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One thing I’m wrestling with is whether there’s something off with her tying belief in AGI to mathematical determinism, when AI is in fact non-deterministic.

Maybe these aren’t the same meanings of “determinism” but I don’t think so? Or at least they seem not entirely unrelated to me. It’s also interesting that the non-determinism of LLMs relies on PRNGs, which require seeding with hardware entropy.

This feels related to the her musing about whether real thought is rooted in and inseparable from the body. Still, there’s no reason to think that accessing a chunk of bytes as a source of entropy has any particular relationship to whatever happens in a human body.

Anyway that just stuck out as an odd discrepancy. I can’t tell if it matters much to her argument. Anyway, I love how seriously she treats the subject without taking the tragically ridiculous so-called “rationalists” seriously (they don’t deserve to be).

Oh and I got to learn a new (to me) word: “qualia.” Concise way to describe subjective experience.