Thuc @The_Patternist

The paper never clearly defines what a pattern is, even though everything depends on it. There are definitions scattered throughout, but the idea is mostly assumed. What counts as a pattern? Is it just the opposite of randomness? How are patterns detected, stored, and changed over time? Calling them Platonic patterns only goes so far, because Levin also says some patterns can change with time and experience. If minds are patterns, bodies are patterns, environments have patterns, and math is patterns, then the main question is simple: what exactly do you mean by a pattern? (If you are against dualism, and say both mind and body are patterns, then you are arguing for pattern-ism)

You can use the same definition of intelligence for LLMs as you would for chemical complexity and your measurement of it, just generalized to language. You are searching chemical space for complexity, although your theory is missing the memory medium that solves the complexity problem: How can something complex exist when it is improbable by definition? For example, the complexity of the human brain is ultimately stored in genes. Intelligence can be defined as the ability to find and store complexity and thus generate it—in other words, to learn. An LLM searches linguistic space for complexity when answering your prompts. Its memory can be stored in the chat's memory. It is locally intelligent because it can search and store what it has found. Not to mention the overall learning from weight training. By this definition, a lineage of viruses is intelligent, which you can argue that they are. The issue is that when people say "intelligence" they often mean "conciousness" which is a relatedly different matter.

1) Domesticated animals tend to be less intelligent than their wild counterparts, dogs versus wolves, for example. Humans select against intelligence when smarter animals escape, resists control, or become threats. 2) Human groups work in the same manner. A high-intelligence individual who reaches the top will start culling other smart individuals due to being a potential threat, only keeping less intelligent people around to use as labor. Apply this to civilizations: bureucracy vs local strongman, etc. 3) Energy is limited. Intelligence is needed to solve problems. If there are no problems that require real-time solutions, there is no need to think. Relatedly, some organisms can reproduce both clonally and sexually. They switch strategies as environmental conditions change. Also, solutions that are stored culturally through taboos, writing, religion, and laws don't need to be encoded genetically or rediscovered through individual reasoning. Don't expect all three levels to be satisfied.

You miss the part where, when one of the women in the sultan's harem gives birth to a boy, she is exiled with her son. When the sultan dies, all the sons enter a battle royale, where the strongest becomes the next sultan. Of course, this system is eventually defeated by the managerial class and gives way to bureaucratic degeneracy.

@KnowledgeArchiv But the people are retarded.

You are mirroring JFK's speech on secret societies, and he wasn't talking about the CIA or the FBI. In a society of individuals, it is advantageous to form teams. But once everyone forms teams, the next advantage is to form hidden teams. The power of secret societies is that they are secret. That is also their weakness. To keep members loyal, they use transgressions and rituals. So the solutions are: 1. Expose them, and risk being labeled a conspiracy theorist. 2. Form your own secret society—at the local level, a gang. Unfortunately, the end result is the cartelization of society, like in Mexico. There is no going back.

Wrong. There is a congruence between language and the world. Searle's Chinese Room argument focuses on the wrong thing. LLMs and machine learning have shown why. What matters is how symbols are grouped together. Next-word prediction is essentially predicting which words belong together. Language, especially well-written books, captures these statistical relationships. It is not random because the world is not random. For example, the words mother and father appear in the same sentence much more often than mother and cloud. That matches how those things appear together in the real world. This matching of reality—the shared structure between language and the world—is what allows us to navigate the world. That is what it means to understand. Consciousness is a separate question. Understanding comes from having a representation that matches reality closely enough to make accurate predictions and guide action.

You have to explain more than chemistry, physics, particles, quantum mechanics, and relativity—not only consciousness and information. You also have to include biology, evolution, and intangibles: government structures, movies, illusions, music, dance, and religion. All of these things exist in the same universe, so by your definition they must be accounted for in an ultimate foundation. Luckily, all of these subjects have already been written about, so you can simply feed them into an AI and have it search for a common set of foundational principles for you—provided that what has been written is accurate. Alternatively, you can take a step back and examine why those ideas were written the way they were in the first place. In other words, don't just analyze the theories—analyze the process that produced the theories. The meta-patterns behind knowledge may be more fundamental than the knowledge itself.

But how do you sort out the crazies? Prediction accuracy? Mathematical symmetry? What about intangible theories such as Darwin's natural selection, where the math isn't quite there? There must be an objective standard you use to say, "This theory is better than that one." First, you have to clearly identify the standard, then apply it to every crackpot theory. Luckily, in a few years, you'll be able to get an AI to do that—but first, you have to clearly define the standard.

@WeTheBrandon Charlie Kirk = Nice guy. Lindsey Graham = Bad boy. Trump = Hot Girl. You: "Why hot girl go for bad boys instead of the nice guys like myself?"

@elonmusk Next up: full robotic body suits. Take a nap while climbing mount Everest. Party at Burning Man. Go to Thailand. Etc.

Death is a lie. There is only transformation.

The implication is that there is a direction to evolution. In the safest terms, without being heretical, that direction is toward greater complexity. There is a path from single-celled organisms to multicellularity, sexual reproduction, nervous systems, rudimentary brains, human brains, language, and consciousness. Now we have artificial intelligence. There is an undeniable trend. Increasingly complexity. An LCD television is more complex than a cathode-ray tube television. A Tesla Cybertruck is more complex than a Ford Model T. There is an undeniable direction toward increasing complexity. If you take it further, you have to ask: How is complexity created and stored? It cannot be completely random. There must be some form of "intelligence" (in terms of pure problem-solving) involved—not necessarily consciousness. This implies that life and the process of evolution are intelligent in the sense that they can discover solutions that maintain existence, store those solutions as genes, and pass them on. If you want to take the argument to its more radical conclusion, you could say that the direction of life is toward greater levels of intelligence. Once intelligence is turned upon itself, it moves toward greater levels of consciousness. If consciousness is the capacity for pattern breaking, then the course of the universe is to transcend existing constraints and defy its previous limits. Break reality and defy existence. The purpose of life, then, is to imagine.

God gives us meaning. You can do all the mental gymnastics you want. Replace the word "God" with "the universe" if it helps. If you want to say that it is the universe that selects for meaning—that it eliminates through natural disasters, predation, time, and decay—and that what remains is what you call meaning, which you then call evolution, that's fine. If you want to say that family, children, and tribe—the products of evolution—give us meaning because they connect us to eternity, that's fine too. Whether it is the random neural connections you are born with that make you interested in certain things, or the experiences that the universe forced upon you and that shaped you in certain ways. Whether it is the act of choosing an ideal self and transforming your current self into that ideal—the process of taking those steps, the act of evolving itself—that gives meaning, rather than the end result. It is all the same. When asked, "Why am I the way I am?" or "How did you choose to become what you are?" I am honest and say that the universe molded me. God gave me meaning.

No, it's actually useful. You have to step back and look at panpsychism, "the universe is conscious," or "consciousness is everything" in terms of theories, and ask why people have these experiences. In short, panpsychism is inconsistent because it defines an entity—"consciousness"—as everything. You have to ask yourself whether a theory that "explains" consciousness will be part of a consistent theory or an inconsistent one. If it is part of an inconsistent theory, then the statement "consciousness is everything and nothing" will be derivable from it, an inherent contradiction. But this is also what many people report experiencing. So maybe we should focus on searching for an inconsistent theory of consciousness.

The result of empire. Don't forget that during World War I and World War II, the British brought in colonial troops to fight and die on European soil. The same would have happened to Japan if it had succeeded in World War II. It was already in the process of employing people from Manchukuo. Either that, or it would have faced constant rebellion.

Yes, but if you go beyond Buddhism and look at suffering in all its aspects and functions, you'll find that: 1) Suffering is an evolutionary product and is therefore tied to pattern survival. 2) Suffering can be turned off pharmacologically or trained to be turned off through meditation. 3) There is both good and bad suffering. Good suffering leads to transformation. Many great people have struggled and suffered throughout their lives. In terms of agents, you could say that an agent capable of self-definition possesses a representational ideal self with defined features. Suffering, then, is a measure of whether the agent is moving closer to or further away from that ideal self. This distinction defines the difference between "meaningful" and "meaningless" suffering.

Have you considered viewing evolution entirely in terms of patterns? Living organisms can be understood as literal patterns in the environment, while reproduction and differential survival can be seen as consequences of more fundamental principles: pattern persistence, pattern propagation, and pattern variation.

@curtis_yarvin So the power of democracy is in your side's willingness to go on a lynching spree? In that case, the left certainly have more democratic power than the whiny right who thinks "vote harder" is better than "chimp harder."

@honestpollster Cope. Weak men are not good men. Maybe if the West taught its children to be comfortable with violence, the bureaucrats wouldn't have their boot on our necks.