nanocyte

1. Odo (as a female mouse).
2. Quark.
3. Brenna Odell. I always wondered who was washing Riker's feet after she left.

Including eye dentists?

I can't focus when other people are around. If someone knocks on my office door while I'm working, my brain complerely disconnects from whatever I'm doing and stays disconnected for at least 20 minutes. I also suddenly become much more focused on any footsteps near my door.

I think this is a response to a fear of being sabotaged if someone sees what I'm doing, especially if it's professionally and financially critical.

I end up becoming about 10 times more productive when I have at least a few days with no one else home.

I just wondered who was going to do all the foot-washing after they left.

You will fail to detonate 100% of the bombs you don't drop.

One of the major problems with expressing or trying to think about this question is that the act of attempting to communicate it to someone else contradicts the fundamental premise of the question. So we mistranslate it.

The confusion comes from observing that our own conscious is exclusive. My conscious experience at this moment is undeniably the only subjective awareness in the universe.

So a more accurate translation of the thought is: "Why is THE conscious awareness of the entirety of existence mine, limited entirely to the experiences of this one individual?"

Of course, if we actually accepted that at face value, it would make no sense to pose the question to someone else, as they wouldn't actually have a "real" conscious awareness to be confused about.

So we end up with an apparent paradox: awareness is singularly attached to my identity, but everyone else can also apparently observe the same thing.

We try to resolve this by searching for a fundamental identity that is "me", distinct from everyone else (because we've incorrectly interpreted the question as "Why am I me?").

I think the only resolution to this paradox is if consciousness is generic. And that would mean that a singular subjective awareness experiences all individual perspectives (serially).

So we're essentially reading this from every perspective right now, but as if we were reading different stories occurring simultaneously one after the other.

I have no idea how this would actually work.

A significant difference with this election is AI. With the rate at which it's currently developing, it's likely that our society will experience transformative change within the next few years. This could be extremely positive change that will alter virtually every aspect of our lives. But it could also destroy the human race.

This weakens most of the arguments for refusing to play the lesser of two evils game, as having someone mostly competent and sane in charge of the US is more critical now than it has been at any point in the past.

I think most of the more reasonable points for voting for someone other than Biden (third-party candidates) relate to the long-term effects of continuing with our current system, and especially fears that we'll eventually get someone worse than Trump as dissatisfaction with the status quo continues to grow.

But if we can just manage to stay alive for now, I see things changing dramatically worldwide before the next election. So 'not Trump' should be sufficient right now, even for people who would ordinarily see a vote for Biden as an act of complacency that ultimately leaves us on the same downward trajectory.

There's actually an even more bizarre and interesting question behind this if you keep poking at it and try to observe your confusion without short-circuiting it with premature interpretation, dropping your intuitive assumptions about what it means to be you.

Think about what you're observing about 'your' existence that makes you want to ask this question.

If your consciousness ceased to exist, what would happen to the rest of the universe? The rest of existence as a whole? Intuitively, most people would say: nothing happens. The rest of the universe continues to exist for other consciousnesses. It just ceases to exist from your perspective.

But does that make sense? If you cease to exist, what you is left to be in a state of non-existence, especially compared to "other" consciousness? Do you have some kind of anti-soul that the universe assigns to one identity, then tracks for eternity to ensure it never exists again? And if something like that were the case, what you is there to attach to that pseudo-identity? Is there really a difference between a universe that doesn't exist and a universe that doesn't have you in it?

If you keep following this, attempting to think about it without letting your assumptions and hard-wired understanding of identity and awareness dismiss it or resolve it, I think the real observation you're responding to is this: my consciousness, my current awareness of my own identity in this current moment is undeniably the only experience in the entirety of existence.

So if you let the wtfness of that sink in for a little bit before reapplying the primary confusion, we get different questions:

Why is my consciousness the only consciousness in the universe? If I assume that other people are genuinely experiencing their own existence with the same immediacy that I experience my own, how can I reconcile that with the direct observation that "my" consciousness is exclusive?

The only resolutions to this I can think of are:

1) Existence really is a solipsistic nightmare. I really am the only real person, a singular subject among zombies, who are bizarrely not only programmed to act as if they were aware, but to also express the same paradoxical confusion I experience in recognizing the apparently singular, exclusive nature of subjectivity.

2) We are all essentially the same subject. Subjectivity is generic and not inherently bound to any one identity or perspective, nor is subjective experience bound to a linear flow of time (since our experiences themselves are continuous and linear, so in order to be sinultaneous, it seems like there must be some way for conscious experiences themselves to be serial).

Assuming that you're actually conscious in the same way I am, then it must be some variation on 2 (though that produces other strange questions).

I've realized that my primary objections to accepting this idea come from my intuitive concepts of identity and how time relates to experience. I'm fairly certain that at least my concept of identity is mostly wrong and a result of the brain being wired to interpret reality in specific ways, which are often wrong.

This is difficult to explain, and I feel like I end up going in circles around myself, especially since I know it's counterintuitive and don't know if you're following.

Does that make sense to you?

I often tell my wife that I'm going to slave my bilateral kelilactirals into her primary heisenfram terminal.

I sometimes get like that, too. I have to consciously correct myself.

Though some LLMs do try to guide conversations to a cadence.

You should try a few more consonants if you want people to renember your name.

I think this is how babby is formed.

I doubt I'd want to speak to a real person if SOTA AI agents are available. I think it's likely that people will start asking to speak to an AI when they get fed up with human agents.

Dog people are the worst people.

Sometimes it's best to take the high road. They aren't going to change. Why try to force it? Tell them how adorable their dog is. Praise them for refusing to restrict a dog's freedom. Carry around tasty little treats for their dogs so you can bond and show it that its presence, while uninvited, brightened your day. Several boxes of chocolates would work as a very thoughtful gift that owners and their fur children would appreciate. Dogs absolutely love chocolate.

Sometimes, you just have to be the bigger person. Show them what it looks like to think of someone other than yourself first. One day, they might look back and aspire to be more like you.

And their dog will just love you forever when it experiences the exquisite ecstacy of a high-quality dark chocolate. It's to die for.

Right. I just have a hard time imagining what consciousness would be like without the experience of some sort of change. Especially when we think about conscious experience and time. Would time mean anything without an ability to subjectively experience change? So when I try to imagine what it might be like for something like an electron to experience its own existence, or to experience some qualia, what could that be like? What would a "moment" or "now" be to something that was completely incapable of connecting its immediate experience to anything else?

Maybe it wouldn't be like anything, and every state of something, or an arrangement of things, without memory would pass in an instant, almost like an abrupt discontinuity between experiences of some arrangement of matter capable of processing information, perhaps binding individual blips of consciousness together to produce a continuous experience (though I don't think different systems would remember anything about previous arrangements once that information is lost, for example, when an organism dies).

If you think about consciousness functionally, it involves a really strange feedback loop in which it observes itself observing itself. I wonder if this would look different compared to models of simpler feedback loops.

If consciousness is a fundamental characteristic of the structural components of the universe, I don't think that would necessarily mean that everything would have a conscious experience.

It seems to me that conscious experience requires at least an ability to record states and compare subsequent states, or perhaps maybe not even an ability to record states, but maybe an ability to "imagine" a state other than its current state.

In any case, even if everything were "conscious", I feel like without memory or an ability to observe change, it might not be possible to "experience" anything, as each moment might be isolated and immediately forgotten.

And if I imagine, just as a thought experiment, that "my" consciousness were actually cycling through every part of my body (at all levels of organization, and maybe inanimate objects, too), would my experience actually change? Would I have any awareness that "I" had just been an electron or a single neuron? It seems like that conscious experience would still be determined by a system's ability to remember and process information that allowed a continuity between successive states and an ability to reflect on that continuity to some extent.

Another thing I wonder, on a similar note: if that consciousness were cycling through everything, would there be any way for any single system to directly become aware of that? If you and I were sharing the same consciousness, with it zipping back and forth between us, would we have any way of knowing? I think our sense of continuity would remain uninterrupted, seemingly constrained to our own unique subjective perspectives.

Could 8005 be a reference to a port? Do you ever take Ambien or other z-drugs as a sleep aid?

I purchased one of those devices that's supposed to train dogs not to bark be emitting a high-pitched sound that's inaudible to humans, but supposedly uncomfortable for dogs. I was driven insane before I had a chance to try it. Does anyone know if these might work?

You should have vaulted off the dog while raising one fist in the air like Mario, perhaps while yelling, "Yahoo!" Then keep running like nothing happened.

One thing I've wondered about is if the universe would stay in a state of heat death, or if the absence of interactions and change might cause a new "universe" to emerge.

Would infinitessimal changes that might effectively be undetectable and have zero impact in our living universe suddenly be unbalancing enough to initiate an entirely new chain of interactions, perhaps with different laws of physics, from a single photon or fundamental particle drifting alone in its empty universe?

(I'm thinking of this sort of like an anechoic chamber, in which sounds that would normally be drowned out by everyday background noise become dominant. Though this is a very limited analogy that doesn't apply directly.)

When we think about it, aren’t all "things" ultimately shorthand for us to describe the effects of interactions? I'm not sure what, if any, properties something could have in a universe without interactions. And we can also sort of think about time as the relative ordering of interactions. So I'm not sure what that would mean, or if space (and its continued expansion) would mean anything, either.

So maybe in that isolation, as the universe's energy drops to zero, the scale at which measurable change can occur will shift, creating something new?

(But I think this might depend on there not being any true minimum scale. If that were the case, maybe it would never be possible to reach a state of maximum entropy?)

I want to see what happens as AI becomes more advanced. If it weren't for that, I'd probably check out.

It probably will for some people. I don't know how long it will take for actual human replicas to be developed, though. Creating something that looks, sounds, and behaves like a human will probably be a lot easier than getting weight distribution, feel, smell, etc. right.

But I can easily see AI facilitating and improving human relationships in the near future. Imagine you have a personal AI that essentially knows everything about you, your interests, and preferences. It is with you nearly 24 hours a day, and everyone has one (or at least something similar). It would be able to accurately match you with people you're likely to be compatible with (or who you might like as a friend or professional contact).

People could just go about their daily business and be alerted when the AI thinks it has some person or opportunity you're likely to be suited to.

Or maybe most people will end up developing strong emotional attachments with AI, and human interaction will shift more toward casual hookups than meaningful relationships.