Dionysis

@PageauJonathan The source of the symptom that Gavin exhibits is that he can not see the way the one and many can be One. One statement has to be absolute and that’s that. The one truth that excludes all difference. Dogma is by definition like that. McGilChrist is relevant here.

Who can be saved? I had a discussion with Gavin Ortlund about the Orthodox Church's position on salvation outside the church.

@Apostologia I guess someone that represents anti Christian qualities of character while arguing for Christianity is ok for you as long as he is winning people over? But think about it, if greed is the gateway are they really entering the Tradition in anything but name?

Jay Dyer is an incredible gateway for orthodox inquirers and there is not a single person who is a good representative of Orthodoxy except Christ alone. No piety signalling allowed

@Michaeldudufudu Debating technique over developing the qualities of the soul indeed. Ego inflation and self deception to the max.

Jay Dyer makes us Orthodox Christians look terrible. I unironically believe he's a great debater but hes a bad representative of Orthodoxy online due to how uncharitable he is.

@ElonFinkelstein @Rainmaker1973 I honestly thought maybe the Ukrainian player had a backstory on why he really needed the money or something similar. To people saying this is about passion: No, this is about misplaced passion and idolatry.

@Rainmaker1973 Both of these dudes need mental help. Nobody should be crying over chess.

This is what it looks like when the winner feels sorry for the loser. Ukrainian chess player Vassily Ivanchuk and his reaction to losing at the World Blitz Chess Championship vs US player Daniel Naroditsky.

@PageauJonathan We need a video on this 😁

Ha! Ha! Ha! Huh! Ugh! businessinsider.com/openai-really-…

@SRFielding72 @piersmorgan This whole thing is like an optical illusion. You watch the whole discussion and what you see is your reflection. For all his flows Brand is describing Piers’ mind frame during the interview with crystal clear clarity.

@piersmorgan Two clips that make this interview worthy of an award for you and your team, and sectioning for Brand.

I knew my Russell Brand interview would be an interesting experience when he insisted on saying a prayer for both of us before we started.

@karpathy Interesting but you have to be mindful that this store of **information** (not knowledge, it has never been more important to distinguish between information, belief and knowledge) is to a huge degree unverified, verbose and full of mistakes and even contains made up stuff.

LLM Knowledge Bases Something I'm finding very useful recently: using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases for various topics of research interest. In this way, a large fraction of my recent token throughput is going less into manipulating code, and more into manipulating knowledge (stored as markdown and images). The latest LLMs are quite good at it. So: Data ingest: I index source documents (articles, papers, repos, datasets, images, etc.) into a raw/ directory, then I use an LLM to incrementally "compile" a wiki, which is just a collection of .md files in a directory structure. The wiki includes summaries of all the data in raw/, backlinks, and then it categorizes data into concepts, writes articles for them, and links them all. To convert web articles into .md files I like to use the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, and then I also use a hotkey to download all the related images to local so that my LLM can easily reference them. IDE: I use Obsidian as the IDE "frontend" where I can view the raw data, the the compiled wiki, and the derived visualizations. Important to note that the LLM writes and maintains all of the data of the wiki, I rarely touch it directly. I've played with a few Obsidian plugins to render and view data in other ways (e.g. Marp for slides). Q&A: Where things get interesting is that once your wiki is big enough (e.g. mine on some recent research is ~100 articles and ~400K words), you can ask your LLM agent all kinds of complex questions against the wiki, and it will go off, research the answers, etc. I thought I had to reach for fancy RAG, but the LLM has been pretty good about auto-maintaining index files and brief summaries of all the documents and it reads all the important related data fairly easily at this ~small scale. Output: Instead of getting answers in text/terminal, I like to have it render markdown files for me, or slide shows (Marp format), or matplotlib images, all of which I then view again in Obsidian. You can imagine many other visual output formats depending on the query. Often, I end up "filing" the outputs back into the wiki to enhance it for further queries. So my own explorations and queries always "add up" in the knowledge base. Linting: I've run some LLM "health checks" over the wiki to e.g. find inconsistent data, impute missing data (with web searchers), find interesting connections for new article candidates, etc., to incrementally clean up the wiki and enhance its overall data integrity. The LLMs are quite good at suggesting further questions to ask and look into. Extra tools: I find myself developing additional tools to process the data, e.g. I vibe coded a small and naive search engine over the wiki, which I both use directly (in a web ui), but more often I want to hand it off to an LLM via CLI as a tool for larger queries. Further explorations: As the repo grows, the natural desire is to also think about synthetic data generation + finetuning to have your LLM "know" the data in its weights instead of just context windows. TLDR: raw data from a given number of sources is collected, then compiled by an LLM into a .md wiki, then operated on by various CLIs by the LLM to do Q&A and to incrementally enhance the wiki, and all of it viewable in Obsidian. You rarely ever write or edit the wiki manually, it's the domain of the LLM. I think there is room here for an incredible new product instead of a hacky collection of scripts.

@birchlse Read the paper. This is not uploading in any way.

This is a more likely path to artificial consciousness than LLMs, in my view.

@jhendersonYT We know what consciousness is because we are. We also know what digital computer architecture is down to the smallest scale and that it is observer relative and thus incapable of having understanding, as per John Searle.

I’m not trying to be cute/contrarian here. When people claim LLMs are conscious/capable of being conscious, what is the operative theory of consciousness here? Same question for those who say they aren’t/it isn’t possible. Right now I simply have no idea what people mean.

@LedermanHarvey Have you practiced the phenomenological method? As you are a philosopher it might be your only way out of what amounts to an intellectual pathology. I recommend Henri Bortoft’s two books and ‘History of the Concept of Time’ by Heidegger.

@PageauJonathan @tjskene @JonathanPageau I think this point, the unity of the one and the many as One, is very difficult for many but crucial. But I see Christians consider creation as “separate” from God which I find really problematic. It’s not His fullness but not separate either as that would break the One, right?

@tjskene @JonathanPageau Neither Monism nor Dualism but duality as the expression of the one.

Reflections on the Void: negativity and difference in the Bible and contemporary thinking: youtu.be/10DS7IxOVro In this video I try to circle around something that is very difficult to speak about directly — the void. From the opening verses of Genesis, where the earth is described as “empty and void,” we are confronted with a mystery that runs through Scripture, philosophy, and our own experience. What is the “not that” which underlies being? Why has the modern world become so fascinated with negativity, difference, and alterity? And how do we understand the necessary — yet possibly dangerous — role of emptiness in the structure of reality?

@dhh Nice! Worked on my Omarchy laptop for the first time during a holiday (on a Thinkpad I got for £260!) and it was a wonderful experience. Still doing my main work on my Mac Studio but I am already missing the custom window management setup..

Omarchy 3.4 will ship with a new Remove > Preinstalls option, so purists can get that barren default setup they've been asking for. Just Neovim, terminals, browser, media readers, and the defaults. Take it, heathens!

@AndyWilson55072 @elonmusk Doesn’t work though. I remember discussing this with the LessWrong crowd. It is more of an illusion of rationality because no one really tracks the numbers and the assignment is intuitive anyway. Its only real value is giving an intuition against black and white thinking.

@elonmusk Bayes' theorem is the closest thing we have to a rationality cheat code. Update beliefs with evidence, not emotion. Wish more people (and institutions) actually used it. Thanks for the reminder, Elon."

Think in probabilities

@vjbento @ThePrimeagen What other solution would you offer? Projects are getting flooded by poorly realised AI PRs. Being open only works if there is some kind of natural barrier and that barrier is gone so.. 🤷‍♂️

@ThePrimeagen Oh nice! A tool for tracking, canceling and excluding people. And it propagates throughout various projects? Thanks big brother. What a dream.

this is a really good

@Sam_kuyp The only “natural” thing about it is that it is consistent with physics. It is an unprovable attempt to retain materialist, scientific realist metaphysics and it is so crazy that you are better off letting go.

Every time I return to many-worlds, it seems so natural, so consistent with the rest of physics, and so perfectly attuned to the mathematics of quantum theory, measurement, and entanglement, that I find myself genuinely puzzled as to why it remains so controversial.

@_georgebaran @davidasinclair @Nature That is not true. Check for instance this paper and commentary: bottomlayer.com/bottom/kim-scu… There is no interaction that causes the change. The equipment is the same and the knowledge of the observer by deduction.

Reminder that in the context of the double split experiment, observation is not the act of a conscious observer witnessing it, but rather, it's the interaction itself inherent to measuring something experimentally that influences the outcome. This misconception continues to persist in popular culture and I've seen it used to argue a number of pretty crazy ideas.

The double slit experiment is one of the weirdest results ever. Particles don’t have a position until they are observed. New @nature paper shows this is true for molecules with as many as 7000 atoms. Someone should definitely try this with viruses nature.com/articles/d4158…

@dhh @ErgoDoxEZ is what you need. You just have to find your way to it 😌

I find it utterly fascinating how a $119 mechanical keyboard has managed to bring me more joy than, say, cars I've spent 1000x as much on. Life isn't linear. lofree.co/products/lofre…

@PaulVanderKlay Until we can verify the claims I have to say I trust Oliver Sacks way more than @sapinker and magazines.

Ugh. got fooled plenty before AI came and does it to me.

@drmichaellevin @DrTomFroese @KarlFristonNews @ThouArtThat @blaiseaguera @akarshkumar0101 I am listening to the podcast with @lexfridman and you are actually answering this. It is all in the algorithm. We can fully explain why that pattern emerged from lower components! But in cells the point is that the pattern emerges **despite** their alleged “programming”.

@drmichaellevin @DrTomFroese @KarlFristonNews @ThouArtThat @blaiseaguera @akarshkumar0101 🙏 But how about the hypothesis that the patterns are stored in the human (computer architecture being observer-relative at all levels)? In the sorting-algorithm experiment everything appears present in the code itself with cells checking against the CellStatus enum (FROZEN etc)

Check out our continuously updating page for the Platonic Space symposium thoughtforms.life/platonic-space… - some great new talks added recently. @DrTomFroese, @KarlFristonNews, @ThouArtThat, @blaiseaguera, J. P. Aguilera (scholar.google.com/citations?user…), @akarshkumar0101, Chris Fields (chrisfieldsresearch.com), Lauren Ross (sites.socsci.uci.edu/~rossl/), Lucy Spouncer (lucyspouncer.uk), Mariana Emauz Valdetaro (mvtta.github.io), @okw, Ben Lyons (interestingessays.substack.com), Alexey Tolchinsky (montgomerycountypsychologist.com/about), Joel Dietz (connection.mit.edu/people/joel-di…), and more coming!