Global Timeslip PKD Webinar runs on zoom all day today. Like wack TV in your background! Yah, mon. Phil TV! John Shirley, Cody Goodfellow, and Rudy at 10:30 am PST (god willing / dog barking). www.philipkdickfest.com/telethon
Rudy Rucker
@rudytheelder
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Rudy Rucker is a transreal cyberpunk writer with a checkered past. Fiction: The Ware Tetralogy, Complete Stories, Postsingular, Sqinks, etc. Nonfiction: Infinity and the Mind, The Fourth Dimension. He paints & sells his works online. His novel Juicy Ghosts is about bringing down an insane evil President. Read it. Paintings at https://www.rudyrucker.com/paintings
I'm reading Pynchon's MASON & DIXON these days, VERY long, 70 sections, each a separate fantastic talel. (Smoaking pot with G. Washington, yes!) I'd avoided the tome for years as I "don't like" history. But now I do...vibrant, live, human, funny. Sugar, coffee, tobacco = wild gab. The Wikipedia outline helps a lot.
I'm taking part in a global time-slip PK Dick festival, on Sunday, tomorrow, talking about cyberpunk, around 10:30 California time with John Shirley and Cody Goodfellow. https://www.philipkdickfest.com/telethon
Artemis launch coming up at 3:30 Pacific time on PBS. https://www.youtube.com/live/08IOsxF1os8?si=wpNquhn5VJR3jbk4
WATCH LIVE: Artemis II blasts off on journey sending astronauts around the moon
The philosphers are throwing in the towel. Talk by David J. Chalmers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07103
Within a decade, we may have robust systems with senses, embodiment, world models and self-models, recurrent processing, global workspace, and unified goals. They will be conscious.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07103
Within a decade, we may have robust systems with senses, embodiment, world models and self-models, recurrent processing, global workspace, and unified goals. They will be conscious.
Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?
There has recently been widespread discussion of whether large language models might be sentient. Should we take this idea seriously? I will break down the strongest reasons for and against. Given mainstream assumptions in the science of consciousness, there are significant obstacles to consciousness in current models: for example, their lack of recurrent processing, a global workspace, and unified agency. At the same time, it is quite possible that these obstacles will be overcome in the next decade or so. I conclude that while it is somewhat unlikely that current large language models are conscious, we should take seriously the possibility that successors to large language models may be conscious in the not-too-distant future.
Final "Surfer Girl." I ran it through a Photoshop/Lighroom add-on called Topaz. For denoise & sharpening. Topaz actually works better than Adobe for these tasks! Astoundingly clean. www.rudyrucker.com/paintings
I'm struck by the wit, plotting, and cross-referencing in our ongoing life stories. It's an objective property of reality, not an illusion. As a writer, I compare our synched world to a novel. Surely the *world* is better-written. Thus the clever touches. And we're in that book. Hooray!
Cable car joy with Desmond and Georgia.
Thanks for the happy birthdays! Bonus: Stephen Wolfram turned up the eve before the party. We talked philosohpy of computation. Says he: AI neural nets contain clots of incompressible computation. These multipotent clusters are linked, like supermoledules in an organism. Happy birthday, Rudy!
