this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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I can define "LLM", "a painting", and "alive". Those definitions don't require assumptions or gut feelings. We could easily come up with a set of questions and an answer key that will tell you if a particular thing is an LLM or a painting and whether or not it's alive.
I'm not aware of any such definition of conscious, nor am I aware of any universal tests of consciousness. Without that definition, it's like Ebert claiming that, "Video games can never be art".
I think the reason we can’t define consciousness beyond intuitive or vague descriptions is because it exists outside the realm of physics and science altogether. This in itself makes some people very uncomfortable, because they don’t like thinking about or believing in things they cannot measure or control, but that doesn’t make it any less real.
But yeah, given that an LLM is very much measurable and exists within the physical realm, it’s relatively easy to argue that such technology cannot achieve conscious capability.
I've always had the opposite take. I think that we'll eventually discover that consciousness is so explainable within the realm of physics that our understanding of how it works will make people very uncomfortable... because it will completely invalidate all of the things we've always thought made us "special", like a notion of free will.
:)
https://philosophyofbalance.com/blog/free-will-you-better-believe-it/
I'm sorry, but that article just isn't very compelling. They seem to be framing the question of "is there free will" as a sort of Pascal's Wager, which is, umm... certainly a strange choice, and one that doesn't really justify itself in the end.
The author also makes a few false assertions and just generally seems to misunderstand what the debate over free will is even about.