If you were a product in your fridge, you wouldn’t be the jar of pickles.
You’d be the milk.
The one with the short expiration date.
Imagine that.
Oh wait...

Vastly exceeding the number of stars in the observable universe, interactions that can never, ever, even in principle occur, because the simulation does not share the causal signature of the thing simulated.

And this is not just throwing out the causal baby with the causal bathwater. It is throwing out the causal baby with the causal ocean: a combinatorial explosion of possible interactions on the order of 10^24 and beyond.

So why does functionalism suddenly sound acceptable only when the target is consciousness? In every other case it reads like hogwash about simulations magically becoming the thing simulated.

Substitute consciousness with some other physical phenomenon, say an ocean.

A digital simulation can preserve abstract structure, dynamics, even functional relations. But it does not become wet, saline, massive, or hydrodynamically forceful. It does not inherit the causal powers of an actual ocean.

Digital computation is designed to keep layers relatively separable. Brains are not. And what we care about w.r.t. brains is not that they are organic, biological or mushy, but the *causal work* their do.

Brains are not like that. Their causal powers are inseparable from physics, chemistry, timing, morphology, and organization interacting across levels at once, including everything the body does in tandem.

Digital computation is always physically realized too, but it is engineered precisely to suppress substrate-specific detail and preserve abstract state transitions across many media.

Functionalism brags that “causal structure matters,” then throws away the actual physics doing the causing.

Future technology and products (part 1): exobiological barriers and filters Our evolved filters, linguistic processing, skin, taste, smell, even the blood-brain barrier, will not be enough to keep bad, hostile, deceptive, or unknown things from affecting us.

mentalcontractions.substack.com/p/future-tec...

Our evolved filters were not built for synthetic pathogens, persuasive AIs, spoofed identities, memetic attacks, and superhuman agents.

A huge new category is coming: systems that help humans detect and resist harmful influence across biology, information, and cognition.

Link in next post.

As to what a biology that puts this complexity first will look like, I'm hoping my new book, The Genomic Code, will illustrate it! 😊

Droste Detective on Steam You're stuck in an office corridor with no exit that has a framed picture of the same corridor on the wall. But then you notice the corridor in the picture is not quite the same. You decide to inspect...

With my studio @figmenthol.bsky.social, I've been working on 3 games since mid last year. Check 'em out:

store.steampowered.com/app/4192370/...
store.steampowered.com/app/3949530/...
store.steampowered.com/app/4135890/...

#gamedev #indiedev #horror #puzzle #chess #madewithunity #steamnextfest

6. Tendency toward indirect or "polite" communication styles, such as hinting or sarcasm, which obfuscates intent and increases the risk of misunderstandings in straightforward, logic-based interactions.

5. Impaired sensory filtering, characterized by tolerance or even preference for high-stimulation environments (e.g., crowded spaces, loud noises, or multitasking), which leads to burnout or errors in precision-oriented work that requires controlled sensory input.

4. Overwhelming need for constant social validation and group affiliation, manifesting as distress when alone. This may include pathological "networking" behaviors or inability to tolerate solitude, interfering with productive hyperfocus periods common in normative populations.

3. Difficulty sustaining deep, specialized interests (often derogatorily called "special interests" in allistic contexts); instead, exhibits fragmented attention across multiple shallow topics, leading to incomplete knowledge acquisition and reduced expertise in any single domain.

2. Compulsive engagement in superficial social rituals (e.g., "small talk" about weather or unrelated topics), which disrupts focused discussions and drains cognitive resources without contributing to meaningful information exchange.

1. Excessive reliance on ambiguous social cues, such as facial expressions/tone of voice/body language, leading to misinterpretation of literal communication. Individuals may insist on "reading between the lines" even when information is explicitly stated, resulting in unnecessary confusion.

Persistent deficits in logical processing and sensory regulation, as manifested by at least five of the following, present from early development and causing clinically significant impairment in occupational, academic, or solitary functioning in a predominantly autistic society:

What if high-functioning autism was the norm?

### Allistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

#### Diagnostic Criteria

The future of technology is self-generating. And while not everything is efficiently generated and re-generated "in-situ" and thus won't be, we are at the opposite end of the spectrum currently. So we will see a massive, paradigm-breaking shift on this.

It's actually bizarre AI companies just nerf models and consumers pay for basically randomly variable performance.

That...shouldn't be legal.

You go to a restaurant and it's not like "Maybe you'll get 100 grams of food, maybe 400 grams, depends on our cash flow today."

POTS 'N SHOTS

ChatGPT's depiction of how I treat it, lol.

It's quite remarkable that for all their flaws, current AI models are shockingly salient, to the degree in fact that in some cases it's a toss up between salience and subjectivity w.r.t. what should be done, when and how.

It'd be insane if it were otherwise. The game may sort of "little", but the art is grand.

🤣

Quick, Bose-Einstein Condensate!

One thing AI really means for the world is that everything becomes auto-actionable, thus an executable.

Your ideas all get to be .exe

One day, not as far away as you might think, much like what we have today wasn'r as far away as we thought in 2020, you will be able to prompt reality.