DaveSumm

I did indeed, ‘try’ being the operative word. It’s where I discovered Gödel and worked backwards from there to Nagel and Newman book (I forgot which, either GEB:AEGB or Penrose’s The Emperors New Mind enthusiastically recommended ‘Godel’s Proof’. I think I got about halfway and struggled, though this was many years back so maybe I should take another run up at it. I had a streak of reading everything I could find on these sorts of topics, and then realised that I was romanticising the idea of finding that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, be it micro-tubules or programming loops or just some kind of tangible thing that one could point to. This has X, so it must be conscious. This doesn’t, so can’t be. I’m wary of falling into that trap nowadays as I don’t really think it’s a solution that will be so easily identified.

Excellent point, I imagine someone has suggested using this as some kind of barometer of true intelligence, whether an AI can ever reason its way around Gödel like we can. I really need to read Nagel and Newman’s ‘Gödel’s Proof’ again, it needs refreshing every few years as I gradually forget how mental it is.

Cool, so what is it? It reminds me of the ‘left and right’ problem, in that it’s impossible to define either direction without referencing said direction. Imagine aliens visited and we had a cracking conversation about physics and mathematics, when certain things got invented and how, comparing histories. “What about consciousness?” we ask. “Con… what? We don’t have that, I don’t know what you mean”. “You know, that sensation that makes you feel like you’re aware you exist.” “I am aware I exist. I still don’t know what you’re talking.” “Well … that thing we’re confused about, but you don’t appear to be. How about this: imagine you were a bat. It’d be ‘like something’ to be a bat, wouldn’t it.” I mean seriously, ‘it’s like something’ is such a feeble answer to anyone who isn’t already confused about it. It’s called the Hard Problem for a reason, we haven’t got our hands around what the problem actually is, because as far as we can tell, there isn’t anything to be explained. The entire function of the brain is completely explainable from what we know, that we have motor function and memory and logic processing. There just isn’t some magic space that accounts for us feeling sentient, feeling like something fundamentally different has happened to us that hasn’t happened to a toaster. “The toaster seems to be confused about something it can’t explain” isn’t much of a statement to someone with a full technical manual of a toaster. Maybe confusion is just a by-product of complexity? To be fair, I don’t believe that. I do think there is something fascinating happening, and I’m fascinated that of all the various scientific truths we know of, my own consciousness is the one I can be surest of. Even if I’m a brain in a jar in an alien lab, or I’m in a simulation, I MUST be conscious. However confused I am, the confusion exists and someone must be the subject of that confusion. But I also believe we’re a long way off of real progress on this, and AI will go sailing past this benchmark while we’re all still in the dark.

We have no clue what it is. Theories range from “it’s a programming loop” to “it’s quantum mechanical tubules” to “it literally doesn’t exist, it’s an illusion”. That doesn’t sound like a theory we have a good handle on. We’re completely incapable of describing what we’re even talking about, other than to reference our own confusion; ‘that thing that has no actual inconsistency to be explained, other than that we all appear to be confused by it’. And they’ll let us know, awesome. Go ask Chat GPT if it exists or not. A “lol” at one of the most complex and vexing issues imaginable, I return your ‘lol’ my friend.

Not today of course, but theoretically, yes.

I agree with most of @Spockydog’s thoughts earlier in the thread, humans have this desire to hold themselves as separate and special, when the truth is nothing fundamentally different is happening when AI trains on data than when humans do. It’s muddier when we do it cos it gets fed into the most complex thing in the universe, gets muddled up with a bunch of other incomprehensible factors and gets spat out again. But one day, AI will produce art as good as we can, better even. If we can’t define it, then we can’t decide when it becomes art. Same as sentience; we don’t understand it, so we won’t know when and if computers actually attain it. We aren’t magic, we’re just computers.

Nevermind.

Great call on Reddit that the Ant-Man shrine is for the version that tried going up Thanos’s ass

When 55 years old you become, look as good, you will not.

It’s a shame we can’t get the full continuity of this being the actual Logan from Logan, but I suspect we can infer a similar backstory. It’s not like that Logan had a clear cut backstory anyway (being both the X-Men 1 and the DoFP version somehow). Does feel more like Wolverine and Deadpool from this trailer.

Eh, right now the concept of ‘this show you’re not digging but worse animation’ isn’t really doing it for me. I think in the scheme of how comic book-y stuff can be, this is just a bit too comic book-y for me. Each to their own, I just thought they might split the difference in tone to bring it more in line with the MCU.

Gotta say, as a huge MCU fan but one who never watched the X-Men cartoon, I have no fucking clue what’s going on with 97. I watched a recap of the original series, and wasn’t gonna bother with 97 but then constantly see people tripping over each other on reddit to praise it. It’s … alright? I’m sure it’d be exciting to see a sequel to something you knew and loved, but with better animation and writing. But for a new watcher, it’s just all over the place. I had to look up what this was Part II of, cos I assumed it was an old episode … but nah, it’s two episodes ago. But it’s in space now, and who the fuck are these people. I’ll probably stick it out seeing as I’ve made it this far, and I could see them tying this into What If? or maybe throwing some references into Deadpool and Wolverine. But this feels squarely aimed at old fans and nothing more, I’m getting very little out of it.

Well Phase 2 had Thor: The Dark World which I think is way worse than Quantumania. Probably the worst villain we’ve seen vs probably the best. Neither the ‘warriors three’ nor the Darcy-Selvig-Foster combos have an ounce of chemistry in sight. Thor and Loki are the best things in it and it’s neither of their best films. Maybe I’ll be more down on QM when I rewatch it, I’ve only seen it once. And to be fair you’re right, the shrinking stuff was fun in the first 2 which is absent here.

I really don’t get the disdain Quantumania gets. I swear if you put it in Phase 3 everyone would’ve given it a pass. It’s not great, but I think it’s better than AMatW, at least. It feels more coherent than The Marvels to me, it broadly executed the idea it set out to do.

Intelligent civilisations? And is the 20,000 the current number or the tiny fraction of the current number? Either way, at a number that small I don’t find it remotely difficult to imagine that none of them end up covering the galaxy in probes. There’s so many hurdles to clear; would other species want to do that, would they have that same curiosity and drive to do something they’d never witness the fruits of? Would they know how? Is it even possible? Would they be sure enough to know it’s a good idea? I mean what if it’s successful, and every solar system has their very own probe parked up waiting for a civilisation to evolve to the point they could examine it? Is that a good thing? What does it do to their culture?

I added my wife to mine, she doesn’t even drive and the rate plummeted. Now I just get joined insurance every year purely for the discount.

Whole heartedly agree with the first part, I’ve never grasped what’s paradoxical about all this. But not sure I agree with the second; we know quite a lot about why we wouldn’t have heard from aliens. The light speed limit is very likely the hard speed limit for the universe. We know it’d take an immense amount of energy to transmit any signal loudly enough for anyone to reasonable hear, even assuming you pointed it in the right direction. It is fundamentally not surprising that we have not detected signs of alien life, and it’s bizarre that people suggest otherwise given that we don’t even have a workable theory of how they would do that. My depressing conclusion is that aliens pretty much definitely exist, and we will pretty much definitely never find out.

I started rewatching the MCU recently, I’d taken a long break and figured it was time. It’s really weird how people say it’s too much work to keep up with Phase 4 and 5, when actually the opposite is true; continuity was much more of a thing back in the beginning. It’s what it’s missing now IMO, some bonafide consequences and shake ups for the whole universe. Moments that, both in and out universe, make people think “OK this changes things”. Phase 1 is full of tie ins to other stuff, and it goes out of its way to flex that it’s part of a universe. Then Avengers basically reveals to the world that aliens are a thing, which is pretty huge. Phase 2 presses home this change, with every film referencing that the world is a different place after NY. Then Winter Soldier casually wipes out S.H.I.E.L.D, up to now the glue that’s been holding everything else together. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D obviously had to pivot hard after that, then Ultron basically ruins Stark’s whole vision of how he wanted to protect the Earth. Then with Thanos rumbling in the background, oh SHIT the Avengers just broke up… oh and now Asgard just blew up. Fuck. Then the snap speaks for itself obviously. Pretty shocking that they did it, but nothing compared to the fact that they had to live with it for five years. Each phase has a distinctly different status quo that informs the films in it. And there’s where the multiverse saga falls down; Loki was pretty good, but it takes place in a weird pocket of time. How much does it affect Earth 616, on the ground in the present? It doesn’t. Neither do any of the Disney+ shows. Black Widow? Nope, set in the past. Eternals leaves a corpse they famously don’t reference, which again, doesn’t actually change much. Even Kang’s existence and the existence of a multiverse isn’t actually a pivotal thing; the audience learns of them, but they were always there. F4? Different universe. X-Men? Probably a different universe. Nothing consequential seems to happen anymore. Which is all a long winded way of saying the multiverse works for some stories, but as a way of moving the entire franchise along I don’t think it works. It’s all too abstract, and they really need to remind audiences what’s actually going on in the universe they built - like, telling us who the Avengers are or if there even is a team right now or have someone mention this as a problem would be nice. It’d lay the ground for Thunderbolts and Young Avengers much better if this was in response to a lack of actual Avengers.

Apparently it was timed so that her kids could break up from school before the announcement. Which makes sense. It seems obvious now in hindsight of course, she had an operation and then wasn’t paraded around so we can all gawp at her and decide for ourselves if she’s OK. There was no answer to ‘what’s going on’ that wouldn’t make all the conspiracies look insensitive. I feel bad for her, she can’t even get cancer without the whole fucking country getting involved.

Wouldn’t there be a ton of phone footage / pictures if “W&K” (as Kevin Pietersen calls them) just randomly popped down the farm shop? Also, anyone else struggle to read W&K as anything other than ‘wank’…

This is all exactly me; find Waititi funny, like his other films, normally love this sort of comedy. I was mildly entertained by the film, not enough to bother with the series. As far as comedy goes (and I guess it’s a sitcom? Even though it’s animated?) still The Simpsons; just blows my mind how strong their first 8 years were. Season 3 onwards they churned out nothing but classics for 6 years. I don’t know of any other show that’s sustained that level for that many episodes. Also I think it was mentioned a while back but I rewatched Malcolm in the Middle recently, the first few seasons are outstanding. It gradually tails off into averageness after a while, but like Friends I don’t think it ever got really painful (like The Simpsons obviously did … twenty five seasons ago).

It was a flippant point, I know it’s not good comparing authors in such a way. I was just staggered how much an author could cram in while another works on the same novel for 13 years. I also usually defend Sanderson at these junctures, purely because I held off on reading him for years because of comments like the previous ones and assumed he churned out any old garbage. But he really doesn’t, no he hasn’t written anything as good as aSoIaF at its best, far from it. But he’s written some excellent books, many far more focused and better paced than Feast and Dance. And he’s built a hell of a shared universe in the Cosmere. Ice and Fire is better, but it’s not “oh I reckon he takes 13 times longer to write one of these” better.

I think it’d be up there as far as ‘sitcoms with a studio audience’ goes. That’s kind of broad by definition, I can’t think of any higher brow comedies filmed with a laugh track that way.

It seems there’s a Secret Project 5… because why not I guess. Someone in the comments has listed all the books Sanderson has written since GRRM put out A Dance With Dragons and there’s THIRTY THREE BOOKS on that list. More words than GRRMs entire career apparently.

It was an impressive piece of writing that that actually made sense within the episode, I think it got as far as “they don’t know we know they know we know”. I agree with someone a few pages back, Friends deserved to be as popular as it was. Yea it dipped in the later seasons, but even then I don’t think it had any really embarrassing “oh god why are they still making this” episodes.