So many people appear to be mesmerised by their own place in the physical world, and taken by this powerful idea that the physical world is the source of it all, giving rise to everything through physical laws and processes, like our brain, a product of quaint physical processes, giving rise to consciousness.
To me, that idea seems entirely back-to-front. To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge. What’s even more interesting, is the narrative of that physical world. I am witnessing a physical world that is more often than not, trying to convince me that everything that exists has come from it - perhaps poetically in an attempt to ground (confine) me in it, grounding me in the belief that I am only alive inside the confines of what we call the physical world, where the truth is otherwise.
I simply don’t buy that my consciousness comes from my physical brain, it seems more likely that my brain comes from my consciousness - whatever that is.
I am not impressed with the idea that the conscious experience is special and is in need of explanation. Instead, I propose that the physical world is the more special and more interesting part, that needs an explanation. Not to describe all the physical laws and processes, but to explain why it exists at all. And that is done, not by distracting ourselves with searching the physical corners for answer, but instead by exploring the question of why anything would have given rise to a world like this in the first place.
And that, right there, is the truly difficult question, which is answered by peering over our shoulder into the abyss, from which we all had to run from to arrive here.
If the mind is supported by or comes from the physical world, then the hard question is "why is there something it is like to be me"?
If the physical world is supported by or comes from the mind, then the hard question is "why is the product of my thoughts sometimes incredibly malleable and other times not at all?"
From a pragmatic perspective, there are certain events that behave the same whether the mind came first and is somehow restricted in certain capacities, or if the natural world came first and is imposing itself on the mind (through whatever supports it).
For instance, falling down stairs is going to hurt in either case. If the physical world exists independently, that happens because you either are or have a body which is also subject to its laws. If there's a mental monism, that happens because you can't shape all your thoughts, and those thoughts you can't shape act on some other part of you in a way that injures what you think of as your body.
I find your position quite interesting but I feel like it still suffers the same issues I've seen in other "mind-first" arguments (I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself), such as p-zombies (how do you know other people are conscious as well?) and the origin of it.
I think both positions (physicalism vs mind-first) suffer from the same issue that is to reach the bottom of it all, except physicalism seems to have reached further. In the past we wondered what the world was made of and we observed it, coming to the idea of elements such as Aether, then later developed chemistry then physics, reaching layer below layer of rules that interact to the emergence of the layer above. Lots of rules that we can (apparently) reproduce and verify, cells emerging from molecules interacting emerging from atoms interacting emerging from quantum particles emeging from quantum fields... Maybe emerging from strings or a simulation? We don't know. It seems to me we also don't know how to tell we've finally reached the bottom of it, but what we have sounds pretty solid.
In a mind-first view it seems that this stack is upside-down, with a consciousness giving rise to a brain in a world with its objects which are made of molecules coming to existence upon observation (that is, chemistry would be a top layer after conscience further inspecting it), which are ruled by physics etc. Except this cause-and-consequence relation is not clear to me. Like you said:
> To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge.
How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie? Do I give rise to the world, or do you? Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way? And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us? (not throwing shade btw, I'm just interested in your point of view).
To me physicalism looks like a flame graph with physics at the bottom and minds at the tips of the flames, with less simpler things giving rise to multiple complex things, while mind-first looks like an icicle graph (assuming multiple consciousness) or an upside down triangle (assuming a single consciousness), with physics at the top (all "graphs" putting cause at the bottom and effect on top).
> I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself
Don't worry. You're in good company.
> How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie?
It's impossible for me to say that you are conscious. I only watch my own movie. In that movie, others appear to be watching their own movies. Their movies exist only as content in my movie. I cannot say for certain whether or not there really are conscious experiences like mine occurring. All I can say is that I am being given the impression that there are.
> Do I give rise to the world, or do you?
I do. Or at least, something impresses the world upon me. You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me, and, disappointingly (for me at least), there's no way to confirm it through this movie that I am watching. I am left having to "make up my own mind" about whether or not I choose to believe you are anything but a p-zombie extra, in what is (as far as I can see of the conscious spectrum I am able to perceive), a single screen, single reel movie. But I'm just guessing, hoping, wishing, because that's all I can do from this limited vantage point.
> Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way?
It's a cute idea. Design by committee. Books/predictions of the future seem to have this annoying property of becoming true, lending to this idea. Who knows?
> And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us?
What else am I supposed to do? If you have unimaginable wealth, infinite time and the ability to conjure anything into existence, exactly what are you to do? Perhaps you might dream up what having the opposite of your existence might be, and set about convincing yourself that you are a time-ful, perishable human-being bound by physics and inevitably limited by the finite energy available in the universe, stumped by entropy. Perhaps you even role play as the puppets on the ends of your fingers, while convincing yourself that they're just as real as you are, so you can feel what it's like not to be the majesty of your own lonely empire. What else am I supposed to do, than to go along with it? If we destroy the illusion, we're back to square one - and then what?
Lots of comments here and lots of opinions! the Consciousness conference has been discussing this since 1994, will be in San Diego this October. It is where the actual Hard problem was first proposed by Chalmers, Rovelli was at the conference a few years ago too. https://cs2026.org/ It's a great conference, with lots of interesting people and conversations. Highly recommend
I see, thanks for your reply. I'm still with physicalism so far, but I see your point. It gave me more room for thought.
> You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me.
I was disappointed here for a while thinking about my NPC nature and place in this world, then I realized *YOU* must be a (very persuasive I'll admit) feature of the world that is impressed upon *ME*. Now I'm fine again. Thanks to myself for giving rise to such an interesting p-zombie like you.
> I was disappointed here for a while thinking about my NPC nature and place in this world, then I realized YOU must be a (very persuasive I'll admit) feature of the world that is impressed upon ME.
Exactly. Now that we’re both aligned on having unreconcilable claims to being the one-true-consciousness, we can write competing holy books and argue about promised lands, and all that good jazz.
You see, once we begin playing the game, a whole host of worldly distractions crop up to occupy us. Wait until I show you this game called “having a career”, or “chasing wealth”. Spoiler alert - your body dies at the end, and you get to keep none of it, but it was fun, or at least it was supposed to be.
If I mess with the voltages of a CPU board, it can mess up the software. Do you conclude from that that software is electrical? You should conclude that it runs on an electrical substrate, but not that the software itself is electrical.
Yea, I was asking a SOTM about copy.fail, and it was freaking out, and tried to indirectly call me a hacker a few times. Weirdly, all I did was slightly reword requests, and they all went through. Granted, I am not actually a hacker, so I guess my follow-up questions made it realize that I am asking for educational purposes, but it was definitely the most accusatory, curt, and outright abrasive I have seen an LLM behave.
The biggest problem isn't the token slot machine refusing to give you the answer, but the fact that multiple refusals can end up flagging your account and getting banned from the service.
While contributing to a friend's Remembrance research, I was pretty surprised when Gemini Pro suddenly refused to answer any more questions about photos from the Höcker Album after it spotted an "SS" insignia.
Ironically, the justification it gave was that it wasn't its fault because it was just following orders. I hope this hasn't landed me on Google's list of undesirables.
It doesn’t really come as a surprise to me that these companies are struggling to reliably fix issues with software which relies on a central component which is nondeterministic.
I've noticed a lack of product cohesion in general and it does make me wonder if it's a result of dogfooding AI.
For example, chat, cowork and code have no overlap - projects created in one of the modes are not available in another and can't be shared.
As another example, using Claude with one of their hosted environments has a nice integration with GitHub on the desktop, but some of it also requires 'gh' to be installed and authenticated, and you don't have that available without configuring a workaround and sharing a PAT. It doesn't use the GH connector for everything. Switch to remote-control (ideal on Windows/WSL) or local and that deep integration is gone and you're back to prompting the model to commit and push and the UI isn't integrated the same.
Cowork will absolutely blow through your quota for one task but chat and code will give you much more breathing room.
Projects in Code are based on repos whereas in Chat and Cowork they are stateful entities. You can't attach a repo to a cowork project or attach external knowledge to a code project (and maybe you want that because creating a design doc or doing research isn't a programming task or whatever)
Use Claude Code on the CLI and you can't provide inline comments on a plan. There is a technical limitation there I suppose.
The desktop app is very nice and evolving but it's not a single coherent offering even within the same mode of operation. And I think that's something that is easy to do if you're getting AI to build shit in a silo.
Even a distributed or silo'd org chart has some affinity across the hierarchy in order to keep things in overall alignment. You wouldn't expect to use a product suite that is, holistically, not fully compatible with its own ecosystem, even down to not having a single concept of a project. Or requiring a CLI tool in an ephemeral environment that you cannot easily configure.
That's clearly a trade-off that Anthropic have accepted but it makes for a disappointing UX. Which is a shame because Claude Desktop could easily become a hands-off IDE if it nailed things down better.
And the multiple concepts of subscriptions for products, and the idea of MCPs/connectors that arent shared between the different modalities, and the idea of api key vs subscription, and two different inbound websites (claude.ai and claude.com)...
Agreed. I use the Claude desktop app almost every day, and have used Code and Cowork since their respective launch dates, and even I still have a really hard time grokking what each is for. It becomes even more confusing when you enable the (Anthropic-provided) filesystem extension for Chat mode. Anthropic really needs to streamline this.
YES! I thought it was just me being a bit scattered. But uploading an important file to a project only to have it not there because....<garbled answer from Claude> is distracting to say the least. I don't know what I've enabled offhand but I hate having to stop and try to work out why Claude can't reference a file uploaded to the project in a chat within that project. I think they should pause on all the wild aspirations and devote some time to fundamentals.
Add to that that notion mcp works for the chat but not code. now my workflow has docs I comment with others in notion, while the actual work and source of truth is in GitHub.
Need to fall back to codex to keep things in sync, but that's a great opportunity to also make sure I can compare how things run - and it catches a lot of issues with Claude Code and is great at fixing small/medium issues.
Absolutely its dogfooding AI and vibing huge features on the house of cards. Its a fucking mess, and the product design is simultaneously confusing and infuriating. But the product is useful and Im more productive with it than without it now.
Well, the fun part is that the algorithms themselves are deterministic. They are just so afraid of model distillation that they force some randomness on top (and now hide thinking). Arguably for coding, you'd probably want temperature=0, and any variation would be dependent on token input alone.
Meh. Temp 0 means throwing away huge swathes of the information painstakingly acquired through training for minimal benefit, if any. Nondeterminism is a red-herring, the model is still going to be an inscrutable black box with mostly unknowable nonlinear transition boundaries w.r.t. inputs, even if you make it perfectly repeatable. It doesn't protect you from tiny changes in inputs having large changes in outputs _with no explanation as to why_. And in the process you've made the model significantly stupider.
As for distillation... sampling from the temp 1 distribution makes it easier.
Bringing up computational determinism in the early days of AI was absolutely career-limiting. But now, even if the model itself is deterministic for batch size 1, load balancing for MOE routing can make things non-deterministic any larger batch size. Good luck with that guys!
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The play was to use AI as an opportunity to quietly insert adverts into a platform full of paying users.
The moment your company starts playing a pauper and enshitificating the products I already pay for, is the moment I stop giving you any money at all. Try it. I’m not paying you money so you can try to make more money from me. Either add value and convince me to pay more, or fuck off.
I don’t mind looking stupid. It’s actually an important part of my identity - I lay my humanity bare. I am of flesh after all.
I’m starting to suspect that it’s making it more difficult for me to land a job though. I don’t know. There’s something about it. It’s almost as if businesses aren’t hiring human beings, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
This is a distinctly Zed solution - trying to move the agent experience into the editor, rather than just giving the agent an interface with which to control and read from the editor.
Not only do the most popular editors have little-to-no incentive to implement it (they’re more interested in pushing their own first-class implementations, rather than integrating those of others), it’s much more work to integrate the evolving agent experience into the IDE than it would be to provide IDE integration points for the agents themselves.
So, I think this project would have been much more successful if it had been more focussed on keeping the agent and IDE experiences separated but united by the protocol, instead of trying to deeply marry them. But that’s not in line with Zed’s vision and monetization strategy.
It won’t be long before the big players start to release their own cloud-based editors. They’ll be cloud-based because the moat is wider, and they’ll try to move coding to the cloud in the way that Google Workspaces moved docs to the cloud. Probably with huge token discounts to capture people. If you squint, you can already see this starting to happen with Claude Desktop, which runs its agent loop on the cloud (you can tell because skills appear to need to be uploaded).
Notably, Microsoft, with VSCode and GitHub have a web-based editor advantage in this space, but no models.
It's not just Zed, Emacs has has a thriving ACP implementation in agent-shell[0], and allows for some very cool integrations[1]. There are a fair number of other clients[2] as well.
The second half of this is spot on. The now is making IDEs that can integrate with agents, not the other way around. Soon the Claude and Codex will do that for us on their hosts and the argument is it will save sending the context up.
Me being a non-US reader, it’s honestly a bit frustrating to see how often people from the US forget that a large portion of HN readers are from other countries and don’t share the same context for posts like this. It ends up assuming US context as universal.
And don’t get me wrong. I agree that corruption is horrible. I live in a country where corruption was and still is rampant. Political discussions related more closely to, let’s say, AI companies such as OpenAI or Anthropic when it comes to the Pentagon do spark interest, since they are somewhat more directly connected to decisions we can make as tech professionals in other countries, whether for moral, ethical, or practical reasons. That is not really the case for posts like these, however. To your point, I would love to see the tech/hacker community come up with ideas about solving corruption, even if it’s just philosophical discussion.
If my point still doesn’t make sense, imagine seeing posts about corruption cases from any other non-US country being posted on HN. What would you think about those?
When i browse sites based in other countries, i don't complain when there's a lot of talk specific to that country. I didn't know what Eurovision was until last week, but now LMNC is representing the UK. A lot of talk about how it should be boycotted because of Israel. How a bunch of people i never heard of are corrupt. i'm just there to cheer on LMNC, but i get why it's being overshadowed by the current politics.
I don't think the answer to that is to discourage posting US-centric stories about serious political issues. I think the answer is to encourage people from other countries to post theirs, too.
We need more understanding of each other and of each other's situations, not less. The more we tech people bury our heads in the sand about politics—every country's politics—the more likely we are to create more situations like the one we're in today.
To me, that idea seems entirely back-to-front. To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge. What’s even more interesting, is the narrative of that physical world. I am witnessing a physical world that is more often than not, trying to convince me that everything that exists has come from it - perhaps poetically in an attempt to ground (confine) me in it, grounding me in the belief that I am only alive inside the confines of what we call the physical world, where the truth is otherwise.
I simply don’t buy that my consciousness comes from my physical brain, it seems more likely that my brain comes from my consciousness - whatever that is.
I am not impressed with the idea that the conscious experience is special and is in need of explanation. Instead, I propose that the physical world is the more special and more interesting part, that needs an explanation. Not to describe all the physical laws and processes, but to explain why it exists at all. And that is done, not by distracting ourselves with searching the physical corners for answer, but instead by exploring the question of why anything would have given rise to a world like this in the first place.
And that, right there, is the truly difficult question, which is answered by peering over our shoulder into the abyss, from which we all had to run from to arrive here.