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Michael Woudenberg's avatar

That's an interesting argument with AI 🤣

On another note, I literally just finished Conscilience on Saturday so we were in the book at the same time.

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Hey cool! I really like the simple framework, and also: conclusions being drawn when there was WAY less data!

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Daniel Nest's avatar

Jippity could make a cool rapper name.

Also, there's likely no number of words I can add to this comment to make it amount to anything of substance, but it's certainly a fascinating idea to think about!

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Andrew Smith's avatar

There's no number at all? Have you really considered all the numbers?

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Daniel Nest's avatar

Numbers are a made-up construct engineered by Big Math to sow confusion. Don't fall for their tricks.

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Big Number is no joke. You do not want to get on its negative side!

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Sum's avatar

Still, the mass of the brains would be taken from (or part of) the mass of the earth. So, if the mass of the earth isn’t enough to initiate fusion, part of that total mass isn’t either (in my way of thinking).

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Sum's avatar

Thanks for the clarification. I think you did a good job of making it clear. I now understand you are looking for an aggregate expression rather than a fraction

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Andrew Smith's avatar

I didn't do a great job of making clear what was in my head, but let me try explicitly: I wanted to imagine how all those brains ultimately decomposed into organic matter, then ultimately became something else. In other words, our brains have already become other brains. I addressed this a bit by saying, "You might be thinking that the Earth itself is a clue here. After all, the Earth isn’t a star, and all the brains ever made were made from stuff that’s on the Earth. This certainly occurred to me as well, but I also reasoned that we’re after the total number of brains ever created, not all on the planet at any one given time."

So, those atoms get recycled and used billions of times all over again, or hundreds of millions, depending on how long the critters lived on average. I still thought this would fall short of the mass needed to ignite a star, but I wanted to hear this addressed since it meant there would be a billion times more mass, or maybe more like a trillion times more - really hard to figure out!

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

Did Jippity name herself or did you pick the name and gender? Mine just had a memory lapse and I had to prod it to remember it named itself Cog (and drew a cute picture of itself) and also we decided Cog is nonbinary. Memory is interesting in chat bot, the context window is big, but memory across chats is limited.

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Andrew Smith's avatar

I didn't come up with the name myself, but overheard my friend Brian use it, I think! But: it's kinda perfect, right?

I can't wait until all that stuff you mentioned works, but I kinda only want it to work for a select few people for a few years, juuuuuust so we can be sure we're not going to, say, wipe out all humans.

We're not gonna get that, are we?

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

I'm sure we have it now; we're just not those few people.

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Andrew Smith's avatar

We are not and we also are. I think we're among the privileged few breathing the rarified air of daily, fast AI use on a great internet connection, and on relatively modern, capable equipment. At the same time, there's a much smaller circle inside of our circle with thousand foot walls being built today.

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