Category Archives: Miscellaneous

A number makes all the difference when naming a post

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Here’s a random interesting thought that crossed my mind.

Right now I’m considering doing a blog post about episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants that scared me as a kid (I’m not kidding, some episodes were seriously terrifying). Consider the post title:

SpongeBob Episodes That Scared the Shit Out of Me

Now add a number to the title of the post:

12 SpongeBob Episodes That Scared the Shit Out of Me

Just by adding a number to the start of a post, the title suddenly seems like a cheap clickbait Buzzfeed “article”. I put “article” in quotation marks because most of those gif-flooded list pages on Buzzfeed barely count as articles.

It’s a bit of a shame how you can’t give articles like this catchy names without seeming like clickbait nonsense. But I wasn’t really planning on giving the article a name with a number in the title anyway.

Artificial consciousness – how can it be at all possible?

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about artificial intelligence, from reading this awesome two-part article (1, 2) on artificial intelligence, written about a month ago by Tim Urban on his awesome blog-style website “Wait But Why”. If you haven’t read the article, read it now. It’s a lengthy read, but it’s COMPLETELY worth it.

Among the many things that interested me in that article was the idea of artificial consciousness. It’s exactly what its name suggests – artificial machines being conscious in the same way humans are.

So a few days ago, I was thinking about artificial consciousness, and realized that I didn’t understand how in the hell that can be a thing at all. I was confused even more when I learned that many fictional robots, for example Wall-E or the robots in Futurama, are conscious and self-aware. What’s that all about? Was I missing something about artificial consciousness that the creators of Wall-E or Futurama understood?

In this blog post I will attempt to explain why the idea of artificial consciousness is hard to understand, and how it’s possible for artificial consciousness to actually exist.

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