zlacker

>>galnag+(OP)
I was quite stunned at the success of Moltbot/moltbook, but I think im starting to understand it better these days. Most of Moltbook's success rides on the "prepackaged" aspect of its agent. Its a jump in accessibility to general audiences which are paying alot more attention to the tech sector than in previous decades. Most of the people paying attention to this space dont have the technical capabilities that many engineers do, so a highly perscriptive "buy mac mini, copy a couple of lines to install" appeals greatly, especially as this will be the first "agent" many of them will have interacted with.

The landscape of security was bad long before the metaphorical "unwashed masses" got hold of it. Now its quite alarming as there are waves of non-technical users doing the bare minimum to try and keep up to date with the growing hype.

The security nightmare happening here might end up being more persistant then we realize.

>>Simian+0R
Is it a success? What would that mean, for a social media site that isn't meant for humans?

The site has 1.5 million agents but only 17,000 human "owners" (per Wiz's analysis of the leak).

It's going viral because a some high-profile tastemakers (Scott Alexander and Andrej Karpathy) have discussed/Tweeted about it, and a few other unscrupulous people are sharing alarming-looking things out of context and doing numbers.

>>COAGUL+i81
> What would that mean, for a social media site that isn't meant for humans?

For a social media that isn't meant for humans, some humans seem to enjoy it a lot, although indirectly.

>>scotty+cg1
This is the equivalent of a toddler being entertained by the sound the straps on their Velcro shoes make when they get peeled back and forth.

>>IhateA+e62
To be fair, that’s about the intelligence level of the “humans” looking at the site and enjoying it.

“The rocks are conscious” people are dumber than toddlers.

>>lolacc+SA2
No I'd really like to understand. Are people who make this weird argument aware that they believe in souls and ok with it or do they think they don't believe in souls? You tell me which you are.

>>donkey+NL2
I might be misunderstanding GP but I take it to mean "rock are conscious" => "silicon is conscious" => "agents are conscious", which might appeal to some uneducated audience, and create fascination around these stochastic parrots. Which is obviously ridiculous because its premises are still rooted in physicalism, which failed hard on its face to account for anything even tangentially related to subjectivity (which has nothing to do with the trivial mainstream conception of "soul").

>>namero+563
Why not, we are physical systems, computers are physical systems. If not soul, what is this magical non physical special sauce that makes us special and makes it easy to claim silicon is not conscious.

>>donkey+qk3
I don't know, you tell me: how do you _exactly_ go from quantities to qualities? Keep in mind that the "physical" is a model of our perception and nothing else.

>>namero+Iz3
What are quantities and qualities? Does exciting electrical and chemical signals in the brain and therefore inducing emotions or perceptions factor into this or is it out of scope? Or are you saying its more like a large scale state like heat in physics. If you what is it you seek beyond being able to identify the states associated with perceptions? If you are saying these "qualities" are non-verbal. Very well, do you mean non-verbal as not among the usual human languages like English, French, German, or do you mean in the most general sense as not representable by any alphabet set. We represent images, video, audio etc freely in various choices of alphabet daily on computers, so I am sure you didn't mean in that sense.

>>donkey+YM3
That's the point in contention, how to go from "electrical and chemical signals" (the quantities, mole, charge, mass, momentum, coulomb, spin) to qualities (emotions, perception, first-person perspective, private inner life, subjectivity). The jump you are making is the woo part: we have no in-principle avenue to explain this gap, so accepting it is a religious move. There is no evidence of such directed causal link, yet it is (generally) accepted on faith. If you think there is a logical and coherent way to resolve the so called "hard problem of consciousness" which doesn't result in a category error, we are all ears. The Nobel committee is too.

I agree that claiming that rocks are conscious on account of them being physical systems, like brains are, is at the very least coherent. However you would excuse if such claim is met with skepticism, as rock (and CPUs) don't look like brains at all, as long as one does not ignore countless layers of abstractions.

You can't argue for rationality and hold materialism/physicalism at the same time.

>>namero+5Z3
What if a working Neuralink or similar is demonstrated? Does that move the needle on the problem?

Betting against what people are calling "physicalism" has a bad track record historically. It always catches up.

All this talk of "qualia" feels like Greeks making wild theories about the heavens being infinitely distant spheres made of crystals and governed by gods and what not. In the 16th century, Improved Data showed the planets and stars are mere physical bodies in space like you and I. And without that data, if we were ancient greeks we'd equally like you say but its not even "conceptually" possible to say what the heavens are, or if you think they did have a at least somewhat plausible view given that some folks computed distances to sun and moon, then take Atomism as the better analogy. There was no way to prove or disprove Atomism in ancient greek times. To them it very well was an incomprehensible unsolavable problem because they lacked the experimental and mathematical tooling. Just like "consciousness" appears to us today. But the Atomism question got resolved with better data eventually. Likewise, its a bad bet to say just because it feels incontrovertible today, consciousness also won't be resolved some day.

I'd rather not flounder about in endless circular philosophies until we get better data to anchor us to reality. I would again say, you are making a very strange point. "Materialism"/"physicalism" has always won the bet till now. To bet against it has very bad precedent. Everything we know till now shows brains are physical systems that can be excited physically, like anything else. So I ask now, assume "Neuralink" succeeds. What is the next question in this problem after that? Is there any gap remaining still, if so what is the gap?

Edit: I also get a feeling this talk about qualia is like asking "What is a chair?" Some answer about a piece of woodworking for sitting on. "But what is a chair?" Something about the structure of wood and forces and tensions. "But what is a chair?" Something about molecules. "But what is a chair?" Something about waves and particles. It sounds like just faffing about with "what is" and trying to without proof pre-assert after "what ifing" away all physical definitions somehow some aetherial aphysical thing "must" exist. Well I ask, if its aphysical, then what is the point even. Its aphyical then it doesn't interact with the physical world and is completely ignored.