Comment on Elon Musk Is Rolling xAI Into SpaceX—Creating the World’s Most Valuable Private Company

• zalgotext@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It’s a bunch of technobabble loosely related to his harebrained scheme to launch a fuckload of solar powered AI servers into LEO.

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  • Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Okay, so I am taking it too literally because he’s not even trying to be accurate with the description. What a weirdo.

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• partofthevoice@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  “Sentience” is like this hand-waving magic word. Defined typically as the ability to experience sensations and feelings, it’s very anthropic and egocentric.

  We know that life evolved on Earth, to include our own species. We know that much life on Earth has an internal sense for pain and pleasure, as well as many instinctual drives like self-preservation. We know that our species knows things, and we know that other species don’t have the same depth in their capacity to know things. We’ve demonstrated that other species don’t seem to understand the world in the same way as us humans. Yet, we’ve never quite figured out what any other species knows. We’ve never modeled their form of sentience, let alone our own. We only really know about sentience intuitively, via our own experience. We judge everything’s capacity as though it’s either less than, equal to, or greater than our own — without consideration for how something might just be different. Not higher or lower, but parallel in a way.

  I don’t know what sun sentience would be like, not any more than I already know why any sentience is like, but I can say one thing for sure. Our own sentience is heavily influenced by bias: social, political, legal, economical, financial, emotional, religious, moral, and scientific bias. Peel back those layers of bias, what’s left? Sun sentience might be something like that, like a blank slate that just exists.

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  • PointyFluff@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The sun is not only sentient, but sapient and aware of it’s eternal damnation; be thankful you can’t hear it screaming.

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    • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      if there was a infinite line, like so:

      <——sentient——sapient——> 
      

      … where it marks each stage of “awareness,” where would you personally think humans go on that line?

      ---

      If you think it belongs over the “sapient” point, I’d think that’s very interesting. Isn’t it also interesting that we bond most well with animals that exhibit human-like social behavior?

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  • Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Big tangent, but I just want to say I love this reply, and it’s a great example of what reddit has lost and lemmy has preserved.

    Speaking of other species and knowledge, whale songs IMO are something like the dialup sound we used to hear when our internet went over the land line. Apparently they can hear each other from an ocean away as well. Whales may have entire religions for all we know. It’s fascinating to think about, and they’re right here on this planet with us; the Sun only knows what else is out there.

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• eronth@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  He probably used AI to generate a mission statement for the merged company.

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• hector@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Any sort of universal god would not care about the daily life of bacteria on a piece of dust in an unimaginably larger system.

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  • Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    exactly

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    • hector@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yeah it’s a coin toss whether they would want to check us out further, or use the galactic form of chlorine on the area.

      But odds are they would neither specifically know nor care. In likelihood I imagine there is other life, and not all based on carbon and water. There could be life on gas giants, even on suns, based on completely different chemical interactions.

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      • Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I also think about this a lot. For all we know the storm on Jupiter is thinking.

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  • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I disagree completely, and I am not a believer in any god. You care about things as a human, but (should a god exist) don’t you think it a step too far to assume a gods experience would be anything at all like our own? Whether it cares or doesn’t may be the wrong question entirely — too anthropic of a question. Even if it did have the human sense of care in its faculty of psychology, something that entirely be a social construct, then wouldn’t it equally so be arrogant to assume what a creator does/not care about? A creator might care a lot about you, and sees suffering as some kind of tough love… who the hell can say? The universe could be infinite, and that could simply be a preference in design. Who the hell can say?

    God isn’t our enemy, whether or not it exists. Our enemy is the people who claim to speak for god.

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    • hector@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      What I’m trying to say is I believe in the utterly indifferent god. It likely neither knows nor cares about us. We would go to church about it, but what’s the point?

      We do not have all the answers, and we should accept that, from our position on this speck of dust in the unimaginably larger system we live amongst, we should just embrace that we don’t know everything, despite the experts telling us affirmatively the age and size of the universe as if they could know, or the religious leaders espousing ideas the age of reason has proven to be wrong.

      Part of wisdom is accepting what you don’t, and what you can’t know.

      I don’t really disagree with much of what your responded with however. Creator is a nebulous term. Creating biological machines that evolve to meet their conditions become rather removed from those creators if separated by unimaginable large distances between solar systems. There is no way any being seeding life would survive to watching it evolve over billions of years, even if some form of transport could break the speed of light, which I believe to be impossible.

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      • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Yeah, I’m agreeing with you more now.

        I’ve thought a lot about god and decided that, even if it does exist, my best way to honor it would be to live my life honestly and freely as though it does not exist.

        I’ve considered the argument about the size of the universe, with us being specks of dust in all of that…that perspective does make us seem insignificant, until (IMO) you consider that we humans (as far as we know) are the only species in the whole universe that even tries to worship a god. We’re matter that asks about morals, and it’s possible you might only find that here on Earth. Given, we’re the center of the epistemological universe — not the ontological one.

        I’m not saying that’s necessarily true. I am saying, however, that there are angles while make us more significant even in this big universe.

        Personally, I like to think of God as being the first thing that could move. It very well may be explained as a quirk of quantum mechanics that results in the state of nothing being inherently unstable — allowing for something to arise. We are beings of that something which this mechanic produced, and that’s godly enough (relative to me) for me.

        Again, I’m not saying that’s what god is necessarily. That’s just how I think about it.

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