LastThursday

Me neither. It only has to be convincing enough to appear like it has consciousness, which will happen eventually. What is really happening with lifelike robots and AI is that intelligence is being imported into them from their environment. GPT3 for example, doesn't reason for itself as such, it just has a huge database of "intelligence" to draw from. Equally, our bodies are intelligent because evolution has imported this intelligence from the environment (or universe if you like). You could make a self-sustaining robot/AI that seeks out intelligence (aka curiosity) from its environment and sucks that data in to improve its abilities over time. In a way that is what Tesla does with its self-driving cars, sucks in a huge number of different scenarios and information from the roads to make their cars intelligent enough to be autonomous. Still. Intelligence is not consciousness just one aspect of it.

It's a misunderstanding that the under in understand means below. It actually means between, as in the prefix Latin inter. Inter/under see? So more like "standing between" with a connotation of being in the middle of things. Understanding is just a sensation.

And technology is a product of humans. We're just imbuing our technology with our own innate humanness. So definitely in time we can create automatons that are indistinguishable from humans, because we shape technology in our image. It will be a moot point whether they are conscious or not, or think like us under the hood. Only their outward appearance and behaviour will be relevant.

I'm a big fan of the Matrix movies. I think the amalgam of action and existentialism draws me in. Are we living in a simulated reality? The whole idea of a simulated reality is predicated on being able to escape it; that it is actually possible to do or even desirable. Neo finds out it is possible to do despite finding it undesirable at first. If the desire increases enough then it will reach some threshold whereby there is no going back: a choice has to be made. Is it the red pill or the blue pill? I think that, already, if you know that it is possible to escape reality because you've glimpsed it, then the choice is already made and you've swallowed the red pill without knowing it. The other idea behind simulated reality is that it is being simulated by someone totally outside of the simulated reality. They are like the Gods on Mount Olympus whose soap opera has consequences for their creations. But unlike the Greek Gods our simulator overlords are shadowy and cryptic. Hope is not lost however because once we unplug from the simulation we become one of those Gods and we too can play with the simulation itself. It's the difference between being the user of an app and being the programmer of the app. The parallels with Enlightenment should be obvious because we are looking to "wake up" from reality. Once we have glimpsed the ox's tail we have already taken the red pill. One of the biggest drawbacks of the simulation hypothesis is the possibility of infinite regress. What if the simulators themselves are being simulated? How many levels of simulation could you wake up from? The unspoken problem here is the assumption that Thomas Anderson is Neo or knowing if Chuang Tzu was a human or a butterfly. If and when you awake from the simulation, do you in fact get to keep your identity or do you wake up as someone else? This idea is at the heart of reincarnation whereby some essence of you lingers when you wake up into your new body and reality. And this leads on to asking if consciousness itself persists after death or does the whole world (simulation) disappear with you? It may be that when Enlightenment occurs the old you will simply disappear and be thoroughly forgotten. But. Neo can always jack back into the simulation when he likes and he effectively lives in two different worlds. Enlightenment is not a one way street, you could have a foot in both worlds. This is what the quote "Before Enlightenment carry wood chop water. After Enlightenment carry wood chop water." means. The idea of infinite levels of simulation may also mean that there is not just one Enlightenment but many awakenings available to you. This actually seems sensible. There should be nothing special about where you wake up to, except maybe becoming a God comparatively. In fact in Neo's case his "real" reality is quite miserable and tough despite being a kind of God in the Matrix itself. What if there is no simulation? Until you awaken you won't know.

Exactly it. A question of epistemology. @Gesundheit2's third point is on the money. You have to flip things around. None of us have consciousness, we are all manifestations of consciousness. Although thinking that way can seem completely alien to most people.

And how would you know that? What experiment or questions or observations would you need to carry out to know that a robot is having having an "inner subjective experience"?

If you're talking downloading someone's consciousness into a computer to make a copy of them, then no that will never happen. I do think within some of our lifetimes there will be robots and/or computers that are good enough to fool us. You'll be able to talk to them about their inner life and they will be largely autonomous and very fluid and lifelike. You can already see the beginnings of this for example GPT3 and various robots. All that's required is convergence of many different strands of development. Really the question boils down to how you would know for certain that something or someone is conscious.

Because the ego is not God. It's only the ego that wants. And the ego's imagination is not God's imagination. Ego ≠ God.

Change the world or change yourself? I reckon we often feel completely helpless against what the world throws at us. There is a truth to this. Also, we have a desire to mould the world in our image and leave a lasting impression in it. I think the reason for this is that this gives our lives some meaning, otherwise we may as just well be rocks being battered by the ocean waves. Perhaps when we were hunter gatherers not so long ago, directly providing for ourselves and each other and using all our wits just to stay alive and being super connected to the land, all that was enough meaning. Our modern world is not enough and doesn't nourish our souls and often sucks them dry. But whatever the modern world of towns and cities doesn't give us, we still have our inner world as a source of nourishment. We hugely underestimate our potentials and our ability to sculpt ourselves. So why don't we engage with this potential and why are we so scared of changing ourselves? The largest thing holding us back is our attachment to our identities - we are scared of what will happen if we let go of who we are. We spend so much time and effort building ourselves up and positioning ourselves within our social web; we need love and recognition for our identities. Society expects us to do this and we don't know any better. All those millions of years of hunting and gathering and being part of nature has imbued us with super human abilities. We had to be able to remember a million facts and reason deeply about the natural world in order to survive. We had to tell each other stories to inform and entertain each other; we live and die by our stories. We lived in each others' faces, constantly and up close and personal and that was natural. We constantly moved and used and understood our bodies. All this innate ability makes for a potent brew. We don't engage with our potential because we stay ignorant, and we don't know what we don't know. We fear the unknown and rightly so, it threatens our survival or could take away our hard earned lifestyles. We are also keen on not expending any more energy than we need to, every animal is like this. Given the choice of doing something hard and energy intensive or doing nothing, we will often choose doing nothing. In the end doing nothing becomes ingrained. To change ourselves is to let go of our identities and to engage in a long hard slog of mastering our potentials into the large unknown. But the reward is that when we change ourselves, we also change our world.

@Thought Art is there room for intuition on your list?

Change is death too. For things to change new things must happen and old things must stop happening and die.

This is dodgy logic. Who is doing the supposing? Why aren't they included?

There's so much I could say about infinity and concepts and so on. Ok, how about seeing it the other way round: your body is in awareness? Awareness is like a fluid that can take any shape it likes. It can take the shape of sight and the shape of sound or the shape of feeling. You have an awareness of your eyes. You can look in the mirror and see them, or poke them with your finger, or just close your eyes. Your eyes only exist as an awareness of sight (mirror) and touch (finger). So it seems like you need an awareness of sight to know you have eyes! All you have is correlation. In other words every time you blink your vision changes at the same time. But the blinking and the vision are both just in awareness. You can't be certain that one is causing the other. In fact blinking is not causing vision. Hopefully you see the problem.

I have no answers. But I do have three interlocking observations: There's the whole idea of "perceptual bubble" and that there may be other perceptual bubbles out there, but this is pure inference. You could have ended up in a different reality where you are omniscient and experience everything at once, equally every time at once. But this is extrapolation from you current perspective. When you dig down deep, time and space are constructions anyway, so they're not inherent to reality. If neither are true, then what you are experiencing is already everywhere and everywhen: just a very particular form of it. In order to be in a perceptual bubble, someone has to be in it. There is a strong assumption of ownership here. Somehow there is this notion of a kernel that is separate from the perceptual bubble that is able to say "this bubble belongs to me". But that kernel is a construction too so it is not inherent to reality; and the idea of a perceptual bubble can't be sustained because there is no-one home to experience it.

It would seem like you would have to directly experience two direct experiences simultaneously to know the truth. Until that happens it is just a concept. In any case, if you were to experience someone else's direct experience, whose direct experience would it become? Yours or theirs or both?

If you experienced someone else's mind, would it be their mind or your mind or both?

Matrix, maternal and matter have the same word origins: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/matrix#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/matter#English

Ask yourself if you need eyes to see. How do you see in dreams when you eyes are closed in a darkened room?

I found this paragraph tickled my philosophical bone. The core of the problem that you point out is really the question about what existence actually is. Is existence what Leo calls "direct experience" and nothing more than that? Or is existence an imagined continuity whereby the world carries on with or without your observation of it? Can both be possibly true at the same time? Direct experience is exactly what it says on the tin. Only things which are directly experienced can be said to be absolutely true, everything else is just good guesswork. So why is it then that when you directly re-experience that football hurtling towards you, it is in the place you expect it to be? Why is the world is consistent and hangs together following certain trajectories and laws? Unity. Everything is entangled with everything else. Above all the world seeks to be as highly correlated with itself as possible. The world in one sense is perfection, which means that there are no glitches or gaps, it's like the water in a river filling all the available space. When you stop observing, the whole of existence conspires to conserve the existence of what you just observed, so that it doesn't just disappear into nothingness. It's like a kind of hologram, everything is encoded everywhere into the surface of the glass plate of idealism. The sofa you're sitting is on is spread throughout the whole of existence: existence has a memory of its own. The existence of the sofa is intertwined with the existence of everything else, this is what creates persistence and consistency. That's because everything is a unity and there are no boundaries separating one thing from anything else. Peace and love ?

I thought I would revisit the subject of tension in the body. This interests me because I think a lot of the anxiety and uneasiness I feel in my life are directly connected with sensations in my body. If I can crack the nut of releasing bodily tension then I think that will make for a more relaxed and fulfilled life. There's two sides I want to explore: why do I have tension and how do I get rid of it? The tension I do have is mostly from the shoulders and above, specifically the shoulders, neck and jaw area. This pattern of tension has certainly changed over time. In my teenage years I remember distinctly having a lot of tension around my stomach. This is interesting because I think that stomach tension came very much as a response to low level bullying at school: it was a defence mechanism, fight or flight. Growing up in the neighbourhood that I did, I was exposed to potential aggression from a young age from other kids. I suspect my body learned to be constantly on guard, which created the tension in the first place. So, there is a strong connection between the anxiety I've felt most of my life and the learned tension in my body. Remove the tension, remove the anxiety; well that's my theory. It is totally possible to have anxiety without any bodily tension per se. For example anxiety for me manifests as sort of butterflies around my chest area - probably the effects of adrenaline - it's definitely not positive! But it is almost always accompanied by tension around the shoulders and jaw. I also think that the tension throughout the day contributes to fatigue and regular headaches, although I'm very good at sleeping to counteract it (!). My mother was also quite an anxious person around people (because of her deafness and inability to speak English), and that's rubbed off on to me from a young age. It has taken me a huge amount of time and experience to unlearn most of that anxious behaviour around people, and it's still not fully conquered. I've been using self-hypnotism as a way to truly and completely relax my body. It has also allowed me to become a lot more aware of exactly where the tension sits in my body; and I've built up that awareness throughout the day to continually relieve the tension. But it's no solution as yet, I'm really hoping that sheer determination and practise will release the tension permanently. I have noticed an improvement since I started the hypnotism, but it's slow going. I could go conventional and try to get to the root causes of the tension (which I touched on above), but I feel that's a rats nest of entangled memories and emotions that I have no way to untangle by myself. And to go through therapy and have to relive all that negativity I see as utterly pointless. --- On a tangentially related subject I have been dabbling in dream control. I think a lot of my anxiety spills over into my dreams in the form of unpleasant or frustrating situations I dream about. Some examples are: stairs that stop at walls, my feet being on fire, flooded toilet areas, being naked in public, not being able to find clothing, aloof dream characters, light switches not working and on and on. I have been having words with my subconscious right before sleep so that I don't have so much of this unpleasantness. I specifically talk to that part of my subconscious that deals with dreams. Over time I've built up the ability to communicate with my subconscious via bodily signals: I ask it a question and it responds yes/no/maybe often by bodily "jerks" maybe in the fingers or foot or whatever. How I built up that ability is interesting and I'll post about it some time. It seems to be working (to my surprise). My dreams have been less frustrating and characters in my dreams have been far more approachable and willing to interact with me. But there's still some work to do there. I do think that dreams are partly an emotional outlet for things that don't get resolved whilst awake. But I also think that a lot of the worries and concerns of waking life get encoded into emotions and situations in dreams - if not directly translated. I'm hitting the tension and anxiety from all angles and I hope that will resolve it once and for all.

It's Saturday and I have an idle hour or two before going up to London. I'm lifting a friend up to London to meet another friend to do some night photography. I'm sure I could have worded that better, anwyay. We'll take in the sights of central London starting with the Millenium Bridge with St Paul's cathedral in the background. Then we'll probably go Tower Bridge at some point on our meander. I'm not looking forward to freezing my bits off though, but the reward of restaurant food at the end will make up for it. Here's a shot of the cathedral I took a few months ago from the window of a restaurant. --- I've also been working on writing a book. I'm sort of cheating because I've just dumped this journal into Word. I have 220 pages and 125,000 words. Sheesh! I think it might actually take me the rest of the year to organise all that to make it coherent, rewrite parts, add parts and on and on. It was never my intention to use this journal in that way, but hey c'est la vie. As an aide to encourage myself to publish the book at the end of it, I investigated how much it would cost to have a three or four actual books professionally done. Yikes! Nearly £2000 just for proofreading and grammar alone. The printing itself was more like £400. Anyway, I'll cross that bridge when and if I come to it. The idea of having my book in a bookstore fills me with joy and pride. --- Other than that I've been playing a huge amount of chess. I've played over 1000 games of blitz in the last few months (too much time on my hands). Annoyingly I know I've improved immensely, and yet my rating has yo-yoed like Bitcoin. What happens is that the playing style of some opponents really screws me up and I lose to lower rated players. But what I have on my side is speed and the ability to pluck off weak pieces. But my checkmating skills (and recognising impending checkmate) is abysmal - the only way to solve that is to do lots of puzzles. Anyway, I feel myself improving slowly slowly and I like that feeling. Ciao!

@MovForward some steps you can try when thinking about responding (especially in writing): Do I genuinely care enough to respond? (if not then don't respond) Does responding add something new and positive? (if not then don't respond) Am I very clear about what I want to say? (if not then don't respond until you are clear) Keep the response short enough get your point over. Keep conversation going by asking open questions, prompting for answers, showing interest and so on. If you're being accused, then challenge the accuser's reasoning against you. (if you're feeling too emotional then cool down before responding, or sleep on it). I've found that most times if you're being accused the other person is using faulty logic.

@spinderella your situation is interesting because your goal to make profit seems clear cut. Also, you have actively chosen to put yourself into the position you're in by purchasing the property. So it comes down to a matter of when and not if you're going to make a profit. I think that is what is causing the ball of anxiety, a certain amount of impatience perhaps and that reality doesn't match up with what's in your head (at the moment). When you're in the business of making money you definitely have to take the rough with the smooth and also be strategic. I would be asking myself right now, what else can I do to make my goal come true? Up the rent? Sell off some of the units? Increase your advertising for new tenants? Live in one of the units yourself temporarily to cut costs? Move friends in etc. I would also choose a point upfront at which you can no longer sustain further losses and pull the plug at that point if necessary. -- In terms of pattern of behaviour, I've had friends who had strong goal-oriented mindsets and they were succesful on the whole (I'm envious). But there's a fine line between being impulsive and being goal oriented. I suspect you're not so impulsive, but you do like to shape your environment to be your way and you want it now. It's possible to be more flexible in how you respond to your desires, and sometimes just to "wait it out" to see if things change or if a better goal comes along or be strategic and research before committing to something new.

People will believe anything

@mememe no doubt. Although, correlation is not causation. I can open up my radio and poke around and affect what comes out of the loudspeaker, but no-one believes that the radio stations are stored in the radio.