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I don’t think I’m talking about panpsychism. To me, that’s just giving up and hand wavey. I’m much more interested in trying to come up with a more concrete, empirical definition. I think questions like “Well, why aren’t plants conscious” or “Why isn’t an LLM conscious” are good ways to explore the limits of any particular definition and find things it fails to explain properly.

I don’t think a rock or electron could be considered conscious, for example. Neither has an internal model of the world in any way.

It all depends on what you mean by “conscious”, which IMO doesn’t fall under “Maybe everything is conscious” because that’s wrongly assuming that “conscious” is a binary property instead of a spectrum that humans and plants are both on while clearly being at vastly different levels. Maybe I just have a much looser definition of “conscious” than most people, but why don’t tropisms count as a very primitive form of consciousness?

The big news will be that John Titor is being sent back in time to save us from the Epochalypse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

In his online postings, Titor claimed to be an American soldier from the year 2036, based in Tampa, Florida. He said that he was assigned to a governmental time-travel project, and that as part of the project he was sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer, which was needed to debug various legacy computer programs that existed in 2036

I tried feeding frozen peas to ducks in a pond near me. The peas mostly sank below the water immediately, and the ducks didn’t seem to care for them anyways. A few of them came over to investigate and weren’t interested after checking them out. I might’ve been doing it wrong, or maybe the ducks just were just too used to getting fed bread.

IMO posts like this are great. It’s way better to post stuff you want to see than complain about what’s getting posted. It’s also how we get good memes and we could use a few more beyond beans and Nicole.

Not really a question, but something to think about is being more strict about backwards compatibility so that people don’t get burnt out on having stuff break. Coming from this post by the Tesseract dev, who did not like the breaking changes to the v3 API in 1.0: https://dubvee.org/post/2904152

To formulate that into an actual question, do you think the changes are still worth it and you’d make the same decision to break backwards compatibility?

Excited to see the idempotency feature. That will help a lot with double posts from using https://github.com/RikudouSage/LemmySchedule