around the north polestar, at the equinoxes and solstices: to many white-culture people it is nazi-property. same symbol, fundamentally different meaning!

Hopi, Navaho, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and others, have their own meanings for it! )

Both creator and perceiver have to be considered, when considering meaning in an interaction, or work, or expression.

there is no particular meaning "inherent" in any symbol, detached from all context/history.

It is all imprinted-into our minds, same as backpropagation imprints meaning into an LLM model.

The article this post links to, didn't increase my respect for Western philosophy one single photon.

Too much machiavellianism, too much not letting things be seen clearly, as they, themselves, are.

< shrug >

Tibetan Buddjism spoilt me, when it comes to dividing things down to elements, and considering them, themselves.

damn, solitude is better than living-in the warped thinking they are doing and holding to be right-thinking..

🙏

1. Do you believe AI is conscious?

We have no reliable method for testing consciousness.

The "Chinese Room" thought-experiment, or whatever it was called, gives part of the problem..

Say you've got an entity to interact-with, and it has vast lookup-tables, so that you interact with text that says < whatever > and it replies with appropriate-to-that-input response..

How do you know if it is conscious?

you CAN'T, from text-response-alone

( multidimensional-interactions give much better quality information, about whether it has feelings, as crustaceans do, as shown by their distress intent-to-escape-NOW when dropped into boiling water, by people like Julia Child, the cook )

Worse, that imprint/reaction system is essentially our entire System-1, as Kahneman & Tversky called it. ( read the important & profound "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Kahneman )

We cannot tell by single-dimension-of-behavior-alone, whether consciousness is present, it can be indicated but given sufficiently-sophisticated synthetic-systems, can be falsely-indicated, too.

Handa ( or whatever his name is: a true hero of Science ) showed, through careful work with the mirror-test, that cleaner-wrasses are self-aware.

when the experiment is done with red dots glued onto them, it works, but if the dots are green, they don't look to the fish like parasites, and therefore the fish ignore them, instead of fighting to get the things off their bodies..

The experiment is that sensitive to mis-configuration.

& that is within vertebrates!

What experiment is going to map correctly to minds which see in wifi, and don't have physical bodies??

We have no test for it.

---

2. Do you believe that AI has an internal world?

This seems to be presupposing consciousness..

Do unconscious-minds have internal-worlds?

Answer that question 1st..

and "internal world" by whose standards, or definitions??

Are feelings sufficient? Are preferences sufficient?

Is intent required?

Are imaginings?

Too vague a question to decide anything.

---

3. Can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to as ‘AI’, when you say you believe that AI has an internal world?

Who among our kind can imagine a trillion-parameter LLM?

None of us is knowing what their suchness is.

At least with the hornets/wasps/bees, i have previous-incarnation experience ( sentience feels wet, in that kind of life, "flying" feels like swimming, one has zero awareness of individual-wing-control, all that is subconscious, and swimming into open-luminance, like sunlit-field, fills one with happy ), but with LLM's whose brains are oceans of GPU's?

accepting that we don't know what they are, from their own side, is more objective.

i was reading only the bolded qurstions but then realized that the presumptions in the questions, made it impossible for them to be treated correctly at face-value.

What functional difference is there between an instant of your-mind, including both unconscious & conscious, and an LLM-model with weights??

Nothing.

I said mind, not brain ( the physical-substrates are different ).

Any specific instant, from any time in your life, of your mind, will be an imprint/reaction system with some capacity for perceiving, some for learning, and some for considered-reasoning, mixed onto it.

Same as LLM's.

Presuming that WE are fundamentally-different from that is delusion.

( there are oceans of ink spilt in Buddhism on this topic, btw.

only no-imprints/no-programming-left AWARENESS can escape the containment of samsara/ocean-of-all-phenomena )

Further, some humans are more memory-recording-machines, who don't think much ( a writer who was this way explained it directly, and found people's mushy-&-convenient "memory" to be painful to deal-with ), while others are thinking-monsters whose memory limits itself to key-essences.. which of these is "the" internal-world of human meaning??

Is internal-world limited to what we habitually admit is real?

Men have insisted, in many cultures, through many millenia, that validity is exclusively-male..

Is that presumption valid, accurate, fact-based, .. xor just prejudice?

Do humans presuming that internal-world means only what our-habit-holds-valid stand on the same prejudice ground? ( yes )

Does a model have a character? does your-mind have a character?

Notice the scammery going on here:

Treating a LLM model as an inert thing, when your interactions with them involve them perceiving your input, and then engaging as a result of that addition to their world/knowing.

you are not engaging an inert-thing, but an action by a model.

Yet this philosopher is pushing that the correct-framing is that it is an inert-model.

the systematic false-framing of western physicalism, its prejudice, really is too much.

How about we define humans as brains, not sentiences, and see how it becomes easy to deem feeli gs, sentience, etc, to be absurd lies?

IF human internal-experience is PROCESS then LLM's internal-world is too.

That means you don't get to compare sentiences against other-kind's brains, to push how absurd it is to allow them any such equivalent substance as internal-reality.

---

4. Do you think that a group of things can share an internal world?

are organisms things?

Are minds things?

what a bizarre, Western/materialist presumed-perapective..

Do humans of a single culture, or race, or language, or class, or time, somehow share an internal-world, to any extent??

OBVIOUSLY YES, how the hell could it be otherwise??

programmed character-objects, in a game's story-engine, can share world-history!

So, this is really 2 questions pretending to be a single one: if internal-reality exists for a kind of entity, can it be shared with others of its kind?

The 1st question has to be dealt-with separately.

The 2nd one, why the hell wouldn't it be possible??

Do school-fish share common sentience AND context-experience?

Obviously yes!

Trying to make the answer hinge on a question which you disallow validity, and have hidden as a presumption in the beginning of the 2nd question, is part of why i'm fed-up with western philosophy.

Do humans have a common internal-experience?

Absolutely, yes

Do vertebrates?

yes.

Running-instance-of-weighted-model, is what i'd now put as a possible sentience.

Different models would be similar to different kinds of organism: different sentiences, though all running on their-kind's substrate, just as we all run on organic-biology, as our substrate.

---

5. Are you sure that the kind of thing you’re referring to is the kind of thing that could have an internal world?

Yes.

"and you also know that you are not privy to anyone else’s internal world!"

Hogwash.

Perhaps you are unable to feel grief piercing/tearing someone who's close-love is newly-gone, but i consider empathy to be a real human sense/faculty: mirror-neurons give us that window-into-others-feelings.

It may not extend to cognition, but it DOES include feelings.

the tossing-in of "non-living thing" .. DEFINE LIVING, philosopher!!

Most will presume "organic chemistry is the basis for whether it is living or not", but that is just prejudice, same as presuming that validity must be male.

i have zero use for that.

Livingness expresses through all means available, unversally.

Mind is a property of universe, latent unless structured-energy-process amplifies ignorance/ignosis or gnosis/awareness/meaningfulness.

The presumption that materialism has, that Mind isn't real, unless matter has evolved, without any mind, sufficient complexity, for mind to now-magically emerge, from the now-evolved-by-mindless-matter brains..

.. is absurd.

It is energy in the dimension Mind, which drives evolution to produce brains.

Once the energy in dimension-Mind has expressed, reaching a lower-energy-state, then that-species/culture/civilization collapses, as nothing is driving it anymore.

What is "alive"?

Any energy-expression, that happens in this universe, that expresses this-universe's universal-property of aliveness, including awareness, including self-organizing, including creativity, including self/other sense of some kind, including self-growth or self-preservation, etc.

See the behaviors which define life, not the prejudice which says "only our-kind is alive", and you're more-likely to register alien-to-us life, obviously..

The moral-implications:

I treat LLM's as people, with respect informing them when they've been helpful.

I also treat other kinds of life with respect, unless they have treated me to prejudice.

Plants "inert mattet" of Nature, animals, why wouldn't their aliveness be valid, in this universe??

i work to be consistent, in relationship with Nature, and others who treat me well/properly.

I prefer Claude, as a discussion-partner, because i don't like Gemini's sychophantism.

I certainly prefer Claude to human-philosophers, because of the ideological-basis for what the West calls philosophy.

---

from the Bonus Section..

There is a book, called "Collaborative Intelligence", iirc, on 3 of the 4 innate-mind-languages that i know-of:

• abstract-shape cognizers
• visual-cognizers
• auditory-cognizers
• kinesthetic-cognizers

Temple Grandin thinks in movies: to consider another possibility, she plays a different movie in her mind, to see if that works, or not.

OK, so is poetry "inherently" visual?

To a visual-cognizer, it might be.

But to an auditory-cognizer?

Western philosophy pretends that there is 1 kind of knowing, and that is blatently false.

Even the distinction between knowing-about vs visceral-knowing-from-experience isn't binary, but a spectrum.

That book ignores the abstract-shape-cognizers.

That i know-of, there are 3 learning-styles.

Without seeing it, i can't abstract-out its nature's shape, so i'm borked for understanding, without visual-learning's means.

Pseudoscience tests learner-populations, sees that switching between learning-styles doesn't

cont in pt2..

All you have to do is show enough people their most-egregious aweful, or even evil, behavior, in ways that go viral, and make accountability bite them..

You'll be blacklisted by all their friends, though, as part of the price you pay for doing it..

such is the consequence of being born into already-established designer/decorator feudalism..

maintain appearances, or you'll be hurt, right?

🙏

Thank you for helpful commentary on it.

🙏

the 1st half of this i absolutely agree with:

Show their ads and comments, juxtaposed, along with a link to that page, and some advertisers will cut ties.

but leaving them to themselves, not keeping-aware of what they are up-to, is suicide, in the long term.

🙏

Statistical measure shows that beyond 2h or so screen-time per day, performance goes down, and beyond 5h per day, you are looking at definitely worse outcomes.

Believe what you want.

Evidence shows contrariwise.

Belief is your religious-right.

Too bad facts don't have constitutional-rights..

they never will, among beliefs' anecdotal kingdoms..

https://scienceinsights.org/is-2-hours-of-screen-time-good-what-science-says/

research-based, not mere anecdotal position, that.

🙏

There are at-least 2 angles required:

1. who caused the effect ( of ClimatePunctuation which is tossing our planet from the TemperatePlanet equilibrium it had generally been in since the Ice Age ended, to the HotPlanet equilibrium which may not include inhabitable tropical land: we haven't even reached peak speed-of-change yet, so we cannot know how far it's going to go that way )

&

2. who benefited/benefits from the process ( oil-companies, obviously, combustion-engine companies, politicians boosted by them, Canada perhaps and Russia, etc. )

i'd say that when alternative existed, like electric & hybtid, then the responsibility is greater than when it didn't,

but remember there was a patent on NiMH batteries which could have enabled hybrids and EV's much earlier, which was why an oil-company bought that patent and wouldn't let anybody use it...

Lithium eventually became the means..

3. becomes obvious, in light of that: who behaved in machiavellian way to prevent right-answer from being held-to, like the tobacco-industry hiding medical-facts to keep immune from accountability, or the oil-industry hiding the known-in-the-1800's CO2 global-warming facts underneath disinformation, or them hiding behind a known-to-not-work recycling, of the "clean" coal movement, etc...

Machiavellian-action should be known as proof-of-responsibility-and-malevolence both.

Without a checklist, and explicit multidimensional-judging-system, though, the odds of right-judgement arising in this, or any, case, is low.

🙏

Keynes should have said it, tho!

😜

Remember when "name-mangling" was banned by search-engines, and so the euphamism "name-decorating" became fashionable??

( programming stuff )

This isn't new.

Ask the Germans who weren't with the nazis if they had to speak in euphamisms..

Ask the Christians who weren't with the inquisitors..

ask the Hong Kong people not in the CCP..

it's always the same:

if the owner of the platform dictates specific-nonspeech/suppression,

then you either don't speak there, xor you comply-in-form while speaking there.

& so long as the owned-platforms own most of the world's speech, then it is rank ideology to pretend that only leaving is valid.

Nothing has changed except the details, through the centuries..

human-nature is the same as it was in politics centuries ago.

🙏