Reposted by Dan Miller
Explaining the American Collapse in 2060: "so, basically, everyone on the right went insane after they let a Black centre-left president into office"
Dan Miller
@meelar.bsky.social
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Queens volunteer chapter leader for @opennewyork.org. YIMBY, pro-transit, pro-biking, anti-borders-and-cars. He/him
![[Title] Believing in thinking machines, and the severe risk therefrom, does not require believing in magic.
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By Katie Surrence / On September 24, 2026 / At 8:21 am / In General
Round my neck of the woods, we are usually quite committed to materialist explanations for all of human cognition, up to and including consciousness. I share the commitment. This is quite the opposite of believing in magic. If you believe that cognitive phenomena are fully explicable, in principle, from material causes, then you have to at least be open to empirical demonstration that they could occur in another substrate, like, say, a computer. Ten years ago, I would have said, “In practice human brains can encode so much more complexity than a computer. It would require extraordinary technological advances in hardware to approach any of the interesting aspects of human cognition. Maybe someday, but this is nothing that I will see in my lifetime.” I have updated my beliefs in response to events.
Let’s consider “reasoning”. You could make a list of progressively stronger requirements for reasoning that looks like this:
1) goal-directed transformation of representations according to rules
2) goal-directed transformation of representations that have meaning, and correspond to things in the world
3) the preceding, plus drawing conclusions about representations because they are supported by evidence, distinguishing good and bad inferences
4) all of the preceding, plus conscious consideration of reasons](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:jfersscjmut66kwgcgtqmeor/bafkreifk4zgczyos2z4ndzhzvv43btu5x62blsgipsung6i4dvqlepvody)
