Notes

I don’t know what consciousness is but I know how it feels. It feels like inner world. And that’s what we expect other people to have when we say they’re conscious. LLMs have no inner world. They are shown a context, they process it to generate a response, they shut down, the response is added to the context. They don’t “remember” the context, it’s fed to them over and over again. No inner world. Perhaps there’s some transient consciousness in the activations in that split second when the context is processed. A ripple of consciousness that fades away with every single response.

So much of human dynamics, both individual and social, is a result of a tension between two core drives, competitiveness and cooperation. Both are innate, gained through evolution. They’re present in each of us, perhaps mixed in different fractions, nurtured differently, and both can become dominant in most of us, perhaps triggered by different circumstances. Their dynamics is collective, and the public manifestation of each pulls the public in its own direction, two competing self-reinforcing feedback cycles.

Fossil fuels are the actual forbidden fruit

It’s not good vs evil. They are not opposites on a spectrum. They are two independent instincts developed through evolution. Evil as egoism, competitiveness, war. Good as altruism, kindness, solidarity. Both are activated by tribalism, good towards us, evil against them. Each person has a propensity to both, cultivated by their upbringing and culture, and influenced by their present environment. Morality is an attempt to build a theory of the two instincts, but the instincts are the empirical ground truth. One can have both instincts active at the same time, good towards one individual or a group, evil against another. Morality cannot be universal—the instincts dictate that the moral value of a behavior depends on the tribal status of its recipient.