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This blog is a follow up to a previous one where I used structural linguistics and Landauer heat to do some estimates of how many Floating Point Operations per second (FLOPS) the human brain was capable of. Using this estimate as a benchmark for AI timelines, that is to identify...
This weekend I decided to do some back of the envelope math to estimate what human brain capacity might be when converted into flops (floating point operations per second). The primary reason for this was to test/investigate the structuralist intelligence hypothesis I’ve previously put forward: > Intelligence is determined by...
After my last post on the nature of qualia, I had several long discussions with readers in the comments and on twitter which made it clear there were crucial aspects of the materialist semiotic framework which had been background for me but that I had not explicated in the blog....
I recently read the essay by China Miéville “Beyond Folk Marxism: Mind, Metaphysics and Spooky Materialism” which is all about criticizing Marxism and its ontological materialism for often not taking the “hard problem of consciousness” seriously. He claims its impossible for metaphysical materialism to account for consciousness. How is it...
(Thank you to Jessica Taylor and others who provided feedback on this essay) The practice of coherently ordering the good and the bad began with Plato and Socrates. In the day of the ancient Greeks, this ordering was accomplished through the method of classical dialectics, essentially by debate through dialogue...
Picture yourself on a beach. The beach isn’t on Earth, it’s on a planet that’s going to be colonized by humans several thousand years from now. Let’s say the water is a little different color than what we’re used to, somewhat greener. Whatever you just experienced was not a phenomena...
In previous posts on AI I have given some critiques regarding the orthogonality thesis and rationalist notions of optimizing towards rational, coherent goals. The purpose of this blog is to correct mistakes and carry the conclusions of those blogs forward. To summarize, these previous blogs have described flaws in rationalist...