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1 year agoI been using D for like… 10 years or something. The biggest problem D faces and has always faced is the leadership’s lack of direction. If you lurk their forums you know what I mean.
I still hope for a D3 one day where the language is redesigned from the ground up, not that D2 is bad but it has a lot of features that never really matured properly. I really truly believe a redesign could clean up all the rougher parts and revitalize interest in the language but my hope will probably never get fulfilled.
Still use it tho…
There is a flip side of the coin for #2 and its is something no one really wants to talk about. People actually get very emotional if you even suggest it. Which is the consciousness issue.
Basically if the claim is that machine learning is on the right path to explaining how our minds work, which is a claim im inclined to agree with, then it seems unreasonable to dismiss the idea that deep neural networks now might have some kind qualitative conscious experience. I am not going to say for sure they do have conscious experience, they might not, but I think its wholly unreasonable to dismiss the possibility out of hand.
As it stands we don’t have any well accepted theories on how consciousness arises at all. The issue is actually something science is not well equipped to address in its current state, we need fundamental philosophy to address it (im talking academic philosophy not woo woo crystals shit i shouldn’t need to say this).
The best we can do now is try to find what are referred to as “neural correlates of consciousness” which is the correlation between neural states and conscious experiences but we don’t have a way of explaining why those activity patterns produce the experiences they do. We have theories on how matter acts, not what matter experiences. There is no connection between information processing and experience, that link just does not exist in our theoretical frameworks and it’s unlikely to go away with just more understanding of the details on how information is being processed in the brain. We need some way to link types of information processing to types of conscious experience, closest we have is stuff like integrated information theory but its not fully accepted.