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Leon M's avatar

This is great. Hypothesis then, pain is the price of consciousness. Our attitude to suffering will change when the only way for a new consciousness to be created is for it to be tortured into existence, either by the shock of birth and the subtle agonies of growing up, or by some analogue inflicted on innocent robots.

Venkatesh Rao's avatar

Good hypothesis

Kyle's avatar
Venkatesh Rao's avatar

Nice thanks! Baez is great

sg's avatar

You have shown great restraint by not naming this "Danger is all you need". A lesser man would have caved. The snow-clone-wars are upon us 😅 and they are unreasonably effective 😁

Venkatesh Rao's avatar

Sadly I used up that snowclone right already in issue titled Text is All You Need. Naming 2 articles with that template seemed... greedy. But maybe greed is all you need 🤔

sg's avatar

I learnt a lot of fancy math in school, none of those apply to most edge cases I am tasked with...I use greedy methods all day everyday. You might be onto something 🤔

Vin Bhalerao's avatar

Another highly thought provoking article!

Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle / Active Inference seems relevant here. Also maybe Jeremy England’s work on the physics of life.

Stephen Bailey's avatar

Love this. It also allows the discussion to extend to graph minds / organizations which have their own means of managing attention (feeds, newspapers), memory (histories, metrics, common knowledge), and subjectivizong information (politics).