Hyperbolaman

We've reached the horizon where I'm no longer embarrassed to admit I have long suspected LLMs have subjective experience, but now I'm embarrassed I didn't admit it before

Lobster is currently served in the finest restaurants in the world at prices that require a moment of consideration before ordering. In colonial Massachusetts, it was considered so contemptibly poor a food that servants negotiated contracts specifically limiting how often they could be fed it. Three times a week was the legal maximum in some indentures. More than that was considered cruel and unusual. The lobster washed up on beaches in piles two feet deep after storms. People raked it off the shore and fed it to pigs. To prisoners. To the destitute who had no other option. Grinding it into fertiliser was considered a dignified use. Eating it yourself, if you had any choice, was considered a mark of poverty so low that it required explanation. The journey from pig feed to prix fixe required two things: scarcity and distance. The coastal lobster population was fished down. As it became less abundant, the price rose. As the price rose, it became aspirational. The railways arrived and took live lobster to inland cities where no one had ever seen one, and the inland city decided it looked exotic, and exotic meant expensive, and expensive meant desirable. The lobster did not change. The supply changed. The story followed the supply. The same animal. The same meat. The same nutritional profile. One century: too embarrassing to admit you ate it. Next century: something you photograph before touching. Nothing about the lobster justified the new position.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett on why your brain never experiences reality directly: "Your brain is trapped in a dark, silent box with no direct knowledge of what is happening in the world." The brain never sees reality. It receives only sensory signals and must work backwards to figure out what caused them. Barrett calls this "the reverse inference problem." Its solution: prediction and categorisation. The brain draws on past experience, running an internal model to anticipate what's happening next. It groups things not just by physical features, but by function — an apple isn't just round and crunchy, it can also be categorised as "good for baking." This functional thinking gives rise to something Barrett calls social reality: "Humans collectively impose functions on objects that don't naturally possess them." Money is just pieces of paper until we assign it value. Borders are lines in the sand until we agree they create countries, and categories like "immigrant" or "citizen." Even a scowling face only carries its meaning because a culture agrees it does. "Government, emotion, national identity. All of them are constructed through this shared process of meaning-making." But while the brain is confined to its dark box, it is not limited by it: "It has the capacity for imagination: by taking pieces of past experience and recombining them into something that has never existed before." Yet she warns this is a "double-edged sword." The same capacity that lets us dream, plan, and innovate also means our brains are constantly generating predictions detached from our immediate surroundings. We ruminate about the past and worry about the future. "The very power that frees us from the present is also what makes it so hard to stay in it." Managing this requires practising a deliberate skill — controlling how much you are driven by the world outside versus the predictions running inside your head. What we call reality is a sophisticated simulation, built from memory, prediction, and collective agreement.

🚨Democrat Delia Ramirez on the SAVE America Act: "It would make it nearly impossible for about 70 million women to vote in this country." Thoughts?