Kyle Roth

The main text below is my summary of the points in the book, and I’ve put my commentary in sidenotes. If you want a Marxist, postmodern response to these ideas from the devil himself, check out Jordan Peterson & the meaning of life by Philosophy Tube. Reason and moral purpose come from Athens and Jerusalem, and without those things the West would not be where it is today. Socialism means taking handouts from the nanny state, and while our society continues to function with capitalism bearing the weight of socialist programs, it’s in the process of crumbling. People on the left like to blame institutions and systems for current woes, when in reality this is the freest, most egalitarian society that has ever existed. That’s why we see the conflict over political divides strengthening in America. The West is losing its attachment to reason and moral purpose, instead shifting to intersectionality, hedonism, and scientific materialism. Happiness is built on a sense of moral purpose, and is achieved by maximizing individuals’ ability to pursue that happiness. Scientific materialism and atheism are problematic because they take away that moral purpose.

These are some thoughts I’ve had while listening to a Lex Fridman interview with Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at UC Berkeley working on mathematical quantum physics. In the information age, we like to see everything as computation. But what do we mean when we say that something is computation? We mean that a physical system with predictable interactions has a meaningful result. If we somehow learned that the universe was computational in nature, the only thing that adds is that the universe’s state is meaningful somehow.

On 2022-11-03 a class action lawsuit was announced against GitHub Copilot on the basis of copyright infringement, and now (2023-01-13) there’s one for stable diffusion (against StabilityAI and friends). Browsing through r/StableDiffusion, I’m seeing lots of posts like this making the very memeable point that 5 billion images can’t be stored in a 4 GB model. From the original poster:The thumbnail for this post was generated with stable diffusion. See the alt text for details. Yes, I’m not great at this.

The first thing you should know is that this book is only 2 hours long in audio form. That’s short! She managed to get into the difficult details while keeping the jargon accessible. (It helps that we literally know nothing about consciousness.) This book argued alternately for neuroscientific, illusionist, and panpsychist theories of consciousness. It explains the hard problem of consciousness, and then later really explains why it’s so hard. As a science-oriented person, t’s so easy to forget why it’s hard and start to explain things purely physically. When I do that, I end up thinking there’s got to be a neuroscience explanation. When I pay attention once again to my own experience, I lean towards some kind of panpsychism. The author really lays bare her own thoughts, and carefully spends time walking us through simple thought experiments to fight off the assumptions that we bring to the word “consciousness”.

Read this book before you turn 60. In fact, read it before you’re 40. Read it before your parents are 60. Read it if you have parents! Read it if you’re a person who is likely to die sometime in the future. This book gave me tools for the hard decisions that exist for people in the last decade(s) of their lives. Before reaching this stage of life ourselves, we don’t think about it much because we’ve tended to separate the aged from our communities. We’ve lost a cultural understanding of what a good death looks like. This book brings that knowledge back to a world with modern medicine.