Hopefully Interesting

 The recent 80th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima brought to mind some thoughts I'd had when I was watching the Oppenheimer movie a little while ago, and so I thought I'd finally get around to writing them up.   Ultimately Truman thought that dropping the atomic bombs was the best way to bring about Japan's unconditional surrender and its hard to disagree about that.  The most obvious alternative at the time would have been a land invasion of Japan.  One can certainly have "clean" land combat that takes place far away from most civilian residences and which is a matter of combat between professionals.  That wasn't what had been seen recently in the Pacific war though.  The recent Battle of Manila fought as the Allies liberated the Philippines saw the death of around 20,000 soldiers but 100,000 Filipino civilians.  In taking Okinawa 100,000 soldiers died and about 100,000 of island's 300,000 civilians, some because they h...

      With the rise of generative AI we've all seen a lot of discussion about whether AIs could be conscious, now or in the future.  While many of these discussions are productive I've seen others that look more like the proverbial youths arguing about the question  "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"   That's not a question you can just answer, but by realizing that "sound" can mean both an auditory experience and a sequence of vibrations in the air and so dissolve the question , satisfying our curiosity without answering it directly.     I don't see us having any hope at this moment of dissolving the much harder questions around artificial consciousness, but I do hope that recognizing that the term "consciousness" can mean different things in different philosophical and scientific systems can make discussion more productive.  I see three major schools of thought there which I'll call ...