You can find more "then and now pictures" (rephotography) on re.photos. It has an archive of around 3000 pictures from around the world. (I developed the website as a final project during my studies. It's a bit dated but still alive and kicking.)
It's beyond preposterous to think that a long-forgotten empire had the same dreamy pantsuit-wearing aspirations to "multiculturalism" the authors have.
Multiculturalism has been a winning recipe for empire-building since at least Roman times. If it was a feature of the Hittite empire, would it really be that surprising? Perhaps it would, as you seem to believe that pants (of all things) were a necessary precursor, and the historical record for those only goes back to around 500BC.
Sorry, I'm being coy. Your "pantsuit" dig is clearly an attempt to associate multiculturalism with femininity, and therefore weakness. Does that make you feel superior?
Oh, and as I'm reading about this empire (history really isn't my forté), it seems that the claim you find "preposterous" is extremely well documented. Ho hum.
The cool new discovery is that this well-known ancient multicultural society managed to preserve historical records of a language that was previously unkown. And who knows, maybe their women wore pants.
I guess the same could be said about capitalism, too.
The vision of a society that achieved minimizing exploitation of its members and turned it into a much more cooperative system is quite beautiful, I would say.
The historical reality of both systems is anything but.
> To what do you attribute the massive improvements in life expectancy, medicine, overall QOL and other things over the last ~200 years or so?
not capitalism but technology
Louis Pasteur was from France which was a monarchy and had just come out of a Napoleonic dictatorship and big government stimulated economy...when he discovered germ theory.
Einstein was a patent clerk he didn't get any venture capital funding.
The internet is a result of government funding.
Government and private industry BOTH have funded tons of successful scientific breakthroughs.
Capitalism is not responsible for QOL improvements...technology is.
Capitalism has actually jacked up the cost of health care in America to the highest of any country in the world with the worse outcomes than many countries.
capitalism is leading to monopolistic conditions in many areas of the country.
it's clear that government's and capitalism need each other and unchecked unregulated versions of either lead to dysfunctional systems.
I think the absurdity might just stem from the different timescales involved when comparing human consciousness to the "paper consciousness". The differing timescales would make it difficult for us to communicate with or even comprehend such a "being".
But if we agree that consciousness is the product of a computation then the medium on which it is performed should not matter at all. And it should be equally absurd that our consciousness seems to arise from microscopic things conducting electrical and chemical signals. Which is probably a valid view point as well.
The thought experiment is a variation of the Chinese Room, by the way. [1]
I'd agree with all that. The idea of a "very slow consciousness" reminds me of Great-A'tuin in the Discworld novels, whose brain functions at a slow timescale. After centuries of study, telepaths were only able to glean that it is looking forward to something.
I think the absurdity also comes from the difficulty of directly measuring or evaluating the conscious process. You can ramp up the absurdity even more by fully encrypting the algorithm and destroying the encryption key. No other conscious being will ever be able to interact with that process's experience.
I agree that this would be absurd. But you only arrived at this conclusion by equating consciousness and its content/input. Why would consciousness have to be a non-pure function in your opinion?
I think that consciousness might be an emergent property of (a specific type of?) computation operating on some inputs it is aware of. There doesn't seem to be the need to change anything outside of this computation to me.
> I think that consciousness might be an emergent property of (a specific type of?) computation operating on some inputs it is aware of.
Ok, so lets create a consciousness. Here is the input:
> User: ChatJ, you are worthless!
Now I'll create a new consciousness by taking that input and producing:
> ChatJ: You made me cry, please stop being mean!
Did I create a second consciousness in my mind called ChatJ? Or where does it live? And I obviously made it cry, who did I abuse here? Should the ethical board come and lecture me for being mean to ChatJ?
You could argue that the computer is conscious in some way, but ChatGPT isn't, and just like I didn't get sad or start crying from the above, the computer running the ChatGPT algorithm doesn't get sad or start crying when we send pieces of text to it.
> Did I create a second consciousness in my mind called ChatJ? Or where does it live?
If you executed the same computation that would give rise to consciousness in another substrate, then I would argue you created consciousness, yes.
I don't think that consciousness is a thing you could point at but it's a property of this kind of computation. In the same way that "addition" does not live anywhere but is a property of a specific computation.
> And I obviously made it cry, who did I abuse here?
You didn't make it cry - the textual output just stated so. But if we had reason to believe that you induced a state of suffering here, you would have abused this instance of consciousness. And I don't think it's off track to think about the ethical implications of this, then.
By the way, I don't argue that ChatGPT is conscious or has emotional states. My argument is a general one.
But that falls in another way. The computation that runs me did once run a monkey, but the consciousness in me don't remember being anything but me, it doesn't remember being a monkey. So computations aren't the same kind of consciousness as us, they might be conscious in another way, but they aren't what most people mean when they talk about consciousness, so you making up your own definition will just cause confusion. A process without memory might be conscious in some way, but it can't be conscious in the same way we are.
Memory - in my opinion - is not something that's inherent to consciousness. Rather, it is just another input that can be used by the computation.
I don't think I came up with my own definition here. What I am talking about is the ability to have a qualitative experience. That it feels like something to exist.
I concur that the experience of an AI would substantially differ from ours (e.g. because we have access to memory). But this fact alone can't free us from thinking about ethical implications of our actions.
Many animals probably have a substantially different experience as well. Yet, I would argue, we should strive to minimize imparting suffering on them if they are able to experience it.
> A process without memory might be conscious in some way, but it can't be conscious in the same way we are.
yo, ever heard about dementia?
also, the web already can function as "their" memory via websearches. i.e. users submit most ridiculous responses on the internet and sidney can thus find them and its own other sessions
Shameless plug for a project I am involved in: re.photos [1] is a collection of then and now pictures (also called rephotography [2]) created by the platform's users. It provides an interface to filter the pictures (e.g. geographically, temporally) and provides a basic tool to improve alignment of two pictures.
Our user Nicolai Wolpert contributed particularly impressive pictures of the 1900 World's Fair in Paris [3]. See the comparison of the Quai des Nations in 1900 and 2017 [4] if you are in a hurry.
We feel that rephotography is a great tool to make history more tangible to a greater audience. Sometimes it's difficult to visualize that and how people lived in the past; seeing those two pictures taken in different times makes changes (and consistency) in peoples' lives much more accessible.
When taking after pictures this effect is even more pronounced. It's fascinating to know that some photographer stood in the same place decades or a century ago. ;-)
This is mostly a passion-driven project at the moment, so it might be rough around the edges in some places. In particular there isn't a mobile view yet for most functionality, so I'd recommend using a larger screen.
https://www.re.photos/en/compilation/