Gerald de Jong

I wish people would notice that the safety scare is not driven by people outside of the big labs, but directly from their leadership. The "whistleblowers" are plants that are amplified from within the labs, and supported by the CEOs. The goal is to capture the regulators, which will not shut down the big labs, but turn them into an oligopoly and outlaw decentralized AI.

The computational universe can be described through rules that describe change in discernible differences with finite resolution, as opposed to the classical view that maintains that time and/or space have infinite resolution. We can only observe finite resolution, and it turns out that the assumption that infinite resolution exists creates problems in all the mathematical languages we use to capture these infinities. In the computational universe, geometry only exists if you squint, in the classical universe, it is foundational.

Atheists frequently misunderstand that religious indoctrination does not aim to impose propositional beliefs, but to install agents. To believe in God is not a belief, it is a psychological configuration in which the personal self shares the mind with another agent.

In a few years, Europe will be governed by right wing governments, and they will read your encrypted messages, prevent you from posting and reading ideas they disagree with and even jail you for wrongthink, and the current governments create the laws making that possible

Your experience is a simulation, a virtual reality projected into a virtual observer. The observer is a model of what it would be like if you existed, were uploaded into a monkey and deeply invested in its affairs. The model is used to drive a monkey in the physical universe.

Consciousness does not seem to come in degrees (but awareness, integration, lucidity and agency do). Either “the lights are on” or off. I suspect that consciousness is like fire, or life: once ignited, its activity creates the conditions for sustaining it.

What makes computation important to understanding life and minds is not the Turing machine, but the principle of causal insulation. Computers create their own, self contained world, fully governed by rules that are independent from the dynamics of the substrate.