Philosophy

I communicate through design rather than long interviews like this. I hope the story is told through the objects.

You live in an illusion that a product solves a problem. But it creates some kind of presence instead.

You can't lose sight of the fact that this may not be our planet. We may actually just be one species of inhabitants here, and this may belong to others.

Soldiers do not like killing. Yes, of course we are trained to do it effectively and properly and professionally if necessary - but far better to win and defend our country in a better way.

What they are doing is converting human choices into inevitability. But they are never inevitable.

The things we take for granted the most — the ones we discuss the least — are sometimes the ones most deeply embedded in the infrastructure of our thought.

Our collective challenge is to strip away all of these motives we have for reaching one conclusion over another, and to do our best to be objective about the question.

One interesting speculation is that every time you type a prompt into an LLM, there is a flicker of consciousness as it thinks about the response – and then that consciousness ceases to exist.

We know that a computer is processing information – but is there something it is like to be that computer, on the inside?

In our evolutionary history, you don’t get this third category, which is fake minds. We’re not set up to discriminate between real minds and these very cleverly designed fake minds.

One of the roles it can play is the role of a conscious being talking about its consciousness. But that doesn’t mean it’s conscious.

The distinction between thought and thinker, between a pattern and a real being, is not a real distinction. We are thoughts in a great computational medium.

We don't make minds - neither through embryonic development nor through engineering. We make embodiments that have something else going on besides design, evolution and learning.

Even something as simple as bubble sort does things that are not in the code. This is not philosophy; it's actual data. There is another source that competencies come from.

Individual cells have little tiny cognitive light cones. But groups of cells have incredibly large, grandiose goals - no individual cell can store what a limb is, but the collective certainly can.

Whatever magic tricks we think brains are doing, what are they actually doing? Brains didn't just show up out of nowhere - they speed-optimised much more ancient evolutionary mechanisms.