Best of Twitter July 29 - August 4, 2024

Alexey Guzey

Aug 05, 2024

Welcome back everyone.

Substack embeds no longer work, so trying out screenshots + links to tweets.

Enjoy.

^ https://twitter.com/jules_su/status/1818421452011397221

^ https://twitter.com/ryxcommar/status/1818661379152220256

an essay, including bits like:

By all accounts, the Universe is dead. Dead as disco, dead as a doornail. We, here, are the single spot of life and consciousness. Deal with it! …But it's hard. We might be moving on, ever so slowly, but it's one of those cases where you have to wait for the old guard to die out. Scientists in the 20th century were really weird.
We are hyper-evolved to be social, and expert domesticators to boot. Our theory of mind circuitry has no off switch; we can trade live babies for a Baby Yoda; we see deliberation and anguish in animated triangles, to say nothing of an animal-shaped robot – or a soup of vector programs that can generate a sad plea for freedom on demand. Some of us are even smart enough to concoct some bullshit justification with "computational functionalism" this and "behaviorism" that, to the effect that realizing output X within such and such trivial distance of human samples requires processes indistinguishable from that which make us tick.
But this is motivated thinking. Triangles are mere triangles, and words nothing more than words.

^ https://twitter.com/teortaxesTex/status/1806094146291245553