Formerly /u/Zalack on Reddit.e

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  • 34 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Why shouldn’t we, as engineers, be entitled to a small percentage of the profits that are generated by our code? Why are the shareholders entitled to it instead?

    I worked in Hollywood before becoming a programmer, and even as a low level worker, IATSE still got residuals from union shows that went to our healthcare and pension funds. My healthcare was 100% covered by that fund for a top-of-the-line plan, and I got contributions to both a pension AND a 401K that were ON TOP of my base pay rather than deducted from it.

    Lastly, we were paid hourly, which means overtime, but also had a weekly minimum. Mine was 50 hours. So if I was asked to work at all during a week I was entitled to 50 hours of pay unless I chose to take days off myself.

    Unions fucking rock and software engineers work in a field that is making historic profits off of our labor. We deserve a piece of that.


  • I actually think the radio signal is an apt comparison. Let’s say someone was trying to argue that the signal itself was a fundamental force.

    Well then you could make the argument that if you pour a drink into it, the water shorts the electronics and the signal stops playing as the electromagnetic force stops working on the pieces of the radio. This would lead you to believe, through the same logic in my post, that the signal itself is not a fundamental force, but is somehow created through the electromagnetic force interacting with the components, which… It is! The observer might not understand how the signal worked, but they could rule it out as being its own discreet thing.

    In the same way, we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon. Fundamental forces can’t have parts or components, they must be completely discreet.

    Your example is a really really good one.



  • At a sketch:

    • We know that when the brain chemistry is disrupted, our consciousness is disrupted

    • You can test this yourself. Drink some alcohol and your consciousness will be disrupted. Similarly I am on Gabapentin for nerve pain, which works by inhibiting the electrical signals my nerves use to fire, and in turn makes me groggy.

    • While we don’t know exactly how consciousness works, we have a VERY good understanding of chemistry, which is to say, the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism (fundamental forces). Literally millions of repeatable experiments that have validated these forces exist and we understand the way they behave.

    • Drugs like Gabapentin and Alcohol interact with our brain using these forces.

    • If the interaction of these forces being disrupted disrupts our consciousness, it’s reasonable to conclude that our consciousness is built on top of, or is an emergent property of, these forces’ interactions.

    • If our consciousness is made up of these forces, then it cannot be a fundamental force as, by definition, fundamental forces must be the basic building blocks of physics and not derived from other forces.

    There are no real assumptions here. It’s all a line of logical reasoning based on observations you can do yourself.








  • While that’s true, we have to allow for the fact that our own intelligence, at some point, is an encoded model of the world around us. Probably not through something as rigid as precise statistics, but our consciousness is somehow an emergent phenomenon of the chemical reactions in our brains that on their own have no real understanding of the world either.

    I do have to wonder if at some point, consciousness will spontaneously emerge as we make these models bigger and more complex and – maybe more importantly – start layering specialized models on top of each other that handle specific tasks then hand the result back to another model, creating feedback loops. I’m imagining a nueral network that is trained on something extremely abstract like figuring out, from the raw input data, what specialist model would be best suited to process that data, then based on the result, what model would be best suited to refine that data. Something we train to basically be an executive function with a bunch of sub models available to it.

    Could something like that become conscious without realizing it’s “communicating” with us? The program executing the LLM might reflexively process data without any concept that it’s text, but still be emergently complex enough when reflecting its own processes to the point of self awareness. It wouldn’t realize the data represents a link to other conscious beings.

    As a metaphor, you could teach a very smart dog how to respond to certain, basic arithmetic problems. They would get stuff wrong the moment you prompted them to do something out of their training, and they wouldn’t understand they were doing math even when they got it “right”, but they would still be sentient, if not sapient, despite that.

    It’s the opposite side of the philosophical zombie. A philosophical zombie behaves exactly as a human would, but is a surface-level automaton with no inner life.

    But I propose that we also consider the inverse-philosophical zombie, an entity that behaves like an automation, but has an inner life that has not recognized its input data for evidence of an external world outside it’s own bounds. Something that might not even recognize it’s executing a program the same way we aren’t consciously aware of the chemical reactions our brain is executing to make us think.

    I don’t believe current LLMs are anywhere near complex enough to give rise to that sort of thing, but they are also still pretty early in their development and haven’t started to be heavily layered and interconnected the way I think they’ll end up.

    At the very least it makes for a fun Sci-fi premise.


  • We really need to start redistributing how we spend money on health care. Public option, lower executive pay. More non-emergency long term facilities for patients with psych issues or rehabilitation, and chronic illness care. Better pay and shorter shifts for doctors and nurses. Subsidies for medical tech companies to offset end-user price. More government-funded research into medical tech.

    Health care should realistically be our biggest industry akin to a military with the social status of being a soldier and the compensation of being a software developer. We have the wealth and technology to help most people live healthy lives. We need the government to incentivize allocating it correctly.





  • I agree with the other poster that you need to define what you even mean when you say free will. IMO, strict determinism is not incompatible with free will. It only provides the mechanism. I posted this in another thread where this came up:

    The implications of quantum mechanics just reframes what it means to not have free will.

    In classical physics, given the exact same setup you make the exact same choice every time.

    In Quantum mechanics, given the same exact setup, you make the same choice some percentage of the time.

    One is you being an automaton while the other is you being a flipped coin. Neither of those really feel like free will.

    Except.

    We are looking at this through an implied assumption that the brain is some mechanism, separate from “us”, which we are forced to think “through”. That the mechanisms of the brain are somehow distorting or restricting what the underlying self can do.

    But there is no deeper “self”. We are the brain. We are the chemical cascade bouncing around through the neurons. We are the kinetic billiard balls of classical physics and the probability curves of quantum mechanics. It doesn’t matter if the universe is deterministic and we would always have the same response to the same input or if it’s statistical and we just have a baked “likelihood” of that response.

    The way we respond or the biases that inform that likelihood is still us making a choice, because we are that underlying mechanism. Whether it’s deterministic or not it’s just an implementation detail of free will, not a counterargument.