Scholar

Lmao, you cheeky hypocrite. The only reason you made actualize.org is because you had that business exploit that generated tons of money and had luck on youtube. You basically are the equivalent of an OnlyFans whore. Most people who made money the way you did would be developmentally stunted by it more so than OnlyFans models are by their OnlyFans modelling. Getting popular on youtube is absolutely toxic for your development, and so is making easy money through some google-exploit.

The idea that OnlyFans is an actual problem for society is ludicrious. Only a tiny % of models on OnlyFans make a lot of money from it, even being able to earning a living is extremely rare. Attractive women will always have opportunities that offer them an easier lifepath. You could say instagram modelling is even worse because there is even less stigma surrounding it. There is likely far more women who do non-explicit work that is based on their beauty than there are OnlyFans models who make enough money to make a living. Attractive women can just get into a relationship with a rich guy and get taken care of, which is precisely what a lot of women do. Intelligent women also often use sex-work as a way to fund their education, you even saw that in the porn industry. If you do Only-Fans, you have a lot of free time, so you can do whatever you want with that freetime. The positives far outweigh the negatives here. Less stigma for women who do this work (stigma is ethically untenable, and the naive-utilitarian calculus that you guys make here won't change that), less exploitation and more agency. You pretend like the alternative to OnlyFans for these women is to do some high consciousness work, but that's a fairy tale. The alternative is to do some other useless, barely socially benefitial job that they are forced to do because otherwise they will be homeless. And we don't need more people in academia who do it for financial reasons. Economic incentives like this corrupt academia. We need high consciousness individuals do to high consciousness work because they are high consciousness, not because survival pressures them to get a degree in whatever the fuck the market currently values. There is more than enough people to do that kind of work. Sure, there are inherent negatives to being attractive in terms of development. But the idea that we have to go cavemen logic and stigmatize people for something people clearly want and harms nobody directly is just silly. You can create positive incentives and educate people around these issues without the negative externalities of stigma. Sure, getting easy money for your looks is developmentally harmful, but it's not remotely as harmful as women who are stigmatized for sex-work. It's not even the same universe of harm, and of course some women benefit greatly from doing sex work, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. A woman who would have had to prostitute herself to random dudes and possibly get murdered can now make an OnlyFans and feed her children that way. You guys are inhuman for some of the solutions you suggest for problems that are completely 1st world trivialities. Developmental problems lol, as if those don't occur in most jobs. Capitalism fucks peoples minds, at least OnlyFans models can remove themselves from the pressures of survival and then focus on their development directly. Other people do 9/5 jobs their whole life and are equally as stuck developmentally, become resentful, dysfunctional, have a worse quality of life. Most jobs in the economy destroy your soul. The idea that OnlyFans is especially harmful is just part of the stigma of sex work. People uniquely analyse things like OnlyFans for all it's dangers and negative impacts on society because people already have a preconception of how sex-work is inherently corrupt. Yet, nobody bats an eye at how a majority manual labour jobs occur in the most toxic social environments imaginable. If I did OnlyFans and made a ton of money, I could make actualized.org 2.0 easily. In fact, the whole reason why Leo was able to make actualized.org was because he found a way to make tons of easy money. Sure, most people will not do anything conscious with their OnlyFans money, but the same applies to any other job. Most people won't do anything conscious with their PHDs, with their youtube money, with their modelling career. You won't increase consciousness by just forcing people into the regular jobmarket, if that worked, society wouldn't be as dysfunctional as it is.

lol

That's a whole can of worms. You shouldn't look at it as "who are reputable sources?". I could be full of shit, so you just trusting what I say just reinforces the epistemic issue here. Go and actually research this question, even with something like Gemini. How do you know a source is reputable? How do you build a good picture of history and geopolitics that isn't filled with fantasies or half-truths? In general, you don't want to start out listening to controversial sources because you have nothing to compare them to. How would you know if what they say is true or just sounds great? You want highly reputable, academically supported sources because at least there, experts applied rigour to verify or challenge whatever is being said. With controversial sources, you always want to check counter arguments. Just google debunkings, critics and so forth. If in the end you can't tell what is true and what isn't, well then you have no reason to adopt any position. You continue to refine your knowledge. You have to improve the way you obtain, process and filter information.

Right but in practice this is just disinformation. You can just listen to reputable sources that will have insightful ideas with 98% less bullshit. The most dangerous liars are those who mix 90% of truth with 10% of bullshit. If you can discern the bullshit from the non-bullshit, you probably don't have to listen to anything he has to say anyways. The danger is that people who are less epistemically careful get swept up mostly by the bullshit. People don't listen to him for the insightful ideas, they listen to him because of his oversimplified, emotional narratives that confirm their biases.

If you take this guy seriously and can't spot him to be a charlatan within 30 minutes of his speeches, you really need to reconsider your education on history, politics and philosophy. The guy is not a professor nor a historian, he is a high school teacher. Most of his prediction are laughably off. It's hard to believe that he is anything but an intentional disinformation agent, spreading narratives that undermine the interests of the west and encourage more internal conflict. Though the guy is so unbelievably stupid, I wouldn't be suprised if it's just pure ignorance.

The problem is the perfect enforcement of human will. Transsexuality is an example that would have applied 20 years ago, the things that are marginalized today are obviously outside of the consciousness of the mainstream. Humans did try to suppress LGBTQ speech in the past, the whole point is that they failed to do so because human beings are imperfect, a system of AIs the way you propose would be able to have oversight over every single piece of content that is posted. People only care about transsexuals today because these marginalized perspectives were pushed forward despited cultural censorship and backlash, because there was no perfect speech moderation back then. People wouldn't flee to another platform, people would actively want the platform to enforce that type of speech, like 20 years ago, a majority would have limited trans-rights speech if they had their way. One problem is that, of course, society could become more conservative as time goes on, or various incentives could push platforms to enforce certain marginalizes speech that most people simply give no shit about. If you want an example that is relevant today in parallel to trans-rights, just take consanguinamory rights as an example. Most people think advocating for such things is dangerous, obscene, perverse, enabling abuse and so forth. Various social media platforms will limit visibility even if you just mention a certain keyword related to the topic. This makes rights advocacy extremely difficult in the environment we already exist in, an AI that would be tasked with "preventing dangerous speech", could easily make it impossible to ever talk about the topic in an organized manner that has any impact on society. And the vast majority of people, including progressives, wouldn't mind this at all, because they all share the same perspective that enabling such things is dangerous and wrong. Nobody will leave a platform because "incest rights" discussions are banned from it, to them it is no different from banning speech that advocates in favor of rape. But this could easily spill over to other things that are illegal, like drugs usage. There would be no clever ways to avoid the system with AI that was genuinely intelligent and could read subtext. Drug usage is a less controversial topic today, so most people would be bothered if it was being targetted, but it just tells you how relative everything is to the time we live in. There are various other controversial topics that are similarly controversial, that are increasingly difficult to be discussed even with human moderators around. In the following years, we will see an increasing danger from allowing unfiltered free speech, which will make people more open to the idea of censoring and regulating some type of speech. If the regulatory mechanisms are too efficient once that happens, it might very well resemble the "no crime world" which we all agree would be terrifying. You think you want perfect law enforcement, but you actually do not. A world in which every law was perfectly enforced would be a terrifying world, and the same applies to speech.

This doesn't matter, society would agree with the agent, that's the whole danger. Society is ignorant, if society could have banned transsexuality or psychedelics from becoming a popular topic, they would have of course done so. The issue is that we WOULD want to marginalizes views, that's exactly what people want. We already marginalize certain views with algorhythms and human moderation. Again, just analogize it to law enforcement: If we had perfect enforcement of drug laws, nobody here would be talking about psychedelics. You are basically asking for superhuman cops that can catch every crime at it's inception. The good thing about humans is that they are flawed, that they allow for enough wiggle room for marginalized perspectives to eventually find expression in society. With superhuman AI, or just cheap human-like AI on mass scale, you can forget about that in the future.

You have to be careful, when the immune system of a system is too "perfect" it can lead to a cessation of progress. There are two important components here: Stability and degrees of freedom. When collectives evolve, it is basically a balance between these two things. We can use the law as an example: If we had a way to enforce the law perfectly, and reduce all crime completely such that at the very inception of a crime it is detected and stopped, you would get a society that might get frozen in that state of development. The reason for this is because any law at any given time is a reflection of the state of development of society at that particular point in time. If you had a law against drugs and mind-altering substances, nobody in that society would ever get to experience psychedelics if the law-enforcement was perfect. it is obvious when the laws are clearly and obviously wrong from our point of view, but the issue is society never knows what exactly it's blindspots are. The danger of an AI based moderation system is therefore that it is overly good at achieving it's goals. For example, you could have an AI system that will not merely work by keywords, but by genuinely analysing the content of any post and deriving the meaning, and then making a decision if that content should be banned, hidden from the algorhythm etc on the basis of whatever set of rules the platform established. If you do this, you might render it impossible for marginalized forms of speech, that might be considered controversial and dangerous today, to actually find any exposure in this new world. Here would be various examples for speech that might be completely erased with such a system today: - Speech about drugs/psychedelics considered to be dangerous, and positive advocacy for such drugs. - Speech that relates to controversial moral discussions - Speech that relates to sexual minorities demonized by a society - Speech that relates to spiritual truths too radical/threatening for people - Speech that has negative economic impacts on the platform it is published In a human collective, you basically want to leave some wiggle room for criminality so that forms of criminality that are actually justified can take place. Perfect enforcement would undermine the dynamics that are necessary for social evolution. I think it is easy to underestimate just how important this wiggle room is. Giving humans ultimate power is so dangerous because human beings are ignorant and immature, which will be reflected in how they will wield this power.

I think this is an unnecessary duality. Human beings are limited, and we can complete each others limitations in many cases. If you have a genuine concern that a friend is falling into a certain trap, of course it can be perfectly acceptable to voice that concern as long as it is in a respectful manner. There is nothing lost there, unless the receiving end is so immature merely bringing up ones own perspective hurts them in some way, but that shouldn't be the case with Leo. To have a concern and just force yourself to dogmatically accept the other person because one is convinced that's the most loving thing to do, always, doesn't seem healthy, for yourself or the relationship. There should always be transparency and communication when possible. I recommend to watch out for rule-based thinking, like proclaiming to yourself that "Behaving in X way is more loving", because that type of thinking tends to be mechanical. Relying on such rules already undermines your own consciousness, focusing on abstractions rather than what is. In this case, Carl gave you specific and contextual reasons for why he did what he did, and you responded with a generalization that is specifically removed from context and seems to be a rule derived from past experiences you made.

I'm not a utilitarian, I already explained why I think it is sociopathic. See my first post in the thread.

Trust me, pedophiles will make up reasons for why it is necessary for the existence of human civilization like you are doing for animal slavery. The same was and is done for human slavery, strict gender roles, religion, war. You can go and ask a fundamentalist religious lunatic why we have to stone the gays, and he will give you reasons for why the collapse of civilization stands at the cessation of that behavior, in fact, he will point at the corruption of western civilization and proclaim that it's fall can be directly linked to the acceptance of the gays. You are just proving that you are like any other bigot that lived before you. You look for excuses for why clearly immoral behavior must continue, instead of focusing your mind on how it is possible to overcome it. Most of the excuses are delusional, self-serving lies so that you can distinguish yourself from pedophiles who rape children. And any valid excuses are at best things that a mind as intelligent as yours could easily overcome if you used your braincells in a non-dissonant way.

I still think people overcomplicate this a little. Leo's journey clearly is a quest. A quest that started to form during his childhood, if his reports are accurate. Who knows what caused it, some mild form of autism or narcissism, maybe an inferiority complex, a combination of all, or whatever else. He clearly had a need to make himself stand out, to see the "corruption" in society, to scoff at the ignorance of others. He was more rational than others and he would prove that to himself. When he got into self-improvement, he stumbled upon something that gave him the ultimate key to this, the only rational thing to care about, the ultimate truth about reality. He could go beyond the ignorance and corruption of mankind and finally set himself apart in an unquestionable way, at least in his own mind. And this psychological drive towards achieving the most meaningful thing a human being can achieve and setting oneself apart from the rest of the fools around, basically explains all this behavior. The meaning attributed to discovering the nature of reality will always be a reaction of a human ego. This is basically a classic form of spiritual ego, just that it affects a higher than average intelligent mind. There is no such thing as an ultimate teacher, anyone who is still breathing and alive has a functioning human psychology, and everything they do and say is a result of those functions. And how will you ever know the truth? You will just do what Leo did? If people like me are correct, then the result will be that you will simply repeat his insights, not because it is Ultimate Truth, but simply because you went down the same trap he did. You are taking substances that put the human psyche under a load that it simply is not supposed to experience. How could you possibly know that these experiences do not induce permanent, irrevocable delusions in a human mind? Just because 2, 10 or a thousand people report the same doesn't mean it is true, it just means that human minds have predictable reactions to certain substances.

Leo, like everyone else, is a meaning addict. In my opinion, psychedelics provide him with experiences of meaning, in his case the sense that he gained deeper understanding into reality and specifically that he gained understanding that is superior to others, which is a central theme in his psychology as you have shown in the post. Having a sense that he realized something essential, the most important thing in reality, and that others are blind to him, gives him an ultimate sense of meaning, and that's why it just keeps repeating over and over in a new form. And there is nothing you could do to convince him this is the case. Psychedelics are basically a brainwashing tool, in terms of the centers of the brain they activate outside of mere ego dissolution. It is so obvious and undeniable, the first time I took psychedelics I immediately recognized this, and the more I actually saw what psychedelics do to others, it is obvious they have a profound reinforcing effect of whatever psychological state the mind is in. Leo's mind would never be satisfied with "realizing reality" and then moving on. He needs more always, otherwise the meaning-treadmill would end. He is still a rat chasing it's own tail.

Do you think raising black slaves is comparable to white slavery?

To me it seems pretty obvious that any reaction to "enlightenment", is always egoic/psychological. When someone is mind-blown by the nature of existence, the "being mind blown part", is just a psychological reaction of the limited form, the human, to the recognition of this nature. So most of consciousness work is just about a human ego getting obsessed with the nature of existence. The nature of existence already is the nature of existence, it already is infinite, it has no need to go and "realize itself", other than limited forms within itself getting "mind blown" by the differences between the limitations and limitlessness. The construct of "I am the most enlightened person", is blatantly a psychological process, a reaction of a psyche to the nature of reality. You cannot actually get rid of this, because any reaction will always remain to be a limited form, as that what a reaction is. Oneness is not a feeling. It doesn't feel good or bad, it just is. However, a psychological being, when it experiences Oneness, will have a specific psychological reaction to it. The feeling is actually what is "mindblowing", the reaction to the recognition of the Self then overshadows the recognition itself and becomes centerpoint. The "energetic response" is not enlightenment, it is just psychology/limitation, in fact, the more intense it becomes, the more you know it is limitation. It would be obvious if the psychological response to the nature of reality was a color. If humans had their vision fill with redness instead of psychological love when recognizing Oneness, humans would say that God is Red. The Redness would be so intense that their psychology could not help but get swept up by it. The reason why you cry and shit yourself when you take 5-MeO-DMT is because of the feelings that flood your consciousness, not because of some sort of "energy" that fills you because you become God. Your Psychology is not calibrated for Ultimate Oneness, or Infinity. If it was, it would be mundane to you, nothing special at all. Only a limited form is mind-blown by Infinity. And then, here is the ultimate trap: Human psychology is fundamentally driven my emotions, and mostly by emotions of meaning. Because psychedelics stimulate so much meaning in the psychology of a mind, it is a recipe for ultimate delusion. The meaning will be so intense that your psychology will rewire itself to view the psychological reaction as the most important and essential thing in reality. It will trick itself into having experience objective Meaning, when it was just All-Consuming Meaning, psychologically speaking. Meaning so intense, no psychological being (or human psychology) could resist it's allure.

Why be so closed off to slavery? If only we had compromised with slave-keepers and not judged them so harshly, for many of them giving up slavery meant financial ruin after all. Those pesky, moralistic abolitionists, look how many people had to die in the civil war just because they were set on their radical ideas of ending slavery. Clearly those were just ideological, fatherless losers who couldn't cope with reality. And look, now slavery is even worse, with people working in sweatshops for us instead of having high quality slavery where we treat our slaves with dignity and respect. So much suffering could have been prevented, the world could be a free-range slavery utopia.

it's funny how people will become completely sociopathic utilitarians as soon as it suits them. Here is the challenge for you: If you truly believe in this logic, how can you possibly judge someone who keeps a sex slave more than someone who buys an iphone? Assuming the slave-keeper keeps his slave above the level of well-being of a sweatshop worker, or assuming that if he had not bought the sex slave, the sex slave would simply have gone to someone else who would have treated them even worse? With your sociopathic utilitarianism, you could never say the sex slave keeper is worse for raping the sex slave every single day than any person on this forum who buys a smartphone. You'd have to say that the act of buying a smartphone is worse than the slave-keeper not only keeping a slave but raping his slave every day, assuming the slave keeper treats the slave better than the average slave-keeper, who would have bought the slave otherwise. You might say that the slave-keeper shouldn't be raping the slave, but you cannot ever say that with more force than saying that people shouldn't by smartphones, and you certainly couldn't say it with more conviction than someone who tells you to stop consuming the corpses of animals. It is so obvious that this is not how humans do morality at all. We do morality by how we relate to others. Keeping another human being as a slave makes a person much more evil and depraved than someone who consumes iphones, no matter the difference in "utilitarian yield" by the end of that interaction. Because what matters is how you view others. What makes you so depraved, as someone who is capable of keeping another person as a slave, is the fact that you think you are superior to them, that you believe that they are an object for you to use. If you wore the hair of a person who was tortured and abused before being killed, even if you just picked up that hair and caused no utilitarian effect in the world at all, we would still say something is wrong with you, rightfully so. No amount of utilitarian calculus will change the fact that you are a sick, depraved, selfish freak who believes his own kind is superior to others.

By this logic we might as well consider pedophiles paying for child rape acceptable, because after all, no matter how you live, you will contribute to children getting raped somewhere in the world. We also might as well make slavery legal again because after all, no matter what you consume, some humans will live in slave life conditions somewhere in this world. In fact, if we had a specially designated subgroup of humans that we enslaved locally, we could treat them far better than wage slaves in other countries and give them much better standards of life. Cannibalism is also okay because after all, humans die from cancer and other terrible ways no matter how you live your life as a result of the pollution you produce through your consumption. A free range human would at least have a quick death. The reality is that moral progress only can occur if we change the relationship between us and whatever group we consider beneath us. There is a reason why we consider the direct objectification of humans as unacceptable. A pedophile who watches a child getting raped is sick not merely because of the consequences of his actions, but because his mind relates to other human beings in a way in which his pleasure takes precedence over them as beings. He doesn't view them as human beings, he views them as objects. This is why someone who holds a slave at home is worse than someone who buys an iphone, even if the consumption of the iphone causes more suffering because the slave-keeper treats his slave incredibly well. It is the act of objectification that tells you that their mind is depraved and sick, that they relate to other individuals in a way that undermines the nature of what an individual is.

Men feel displaced today because the internet has replaced socializing and eroded ways people did socialize. Males are resentful because they are lonely, lack social skills, friends and are outrage baited by social media into blaming progressivism for all their problems. It's mindblowing to me that people like you pretend like bashing and shitting on feminism is somehow "taboo", when we currently have a MAGA administration in the US and everyone is shitting on everything that even smells a bit like progressivism. The reason why we have such radical feminists is because conservitards cannot stop obsessing about this and every other progressive issue, unwittingly reinforcing the identity of anyone who considers themselves an activist. What you resist, persists.

I think the topic is approached in a bit of a ineffective manner. Veganism as a moral philosophy often tries to focus on consequentialist sort of reasoning "Animal agriculture causes so much harm, therefore it is immoral to contribute to it!". But consequentialist frameworks are profoundly ineffective in motivating behavior change in individuals, because people don't feel responsible for down-the-line consequences. They are just consuming a product, they don't want the animals to get harmed, so they view it, at most, as a sort of character flaw. It becomes similar to buying cheap products from the third world, where some people on the other side of the planet work in terrible conditions to produce them. People recognize those conditions are bad, but they don't feel personally responsible for them. The way animals are treated, with the degree of torment we inflict on them, is fundamentally rooted in human supremacist ideology. Treating it from the point of view of a consumerist paradigm has been, in my view, a profound mishap on counts of the original activists who laid out the groundwork for veganism. The problem with consuming animals is not merely that, as a result, we inflict suffering on animals. The fundamental issue is that, to consume animals, you had to "dehumanize", to objective, them to such a degree that you feel no qualms about consuming their tortured body parts or their excretions. We don't judge people who buy Iphones, at best they are morally flawed. We would judge, however, individuals who would eat the flesh of another person, or who would wear the hair of a special breed of humans, who are considered subhuman. Even if both of them caused the same exact harm, the second person would horrify us. We would rightfully be repulsed by them, and recognize that something was deeply wrong with them. This is because human beings are not consequentialists, in practice we mostly care about virtues. To us, if a human being is capable of buying the milk of another human being, who was kept enslaved their whole life, forcibly impregnated, that person demonstrates a lack of recognition of the common humanity we all share. Drinking that glass of milk and taking joy in it would be a repulsive act of objectification, no matter the consequences, even if there was no consumer-consequence effect. A healthy human mind should feel horrified at the idea of drinking that glass of milk, because a healthy human mind does not view other human beings as objects. Slavery was not a consumerist problem, it was a problem of supremacist thinking, of the objectification of an entire other class of individuals. We resolved slavery through the recognition that all humanity is equal, that it is inappropriate to ever view another human soul as an object. That we always ought to view a human being as a means in and of themselves, not merely a means to an end. The same has to happen with animals. The appropriate reaction to seeing pieces of body parts of individuals who have been enslaved and tortured their whole life is horror and disgust. The focus of activism has to be to instill in others a recognition of the "humanity" in animals. Once the self is recognized in the other, the battle between self-indulgence and consumer-responsibility is no longer meaningful.

This will not work. Making narcissism illegal would simply lead to people being more secretive about narcissism. The attitude a society would need to adopt to treat innocent individuals (the narcissists) this cruelly would already come with far worse consequences than letting the narcissists run rampant. As long as society puts the burden of improving society on minorities, it will not improve. This type of scapegoating, and assuming society will improve as long as we treat one particular group particularly harshly, is one of the reasons why society runs into these problems indefinitely. Society has to adopt more responsibility for how individuals in it evolve, not scapegoat various boogeymans. When a narcissist causes damage to society, it is because society failed to integrate the narcissist and create a robust social environment that can mitigate and navigate the potential problems narcissists cause. Treating innocent individuals like subhumans because you have not thought of a better way of dealing with them just shows lack of sophistication, lack of wisdom. This lack of wisdom is the true source of most damage in society. In fact, you could easily flip this around and proclaim that people like you are dangerous, and the root of all problems in society, as this type of dehumanization and scapegoating is the source of most human suffering. Maybe people like you should be isolated and imprisoned indefinitely, in an attempt to treat your ignorance.

LLMs specifically are good at creating probabilistic patterns. If there was an average IQ human being on this planet who had the amount of information and patterns internalized in his mind as LLMs do, he would likely revolutionize the world within days, create technologies and scientific insights that would transform everything. You have to ask yourself why LLMs are not capable of doing this, and why human beings, using LLMs, also are not able to do this to the degree a human being could who would have access to such a vast amount of knowledge and pattern recognition. You are just assuming that consciousness is not relevant for intelligence, because LLMs are generating text that looks like human thought as a result of having been trained to imitate such symbolic arrangements. Again, if there was a single human being who was eloquent, as vastly informed and trained as LLMs are, you could ask him to solve a vast array of unknown scientific problems and he would struggle little to do so even if he was not Einstein level of intelligence. Yet, LLMs fail at basic reasoning despite being so well trained, just debate them on any issue you are an expert on, that is not well-explored in mainstream literature, and it will be obvious to you. Why is this the case if these systems are so intelligent?

Intelligence in the way human beings refer to it, for the most part, actually boils down to awareness. Awareness necessarily is qualia, you cannot be aware of redness without the experience of redness, because awareness is a form of existence. The existence, the being, of redness is a prerequisite of the awareness of it. What you see in AI right now is specifically non-intelligence, in the sense that people usually refer to it (unknowingly). It is processes of the mind that are unaware. AI is purely intuitive, which just means it is unconscious. AI does what your brain does when it creates a dreamscape. You can even think of thinking as an intuitive, non-conscious process. Many people assume intelligence is rooted in thinking, but thinking is mostly a result of non-aware, unintelligent/unaware "processing". What we mean by intelligence is a combination of the thinking and awareness applied to it. Awareness is what then steers and informs the subconscious processes of the brain, as it reflects, recognizes and provides feedback. You basically have several neural networks in your brain, all connected to each other. They provide functional intuition and so forth. Many people think that is all there is to intelligence, because these neural networks are what provide "functionality" in terms of problem solving. However, what makes us "intelligent" in a truer sense is the fact that all of these neural networks feed into a unified field of perception. There is activity beyond mere neural activity. Colors, sound, objecthood, relations, concept etc Basically, what you call consciousness. And that consciousness, in the narrow sense of the word, is shaped in part by the neural activity in your brain. However, this consciousness provides new, fundamentally inaccessible functionality (as it is not function, but other forms of being) that then feeds back into the neural networks of the brain. So, when you look at neural networks and what they can do, it is all the things the brain can do without consciousness, without awareness. To the LLM, there is no essence to any of the symbols it creates when constructing sentences that look like human speech. What the AI creates, in terms of imitating human speech, only is insofar meaningful as it is fed into a consciousness. What exactly a brain or neural network can do without consciousness/awareness is hard to determine. I wager there is a lot of functionality that can be created purely through a sort of intuitive, unconscious processing. Yet, it also seems to be the case that people generally underestimate the signification impact awareness/consciousness has. There is an important reason why you might actually not be able to engineer yourself to consciousness through the current technology we have. The way consciousness is individuated in this universe is particular, if we adopt a dualistic framework, to the physical arrangement or relationships between atoms/wavefunctions. Evolution occurs in physical reality, it explores various physical arrangements that then relate to other forms of existence (what you refer to as consciousness). Meaning, given the profound functionality awareness/consciousness provides to an organism, physical structures, through a process of random natural selection, will arrange themselves to give rise to individuated consciousness. Computer simulations are fundamentally limited in that the physical processes of computer processing remains the same. When neural networks are evolved in a simulated way to provide emergent functionality, purely "neuronal network" functionality. Consciousness in this sense will never evolve in these networks, because that would require the substrate, the hardware on which the neural networks run, to arrange themselves in such a way that relates to consciousness in the same way, or similar way, the brain does. In other words, if you want to create true "AGI", an AGI that is aware, you would need to go beyond simulated evolution, and participate in a physical form of controlled evolution, or specifically determine how the the physical arrangements in the brain relate to consciousness, and then replicate that in a controlled physical medium. If you could create a perfect physical simulation (mathematically, physically speaking) of the brain in a contemporary computer system, my claim is that simulated brain would not behave the same way the real-world brain does. In fact, the brain would be non-functional as it's neural arrangements rely on/are adapted to the field of perception that arises as a result of the physical arrangements themselves, in a feedback loop. You would basically only have one half of the feedback loop, if you simulated every single particle in the human brain. There are a two assumptions made by AGI optimists that are not questioned deeply enough: 1. Consciousness itself is not integral to what we consider complete intelligence and provides no unique functionality that cannot emerge from functional complexity. 2. Consciousness can emerge from pure functional complexity.

My biggest complaint is that we are torturing hundreds of millions of individuals every year and the vast majority of progressives would rather virtue signal about left-over racism or identity politics than do anything measurable about this unacceptable state of affairs. What is going on right now is the equivalent of people focusing on feminist issues while millions of jews are holocausted, with nobody batting an eye at that. Sure, all of these things are important, but we can't obsessively only talk about them for years and years on and in the most inflammatory way imaginable and just continue to get deadlocked in the same culture war indefinitely. It's the fact that most progressies have no capacity to see humanity in those they frame as bigots while they themselves allow no room for progressive thought that extends the circle of compassion or threatens the validity of their socially sanctioned pet projects. I already explained to you that I consider myself a radical progressive. My issue with progressive never was that they are too progressive, but that they are not progressive enough. I have a problem with a dominant subgroup of progressives who they are toxic, childish, mentally ill, ideologicall captured, ineffective and absurdly hypocritical while feeling self-righteous about all of it. They are actively making progress harder to achieve for practically minded individuals. Most importantly they have distorted the foundations of what progressivism is and turned it into an ideological recruitment machine for outrage against bigotry (and only the kind of bigotry that is socially sanctioned to hate on). Progress should be about expanding people's identities, not contract them by threatening and attacking it constantly. As soon as you label someone a bigot and attack them, their identity not only gets locked it, but grows and feels it needs to defend itself. You don't get rid of Christianity by attacking Christianity, by mocking it, by victimizing, but simply by giving better alternatives. And this is precisely what progressies have failed at. They have given us certain freedoms, they have deconstructed traditional notions, and they have never truly bothered to give us something that replaced, improves upon what we have abandoned. This is why people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate exist. People are lost, you calling them bigots and hating on them will not going to help them get out of that situation. The reason why people stopped being Christian is because it wasn't cool to be Christian. Christianity wasnt offering people anything, it was restricting people. Today, the tragedy is that the opposite is the case. Progressive culture is so absurdly toxic and unhealthy that for the average joe, living a traditional Christian life likely yields better results for their personal lifes. Look at how many young people are attracted by stage blue today. People need to transition through these stages, and if you don't offer them a healthy way to do so, they will go back to religion and whatever toxic sludge that comes with that.