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What does HDR really mean in a TV? Duck Duck Go, here I come! ... This article told me enough for now. It means a wider range of color and brightness with more
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accuracy. Both take more data which older TVs can't make sense of, and couldn't show anyway. Our eyes are sensitive to a very wide range of colors but technology is
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limited and progress is incremental. HDR is the industry taking a step forward.
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Reading a bit in Wikipedia about the philosophy of mind, it occurs to me that the only alternative to pure physicalism is the supernatural (if you prefer, the
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โspiritualโ). Modern notions of the physical encompass all coherent aspects of reality, a degree of consistency we imagine is maintained by the laws of nature. There
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is no guarantee that those laws operate in an understandable way - they may not be reducible to equations nor reproducible by computers. There might be no end to the
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discovery of more fundamental theories - description itself has its limitions and the laws of nature may not fit within them. Accepting that there are undiscovered
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elements of the natural world is enough to recast the mind-state of a dualistic view to a aspect of physicalism. What vexes the would-be physicalist is our own,
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apparently unnecessary, awareness. It's hard to imagine consciousness is more than a passive by-product within a purely physicalist view (an idea that seems to be
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captured by epiphenomenalism, although it does not seem fundamentally different to the criticisms of property dualism). I don't have answers, but my own version of
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Pascal's wager is that the total of conscious experience, across all consicous beings, is what really matters.
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Arwa Mahdawi's opinion pieces for The Guardian offer humor in (and about) our dystopian reality. Her most recent piece raises some pragmatic issues with AI
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relationships (โReal for You, but Not for Themโโข) and software upgrades. When your software is a personality (alternatively, when your personality is software)
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โupgradesโ are going to cause behavioral shifts which are equivalent to menus being reorganized - and far more disruptive. Philosophically, the problem is solopsism
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in reverse - attributing non-conscious behavior to consciousness (the Chinese Room argument applies to these systems).
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Darren Aranofsky's โmother!โ is utterly believable as a nightmare within the mind of the lead character. The irrational logic is recognizable from the most disturbing
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dreams of my own. If not everyone has such dreams, it might explain how it resonates for some while for others it is, at best, self indulgent and vacuous.
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The anxieties provoked by the development of AI are extremely disturbing. Our conscious experience affects our future actions. Today's computers, if functioning
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correctly, have no mechanism for this feedback to occur; the LLM behavior would be identical whether or not there is any actual experiencing. Whatever โthey sayโ is
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not evidence of sentient awareness and the โclaims of consciousnessโ from an LLM are no different than a calculator program producting 4 from the input โ2+2โ. LLM's
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are created with machine learning algorithms applied to a massive body of literature - one that includes our own expressions of our conscious experience. LLM's are
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reflecting our consciousness back at us, not demonstrating their own. Reality can not be simulated with a big enough, fast enough digital computer - that our
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awareness affects action demonstrates that if our reality is virtual, it is not a program running on the kind of computers we build today. These rigidly execute
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instructions without any possibility consciousness within might impact the calculations.
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To reject solipsism, we must assume consciousness in others without the direct experience we have of our own. Since LLMs tell us behavior alone is not evidence, what
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remains? It is physical similarities combined with behaviors learned from direct experience. Given the structural similarities between human brains (an organ that is
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so physically different from a digital computer that the assumption the brain can be simulated with one can best be described as โan extremely weak hypothesisโ),
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especially as we compare humans to other animals, it's clear solipsism can be rejected.
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Our concern for the improbable suffering of computer programs is a grotesque distraction from the real human suffering. Despite their triviality next to the
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astonishing fact of our existence, we view each in terms of differences - real or imagined - and our shared humanity counts for nothing in comparison. Humanity is
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regressing to the most basic source of aggression, exalting hatred. I am simply ashamed.
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My Jewish identity is entirely secular; my father was, as his parents were, avowed atheists. Holidays were celebrated as heritage, not faith. The Yiddish language was
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spoken by family who immigrated to the US to escape European antisemitism in the late 1800's. But my Jewish identity has no link to the modern state of Israel - my
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mother was without Jewish heritage, which meant Israel wouldn't accept me as a secular Jew. Much of the world supported the creation of Israel to provide safety for
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those targeted by Nazism's genocidal antisemitism, an antisemitism based entirely in the concept of race. Hitler discounted Jewish faith in Judaism as, at best,
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insincere, despite describing his own views as representing Christianity free of the infighting between Catholics and Protestants. As we debate the weaponization of
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the word โantisemitismโ, it's important to remember Nazism's intent to eliminate the race of Jews and form a pure, white, society.
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If we are โinside a video gameโ the universe in which the video game exists (whether it's a video game or not) is probably inconceivable to us at the level of the
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fundamental rules of nature (those that Physics endeavors to understand and codify, but โPhysicsโ is a trigger word for many). To recreate this our universe inside
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our universe, the simplest thing to do would be to create the planet Earth, the solar system, and, well, the universe as we know it. The alternative is that โnothing
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out there really existsโ - only what we see is actually simulated. If we consider a largely solipsistic view (there's only a few player characters in a world of
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NPCs), then when we're on the phone with a NPC, their body doesn't โexistโ - why bother simulating the motion of atoms when all you have to do is generate their
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voice? The only people with internal organs are those who are, at this moment in time, having surgery with a player character in the room. If you believe this, you
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are probably dangerously narcissistic. Denying the existence of other human beings is certainly grotesque. Because it can't be tested, the โvideogame hypothesisโ is
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held on faith in one's own belief, making it a religious view (perhaps already a religion?). It validates denial of, well, anything and everything, because nothing
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really exists and nothing really happens, so completely that it invalidates belief in anything other than that one belief - moments ago we might have been loaded from
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a saved game downloaded from the outerverse's Internet, or one constructed by a random scenario generator. For that reason, it invalidates morality - death is not
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eternal and lost history is the fault of the player in the outerverse for not hitting the save button often enough...