Bare minds
Sun 6 October 2024
Back in the Stone Age, humanity was just scraping by with not much more than our bare hands. Working
with AI has showed me that, all this time: we've just been scraping by with our bare minds.
If computers were meant to be bicycles for the mind, then AI is jetpacks for the mind. Read more
The free space equation
Sun 15 September 2024
The idea is: if you have some resource which is partially used, and you increase
the total capacity, how much does your free capacity grow in relation to your increase in total capacity?
ChatGPT couldn't give me a name for this idea, so I'm calling it the free space equation. Read more
Encyclopedia Mechanica
Tue 10 September 2024
I've been working on a new online encyclopedia project, and it is almost ready to rival Wikipedia.
It's called Encyclopedia Mechanica. Pages are created on-demand by an LLM
in response to user queries, so in a way we actually have more pages than Wikipedia already, albeit with more errors. Read more
We're not in a simulation
Fri 2 February 2024
In this post I'm going to make the case that IF (big if) the universe can be simulated, then
actually running the simulation has no effect on the contents of the universe. Either the universe can be
simulated, in which case we exist within an abstract mathematical structure independent of any actual simulation, or
the universe can not be simulated, in which case we trivially do not live inside a simulation. Read more
Incongruous technologies redux
Sun 5 November 2023
Good news: I have worked out why my incongruous technologies are
incongruous: it's because of software! Read more
Incongruous technologies
Sun 2 July 2023
Take saws, for example. We have saws for cutting wood, saws for cutting metals, saws optimised for cutting curved shapes,
electric saws, computer-controlled saws, and so on. Saws are pretty well explored. Saws are general-purpose.
You probably won't discover a new use for saws. Read more
Classifying minds
Tue 25 October 2022
Trying to learn about the mind by analysing the brain is like trying to learn about software by analysing the computer.
The only reason anybody thinks
neuroscience is related to minds is because we're not familiar with minds that aren't made out of brains.
But brains are just
the mechanism that evolution landed on, they're not fundamental. Our planes don't fly the same way birds do, and attempts to
discover principles of flight by analysing birds were not successful. Flight is actually much simpler than birds!
Maybe the principles of consciousness are much simpler than brains. Read more
Consciousness is computable
Mon 20 June 2022
At first I thought it was quite surprising that consciousness can exist in the first place. It doesn't seem
to be the same sort of thing as anything else that exists. But there's
an enormous selection bias here: every possible universe in which consciousness can not exist does not contain
anybody wondering why it doesn't exist. The only time you can even ask the question is when it already
exists. So in that sense it's not at all surprising that consciousness exists, it is in fact guaranteed! Read more
What if we could assume new identities at will?
Sun 21 August 2016
I've been thinking a lot about privacy and anonymity recently. It's reasonably
possible to create a new online identity, with no links to your real-world
identity, as long as you don't need to buy anything and you're careful. Use Tor,
get an email address from SIGAINT, and you can
sign up for accounts on a lot of other services and speak your mind freely. Read more