Paul Bennun

Anyone I know at #WWDC?

Oops @thetimes

Join @chrisphilips and @jeznelson , celebrating 40 years on the radio together, as they host the opening show for OneJazz, the new global 24/7 jazz station 📻. This Saturday, May 25th, at 12 PM (GMT).🤍onejazz.net🤍 Let us know where you’re going to tune in from! 🌍

Tweeting like it’s 2009.

Where do folks stay at WWDC? First time I’ve had reason to go.

@kinggizzard not that you do this but I’ve 2 x tickets for Hamburg, Wednesday, and I’m in Los Angeles. At this point, a fan can have ‘em. Do your thing?

I have two tickets for #KGLW at the Stadtpark in Hamburg this weekend and I can’t go. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard fans in Germany, they’re going for cost price.

Who do I know who knows someone at the @vanguardjazz ?

@newjorg Been telling you dude

@MikeSims1103 @TheGuildhallBar Sure.

@PatchouliW Cough theverge.com/24153919/audio…

@benoonbenoon *patpats* you tried. I thank you for it. Perhaps the world isn't ready for an engine where only sound truly matters.

2/2 Happy: we plan to open source the Papa Engine (still the best audio VR engine in the world) and our binaural audio games.

I had a lovely conversation with The @verge’s Vergecast about the past, present and future of audio games (video games with no video): theverge.com/24153919/audio…

@stuartbuck1 @fchollet Yes, but they’d actually be fresh memories not old ones (if you see what I mean), memories of memories.

@fchollet I should have tried this myself, but what if a parent raised a child from the earliest age by drilling them on recent memories, and then constantly revisiting those memories so as to embed them more permanently. Would that work?

At age three, your memory range is about one year -- you can remember things from one year prior, but you have forgotten everything that happened two years prior.

@fchollet My guy, consciousness is not a function of capability. Sophistication of environmental awareness and understanding enables 3rd parties to recognize consciousness, no more. I suggested you’re back-to-front. Why is consciousness any more than a sense of being?

As for what drives this emergence -- my view is that consciousness requires context, both permanent context (a "world model") and instant context (your sensorimotor data feeding into an instant "situation model"). Newborns have little permanent context (they've learned very little in the womb, mostly just the basic outline of their sensorimotor space) and underdeveloped perceptual systems, so they can only manage epsilon consciousness. Note that I'm not saying that world models and situation models *create* consciousness. They don't. They are requirements for consciousness. Much like scrolling Twitter requires wifi, but wifi does not create Twitter.

My view on when consciousness emerges: newborns are not likely to be immediately conscious. Consciousness starts lighting up after birth, gradually, reaching meaningful levels around the 1-3 month mark (qualifying as fully conscious), but only reaching adult levels around age 2-3. The timeline is likely to vary significantly from one individual to another. A 3 year old enjoys the same quality of conscious experience as you do, despite having much less knowledge and capabilities.

@surfer_ec @fchollet This is interesting! Brain development is exactly the same speed—but definably human skills are all bio-cultural, and obtaining them takes longer. We have to learn culture, but our brains have the necessary features before birth.

@fchollet A baby has all the neurons it’s going to need (if you want to be reductive and call consciousness a purely emergent property of a brain). Synaptic connections aren’t remotely a solution to the Hard Problem.

@fchollet I challenge these definitions. You’re describing a neural default mode network which permits agency and 3rd party *social* recognition of a cultural ‘self.’ Neither requisite for awareness of existence.

@fchollet @mariopalomera Heavens, no. Newborns are nothing but consciousness. They learn to apply that to the physical following birth, and we recognize them as ‘people.’ A regression model is information, incapable of agency—entirely different to even a newborn.

That anecdote is questionable, but more scientifically, the brain activity of newborns shows that they can recognize their mother's voice. Which of course makes sense since brains start learning long before birth and the most basic form of learning is to learn associations. That isn't the same as being conscious -- if it were then logistic regression models would be conscious.

Oh my God Twitter is buggy. Jeez. Sorry @harikunzru that tag would have made no sense.

@perreau @alexisohanian I love them too.

@alexisohanian “We need it” oh wait that’s the rain.

I know I'm in the minority, but I love these overcast LA days.