Matthew Sheffield
@matthew.flux.community
13K followers 1.3K following 7.1K posts
🟦 Analyst and writer focusing on cognition, politics, religion, technology, and media 🟦 Host, Theory of Change 🟦 Also a software developer and web admin Signal: matthewsheffield.01
![Eric Oliver: Yeah. A player piano is not musical. It’s a player piano. In that sense, it’s not generating its own music. [00:34:00] It’s funny; it even starts with this Cartesian notion of “I think, therefore I am.” Well, if you didn’t have a word for think, then would you not exist?
I mean, that starts with the same linguistic fallacy: that cognition somehow has to be understood only if it’s oriented in some lexicon of words. And that’s one aspect of our type of cognition, but it’s not cognition in its totality.
And I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding in terms of what consciousness is. Our willingness or eagerness to ascribe consciousness to, say, LLMs also reveals what our own brains do with respect to consciousness, because our sense of self is a model that our brains are creating. I’ll maybe situate this in another way. We oftentimes think that the way we perceive the world works like this: I just open my eyes and the world [00:35:00] comes to me through my senses, and then my brain is there processing all this incoming information and kind of creating a scene.
It’s not really what’s happening. What happens is that in the moment before I open my eyes, my mind is already generating a prediction about what it thinks the world is going to be like, and then this information comes in and basically updates and varies that prediction relative to the incoming information.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:d3v6hjby4ks6xw27gbzkeihl/bafkreicexqmpt6bcu5zpze2jzpeeztfx5uy2fsugv64rv5lfzcbusvcdue)
