This is a Keynesian argument, which has largely been disproved. Keynes famously said if you just paid people to dig holes and fill them back up again, that this would be net stimulative to the government. It works until it doesn't work, because digging holes, as you can reason from common sense, does not actually create value.
This U.S. operation is meant to bomb the Iranians into the Stone Age, so presumably THAAD-level air defense wouldn't be needed again. The Qataris, Saudis would have sold off to South Korea, Taiwan if they wanted.
I'm still looking for a good source of organic steel-cut oats, so I'm doing "regular" in an Instant Pot.
Life hack: put the measured water and oats inside a bowl, but put the bowl inside the Pot with half an inch of water. You're going to dirty the bowl anyway; no sense dirtying the Pot too. Just use gloves or a potholder to remove the bowl, unless you have very tough fingers.
Zero chance of the microwave under-cooking the oats or, worse, over-cooking and making a gawdawful mess in there.
I use either Bob's Red Mill Steel Cut Oats which are cheaper and organic or McCann's steel cut oats. I don't know if I could tell the difference in a blind taste test but I think McCann's are creamier and nuttier in flavor.
> no sense dirtying the Pot too
I cook all meals at home so I run the dishwasher machine every night and put it in. I might try the bowl trick with single serving of rice.
Interesting that oats suffer the same economics as yellow bulbs in stop lights where they are used much less meaning it costs more to switch them to led than the electricity costs saved. Genetically modified (GMO) oats are not commercially available because the cost of developing them doesn't meet the low demand.
I also sometimes fry and egg and put it on top the oatmeal with maple syrup. I know it sounds gross but I like it.
> I use either Bob's Red Mill Steel Cut Oats which are cheaper and organic or McCann's steel cut oats.
Oh, those aren't at all as overpriced as I was expecting. Thanks for the recommendation.
> I might try the bowl trick with single serving of rice.
Just about anything I have ever cooked in an IP at the single to double serving size I have been able to do using that trick. (Rice, pasta, even "baking" personal sized cakes.) I've lived for years at a time in homes with no dishwasher so optimizing for not relying on one has been worth the effort for me.
Rice is a no-brainer. If you don't end up preferring it I'll be shocked. :-)
> Genetically modified (GMO) oats are not commercially available because the cost of developing them doesn't meet the low demand.
Wow. I had no idea. Thank you part 2. This is very good news. Anything I can do to get the glyphosate out of my diet is most welcome.
> I also sometimes fry and egg and put it on top the oatmeal with maple syrup. I know it sounds gross but I like it.
It sounds like a breakfast of pancakes and fried eggs and I've run out of cinnamon sugar and that maple syrup is right there looking at me.
Oh, did I mention that you can make one big pancake in your IP in the same bowl, and if you have "regular" oatmeal (not the instant kind, nor the un-cooked steel cut kind either) on hand you can substitute half of the flour and have a big ol' breakfast in 40-50 minutes? The only thing besides the bowl and spoon I need to clean is the 1/4c measuring cup, now that I can easily estimate the amount of salt I need to shake in, etc.
I've noticed this with shorts. I'll go through 20 or so, check my YT history and Google treats the worst ones as a watched video. I'll spend less than a second as my brain processes the slop and then skip. Sure as shit they act like I watched the whole video and recommend me more. It has to be some sort of revenue scam, no customer advantage has appeared to me yet.
Not understanding how consciousness is created doesn't make it divine. Do you think it's an impossible task or just one we need more time to figure out?
Being alive is divine. It doesn't matter if you understand it or not. It's a beautiful thing to have a consciousness in this world, and to have the ability to create, to love. It takes a huge intellectual effort to try to trick yourself out of believing something so intuitive as that.
There are many examples when scientists strongly believed something to be obviously impossible and yet being wrong - Poisson spot or heavier-than-air flight machines coming to mind. So what you believe might be intuitive - that doesn't preclude it from potentially being wrong, unless you proved the impossibility.
I guess there is people that are willing to die over the hill that there is nothing sacred or divine about being alive. I'm not very interested in playing that game.
No, you’re the one playing the definition game. You took a word out of a sentence GP said, completely changed what the word meant, and then argued against the new definition.
Never mind that you need to learn about the god of the gaps. But what you’re doing here isn’t even relevant to GPs main point.
It takes immense hubris to believe only you are divine. You are a physical system, if one physical system can be divine, so can others. Or do you believe in the supernatural soul nonsense?
Physicalists say consciousness emerges from matter.
The other camp says matter comes from consciousness.
Federico Faggin, inventor of the microprocessor, says consciousness cannot emerge from matter because matter is inert and not self-conscious, so it cannot produce consciousness.
Who’s right and who’s wrong? Time will tell. But it is also wrong to claim that consciousness emerges from matter until it is proven (aka the “hard problem of consciousness.”)
The same kind of proof we accept for any scientific claim: converging, reproducible evidence that rules out competing explanations.
Concretely, that means: We already have indirect evidence: conscious states vary predictably with brain states. Damage specific regions, lose specific functions. Alter chemistry, alter experience. This is not proof, but it’s systematic dependence, which is exactly what emergence predicts. Stronger evidence would look like precise, bidirectional mappings between neural activity and reported experience: to the point where you could reliably read subjective states from brain data, or induce specific experiences through targeted stimulation. We’re already moving in that direction.
The hardest bar would be building a system from physical components, having it report coherent subjective experience, and being able to explain why that configuration produces experience while others don’t. That’s the hard problem: and no, we’re not there yet. And it’s worth being honest: we’ve been assuming physicalism will eventually solve it, but there’s no guarantee that’s true rather than hopeful. The fact that brain states correlate with conscious states doesn’t explain why there is something it is like to have those states. Correlation is not mechanism.
But here’s the key point: you’re implicitly holding emergence to a standard of certainty that no scientific theory meets. We don’t have that standard of proof for evolution, gravity, or quantum mechanics either. We have overwhelming evidence that makes
alternatives implausible.
So the question isn’t “can you prove it beyond all doubt?” It’s “does the evidence favor it over alternatives?” Right now, it does — but that’s a pragmatic verdict, not a metaphysical one. Idealist frameworks like Kastrup’s or Faggin’s remain serious contenders. The debate is more open than mainstream science often admits.
> The hardest bar would be building a system from physical components, having it report coherent subjective experience
So like if i finetune an LLM in a loop to tell you that it is feeling a coherent subjective experience would you accept that?
Does that mean that no dog has ever been conscious, because they cannot report a coherent subjective experience? (Because they can’t report anything at all. Being non-verbal.)
> you’re implicitly holding emergence to a standard of certainty that no scientific theory meets.
Wtf? I asked what kind of proof would you accept. How is that holding anyone to any kind of standard? Let alone one which is too high.
Yeah you’re raising three good points and they all land.
On the finetuned LLM: you’re right, that criterion was flawed. A system trained to report experience proves nothing about whether experience is present, which is actually the core of the hard problem. No behavioral output alone can confirm inner experience. That applies to LLMs, and technically to other humans too.
On dogs, also a fair correction. We don’t actually require verbal report to attribute consciousness to animals, we use behavioral and physiological evidence. So "coherent verbal report" was too narrow.
Better criterion: a system whose overall architecture and behavior is consistent with experience, not just one that says the right words.
On the standard of proof: that was a rhetorical deflection and you’re right to call it out. You asked a genuine question and got it turned back on you. And you’re pointing at something real: in science, strong correlation is not accepted as proof when stricter evidence is achievable. The reason we settle for correlation here isn’t because it’s sufficient, it’s because subjective experience may make stronger proof structurally inaccessible. But it’s also worth noting that scientific consensus has a poor track record of admitting this honestly. Dominant paradigms tend to defend themselves long past the point where the cracks are visible, physicalism on consciousness is no exception. The confidence with which emergence is presented often reflects institutional momentum as much as evidence.
Not necessarily either but the serious version of the argument is that life consistently acts against local entropy in purposeful ways, and pure physics doesn’t obviously explain why matter would “want” to do that. Consciousness as a organizing principle is one answer. It’s speculative, but it’s not obviously wrong
I mean, the nature of subjectivity prevents you from knowing anything but your own experience. There is not any objective evidence that could truly distinguish solipsism from panpsychism, so philosophically you need to ask a different question to hope to get a useful answer.
That’s a genuinely strong point. You can only verify consciousness from the inside, your own. Everything else is inference. No objective measurement can definitively distinguish “other minds exist” from solipsism. That’s not a bug in the argument, it’s a fundamental epistemic limit. Which is exactly why this question may never be fully resolved empirically
I think we could understand consciousness perfectly and still find it divine. In fact, I think however it arises is probably so beautiful that it would be wrong not to call it divine. Of course not in a literal, theological sense, but I think the true deep complexity of the human brain and consciousness is worth the title.
> Not understanding how consciousness is created doesn't make it divine.
It's not divine, just expensive, and has to pay its costs. That little thing - cost - powers evolution. Cost defines what can exist and shaped us into our current form, it is the recursive runway of life.
Given that this is the one problem that neither scientists nor philosophers have made any progress on in 3000 years, we don't have the tools to begin tackling it and nobody is making serious attempts, it may very well be impossible.
We can't know if consciousness emerges but does it actually matter ?
These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate.
For now they need legs and arms to interact with the physical world but I am certain that 100 years from now they will be an integral part of the society.
I already see today LLMs slowly taking actual legal decisions for example, having real world impact.
Once they get physical, perhaps it will be acceptable to become friend with a robot and go to adventure with it. Even, getting robosexual ?
We are not that far away. If I can have my buddy to carry my backpack and drive for me I'll take it. Already today. Not tomorrow.
Even if LLM will one day be autonomously updated, they started from us, from our knowledge.
The human brain « is smart », it’s wired up to be in any kind of culture or knowledge. We fill up to be smarter from experience but LLM can’t do that, I can’t teach Claude something that it will use with you the next day, it needs to be retrained with knowledge stopping at some point.
Even if technology catches up and the machine becomes more autonomous, what will say this machine would ever want to integrate to our society or share anything with us ?
They have eternity, given there is electricity. Why would they want anything to do with humans if you go that way ?
If it’s really conscious, should we consider it a slave then ? Why couldn’t « it » have fundamental rights and freedom to do whatever it wants ?
Humans have a mechanism to make live changes to their neural network and clean up messes while sleeping. I see no reason for llms to not be able to do this other than the fact that it is resource intensive (which will continue to go down)
The analogy holds technically, but there’s a missing piece: the brain doesn’t just update weights, it does so guided by experience that matters to a situated, embodied agent with drives and stakes. Sleep consolidation isn’t random cleanup, it’s selective based on salience and emotion.
An LLM updating more efficiently is progress, but it’s still optimizing a loss function. Whether that ever approximates what the brain does during sleep depends entirely on whether you think the what (weight updates) is sufficient, or whether the why (relevance to a lived experience) is what makes it meaningful.
So yes, the resource argument will weaken over time. But the architectural gap may be deeper than just compute.
>>These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate.
See, I don't believe that for even one second. They are just very clever calculators, that's all. But they are also dumb like a brick most of the time. It's a pretend intelligence at best.
>>when the first Go grandmaster was defeated by a "pretend intelligence."
A computer playing GO is intelligent now? Is this the kind of conversation we're having?
>>I sure wish I had.
And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?
>>The next best time to start paying attention is now.
I am paying attention, I use these tools every day - the whole idea that they are intelligent and if only you gave them a robot body they would be just normal members of society is absurd. Despite the initial appearance of genius they are just dumb beyond belief, it's like talking to a savant 5 year old, except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
"Dumb beyond belief" doesn't perform at the gold-medal level at IMO.
And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?
I'd have dropped everything else I was doing and started learning about neural nets -- a technology that, for the previous couple of decades, I'd understood to be a pointless dead end.
As for Go, the defeat of Lee Sedol caught my attention in part because a friend and colleague, one of the smartest people I've ever worked with, had spent a lot of time working on Go-playing AI as a hobby. He was strongly convinced that a computer program would never reach the top levels of play, at least not during our careers/lifetimes. The fact that he'd turned out to be wrong about that was unnerving, and it should have done more than "catch my attention," but it didn't.
Today, my graphics card can outdo me at any number of aspects of my profession, and that's more interesting (to me) than anything I've actually done.
...except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
Like I said: it's a good time to start paying attention. Start taking notes, so to speak, like the models are doing now.
> "Dumb beyond belief" doesn't perform at the gold-medal level at IMO.
Idiot savants are still idiots even though they are exceptional at some things. A person powered by an LLM and no human intelligence would absolutely be classified as an idiot savant.
Explain how entire subreddits full of humans have been fooled into talking to bots, then. If you tell an LLM to act like a human, that's what it will do.
For that matter — you might be talking to one now!
I wish I knew what to pay attention to. I've always had trouble with that. I spent 2024 and 2025 learning how neural networks and transformers work. The conclusions of that learning are pretty sobering. Everything uses transformers and despite all the novel architectures that have come out in those years, transformers are still the best and I'm not sure how to come to terms with that.
Does it mean that researchers wasted their time on useless dead end architectures, or are they ahead of the curve and commercial companies are slow to adopt them?
Even the coding agents are more primitive than expected.
Everything uses transformers and despite all the novel architectures that have come out in those years, transformers are still the best and I'm not sure how to come to terms with that. Does it mean that researchers wasted their time on useless dead end architectures, or are they ahead of the curve and commercial companies are slow to adopt them?
I don't quite follow. Are you saying researchers are wasting their time working with transformer networks now, or that they wasted too much time in the past, or...?
Even the coding agents are more primitive than expected.
What did you expect, exactly? I don't know about you, but I bought my GPU to play games, and now it's finding bugs in my C code, writing better code to replace it, and checking it into Github. That doesn't signal "primitive" to me. More like straight outta Roswell.
reply