It takes me months before I find a new song I absolutely love and keep on infinite loop repeat for days.

As far as I'm concerned we're content scarce and I don't care what makes the music - humans, robots, netherworld demons - I just want good music.

Movies are the same way. I find a magical film maybe every three years or so. There are lots of good films. Some fantastic films. Very few brain melding moments of nirvana.

(Actually, most films are slop. There are some good films, fewer great films, next to negligible numbers of stories that speak directly to the soul.)

I want perfection. We're not making enough or experimenting enough. AI helps us do more weird stuff and explore more state space sensory and conceptual territory.

I wish this stuff had come twenty years earlier.

In a few years, we'll be making more every year than all of recorded history to date. And that's going to be amazing.

> As far as I'm concerned we're content scarce and I don't care what makes the music - humans, robots, netherworld demons - I just want good music.

Presumably you've already listened to every piece of music ever recorded? Otherwise it seems it would be more efficient to do that first than wait for AI to generate it and you chancing upon it.

All good finds are chanced upon. Just now sometimes it's made by AI.

I'm so tired of this anti ai malaise.

There's nothing wrong with machine tools.

We're machines too.

Oh that's what you're banging on about. You think AI is like a demon, or you think LLMs are people too, something like that, hence "I don't care what makes the music". That would otherwise be a spooky and implausible phrase that says something strange about what gives music quality, as if quality in music is something ethereal and mathematical and objective and detached from the human condition, and detached from artists. But if you think the AI counts as a person too then it seems less cold and abstract.

Are you really suggesting quality in music isn’t largely mathematical?

(Belatedly) yes. Kind of a big argument to grapple with, but let's start by considering everything. I mean, all the stuff, the abstract stuff, that's out there objectively in the universe and in the future, waiting to be discovered. I believe there's quite a considerable amount of it. It's all potentially of interest to us eventually, and only a teeny tiny part of it is comprehensible to us now. That part is at the leading edge, the cutting edge of our enquiries, and in order for us to see and comprehend and even care about that part, it has to relate to us. It has to be oriented to us and our thoughts and things we can use.

You see what I'm getting at? Humans don't really like abstract things. Mathematicians seem to, but I doubt that even mathematics truly has an objective abstract quality that's distant from human concerns. I reckon humans do human mathematics, and it probably has fashions, too, it's probably modern and current, that is, of its time and place.

So you could accept that, but still claim that music relates strongly to mathematics as we know it. Of course there's such a thing as the mathematics of music. I could dispute the value of that to the quality of the music, as being too abstract and niche compared to the evocative qualities of music, where it evokes things in our physical world: the sounds of hitting things with sticks, heartbeats, tones of voice, meaningful instruments such as bugles evoking battles, mazy noodling around evoking contemplative thoughts (is that abstract?) ... but either way, the point is that we live in a sort of parochial Bag End, if Middle Earth represents everything abstractly possible, and so we only understand hobbit things and only appreciate hobbit art. So to speak.

If you're just a machine, can I unplug you?

The same way you can unplug a laptop, I guess?

You’re not a machine. I’m also tired of hearing that ontological take spouted by AI enthusiasts.

If you're not religious, I would like to hear why or how we are not machines.

How are we machines?

What is the non machine part? What do you believe exists other than chemical and electrical systems?

Edit: If you mean machine in a more colloquial sense that's fine. Let us first get clear if we mean machine in that sense or in sense of any physical mechanism.

If the question is what is there about us that's not covered by the body, we can mention things like: feelings, intentions, perceptions, acts of consciousness.

Or however else you want to divide up things that have to do with the mind.

Eliminativists/illusionists may completely deny such things. The rest can fall into many camps, some of them religious.

It's not like there are any surprising new parts. It's about how one chooses to interpret/conceive those we are familiar with.

Another different question to help me understand what you think of this. I think you agree with me, but just to clarify. A human being is independent of the process of creation right? If we created a molecule by molecule synthesis of a human being, you'd agree it is conscious and the same thing as a human created via typical reproduction, right?

And what part remains in that space after we have mapped all the brain signals and configurations corresponding to these feelings, intentions and perceptions? I don't feel the need to bring up absurd unproven concepts without waiting for more data. It'd be like me saying there is something aphysical behind Mercury's orbital perturbations if I were born before SR and GR were discovered (as an example). No point in jumping to such an argument without first exhausting more believable causes first. History is very strongly against any kind of bet in the aphysical.

My question to you would be, what do you think remains that's not a simple natural system if/after something like Neuralink is successfully established?

Forgive me if I ramble for too long. I've been seeing a lot of comments in this vein and the thoughts have accumulated.

Tacit in your question is the notion that the inquiries that are important are those that can result in predictive models of phenomena encountered in the world — hence feelings, intentions & perceptions turn into a shorthand for reported accounts of the same — and that given enough reports (data), we could build a dictionary that maps a bundle of reports to a(n equivalence class) of physical system(s).

But when we speak of having feelings, or acting on intentions, most often we are not using these as stand-ins for our failure to pin down the current state of our physical system to another. If I am exposed to fire, I want to get away — I am unconcerned with how well I could translate my report of the pain to a patterns of neural activations. The reality of pain for me is unaffected by the fidelity of my "experience report dictionary". And it is there whether it's a brush fire or a neuralink streaming fire bits to my cortex.

If you decide that primacy ought to always be given to things as they can be modeled, you can choose to elevate the "experience report dictionary" and make the reality of experience a second-class citizen. Then you end up with an eliminativist ontology where indeed, we can rightly be called a mechanism.

But that is a "world-making" decision, a value judgement: "this is how things should be seen". It might be sponsored by our recent history, where we got high on the fruits of applied scientific modelling, nursed by the education which taught us that being a good engineer can have us continue in line with that, and pushed on us by impoverished modern eschatologies promising eternal youth, experience machines and what-not at this point. And it might seem preferable or more dependable than whatever equally impoverished, inhumane eschatologies we may have been presented with before.

It doesn't mean there isn't a whole world of places where we can go instead. But in general, we don't change our value judgements until the current one seems inadequate for some reason.

> If we created a molecule by molecule synthesis of a human being, you'd agree it is conscious and the same thing as a human created via typical reproduction, right?

Sure.

Yes so that was my point, if we can agree that a molecular synthesis of a human being, being a pure naturalistic physical process is as good as any other human then if we assume some aphysical element to consciousness, then we have a purely physical process for achieving a system with aphysicality in it. Which means either its not in fact aphysical or then what, we are left with the quetion at what point during this assembly process this new special aspect arises.

It's my feeling that we are still getting too ahead of ourselves in judging some supernatural element, that it's much like the atomism question in ancient greece. An honest thinker back then could have no really firm reason to support one side over another and they tended toward thesse kinds of endless circular metaphysical discussions. That is until we had further data and observation tools which settled the question experimentally. Juat like certain aspects of consciousness, atomism felt an insolvable question in some ways back then. I feel the problems we will have with consciousness will eventually have a similar fate. This bet has always succeeded for millenia till now.

Eternal youth and experience machines don't seem like problems with any conceptual difficulties. We already know electrical and chemical signals change what the brain perceives and eger6nal youth is no more difficult a concept than making any other form of long lasting machine. Obviously there is a long sequence of research problems to solve in the line but none of it is conceptually impossible or blockaged.

I think humans are machines, they are just vastly more advanced than any machine invented by humans. This is something I thought long before the current AI hype cycle.

What do you think are some important differences between machines and humans?

Is there a difference in how you treat machines vs how you treat humans?

At an abstract enough level, not really. I treat them with care and try to give them whatever they need to do their thing. I want them to last as long as possible.

But in asking this question you must have some differences in mind. Could you speak to some of those?

Humans are organic, biological, evolved animal beings. Machines are tools we make and use.

This is what we call in the business a "fever dream"

Or the uno reverse - that's what the anti-AI crowd is experiencing in their inability to adjust to the coming reality.

You're just going to have to make peace. I don't know how y'all can cope with being angry at progress all the time. It's not going to stop for you. It's also really awesome that we live to see this come to pass.

We're living in a good dream.