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Three days ago I conducted my annual celebration of emergence.

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Sep 11Liked by Andrew Smith

Me, every time I start reading an Andrew article: "Ah, I am going to mention [relevant thing] about this topic in my comment."

Andrew: *mentions [relevant thing] in the article itself*

But yeah, emergence in LLMs. Good stuff.

Also, Tim Urban has a concept he calls "The Human Colossus" to refer to the emergent qualities of humanity as a whole, arising from all of us acting collectively within and across societies.

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I'm familiar with Tim's Human Colossus idea, and I like it a lot!

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There’s no I in ‘Team’!

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There is meat, though.

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Sep 12Liked by Andrew Smith

There is also “mate”, but that’s rather tame.

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Tame, team, mate, meat.

How meta!

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Ooh that’s dark i don’t know what to do with that. One thing that strikes me from time to time is that all computing (including LLMs) is built up from the basic concept of two states - off/on, zero/one, black/white. That includes LLMs. Quantum computing is interesting because it changes those two states into a continuum of grays allowing true parallel computing (which I don’t think our brains really do either). So if I squint - that’s the opposite of your position here.

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Is it the opposite of my position? I'm not sure. I think quantum computing is very likely to give us vastly more complex systems than the component parts of the system can produce individually, but isn't that the same sort of emergence I'm describing so far?

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The squinty part is that the hive mind is built up from the simplest of rules. If we get more intelligence when the base building block gets more complex ... it challenges that premise

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Oh, I see! I think it can start ultra-simple and then you can have emergence into something much more complex, but I also think you can start with something more complex and get something even more complex. I think it's still emergence, I guess is what I'm asserting.

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Yeah agree and I'm glad that made sense because the battery on my iPad just died so now I'm squinting at my phone where my patience to type is low

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Sep 11Liked by Andrew Smith

The more we learn about consciousness, the more likely it seems that many other organisms experience a form of it. With troubling implications considering how we treat those organisms.

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