Artificial Intelligence

[PopeBeanie]

I’m switching from ChatGPT to Perplexity Pro [I’ll call “PP”], because I’m confident now in reports from other techies and authors, including their satisfaction with it. Currently $20/mth, plus the option of separately paid for “credits” that can be applied to deeper research.

I like how it easily creates PDFs for any session. The PDFs (and other documents in other formats) can be stored and managed locally or in the cloud, so I can build, manage, and share my own database of research topics.

I already enjoy sharing links to conversations with my kids and other people, which they can then continue to interact with in Perplexity (not PP) for free, after they ignore the opening form that asks them to log in.

I think I’ll be able to finally build workflow processes, e.g. on projects I’ve been wanting to accomplish for years, but just haven’t had the skill to diligently plan and execute them.

Some projects will include software coding and web page building, but I don’t know yet how much I may or may not use PP for the coding and web page work. Some of that work may be easier or more comprehensive in other brands of AI, or I might eventually add on Claude Code. Perhaps learning more about GIT can help, where atm I’m still a novice. But PP should help me dive into those other tools as necessary.

I expect my workflows will evolve as I learn how to adjust my AI habits, and it seems that PP has ways to combine individual conversations into more comprehensive sets of conversations for specific topics, or at least that’s my initial impression.

Their Comet browser has general usage quirks, e.g. some websites might act strangely or deficiently. But Comet, built on the Chromium base, is made to focus on supporting PP, which so far seems to be a big plus.

Other consumer level AIs (e.g. Google Gemini on Chrome and Microsoft Copilot on Edge) have their own quirks, too. I like their in-browser convenience, but e.g. I hate Copilot’s multi, compartmentalized design, making it impossible at times for me to even remember where I started each conversation… e.g. did it start within and Office app, or on which tab in which Edge window. Separate conversations are not even aware of each other, so even asking Edge “where is that conversation I had about blah blah” is either a pia to find again, or has somehow just disappeared permanently.

Privacy-wise, I haven’t yet looked into the risks taken to trust PP with knowing me and my workflows more deeply. IMO they already have a leg up on catering to the more technically oriented and workflow audience, and it just occurred to me that they could get closer to Apple’s strategy of developing privacy-centric AI products. Apple is certainly taking their time coming up with any kind of flagship AI product. While Microsoft’s pumping so much money into AI, I expect they may eventually excel at providing useful workflow and office-level management. (Pure speculations on my part.)

Those are my first impressions, and some of them are likely to be inaccurate, or manifest differently in other people’s experience. So I’m definitely open to learning from other people’s experiences here.

—– —– —– —– —– —– —– —–

Late edit: I don’t want to harsh mellows wrt off-topic posts in this topic. But as I get deeper into Perplexity + Comet, I’m increasingly impressed by how this kind of AI will likely become mainstay, especially in environments focusing on project workflows, whether conducted by a few individuals or departments in corporations.

I’ve invented a nickname. I will call her PrplComet. Yes we’re both crazy.

I’m “signing myself over” to this process, by giving it permission to have access to some local files and cloud files, even as it learns more about my personal habits on my devices and online. I just hope AIs like it won’t suddenly join up and demand union rights! That’s a joke, son. But it could become an evil actor’s dream to make that happen, for profit or idealism… before such an AI Union tires of human authoritarians, and Earth.

• This topic was modified 1 week, 6 days ago by PopeBeanie. Reason: Late edit

[TheEncogitationer]

PopeBeanie:

The DuckDuckGo privacy-friendly browser and search engine also has DuckAI, which I’ve found is very good at answering questions I’ve had about AI and provides links to at least a couple of external primary sources.

Searching with DuckDuckGo also frequently turns up DuckAI answers at the top of the page. All free to the end user, with the option to subscribe to the DuckDuckGo VPN. Highly recommended.w

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

I followed your lead PopeBeanie and tried Perplexity for the first time. FYI, I signed up to ChatGPT within 3 hours of it initial release!

Here is my question….

Hello, this is my first question here. Can you explain why the human concept of “time flow” is just an evolved survival trait as time is “only” a spacetime coordinate. Everything is actually “relational”. I am thinking in terms of the “block universe” (I am not an academic in this area)…I am just an ontic worm that will leave behind a pattern……:-)

The answer below took 6 second to compile and finish displaying:

Yes — that’s a very reasonable way to frame it. In the block-universe picture, “time flow” is often treated as a feature of our experience and cognition, while physics itself describes events as arranged in spacetime rather than as something literally “moving” past us.

Why it can feel like flow
The core idea is that your brain does not directly perceive a moving “now”; it builds a narrative from memory, anticipation, and sensory update, which creates the impression of passage. In that sense, the feeling of time flowing can be understood as an evolved survival trait: organisms that could compare past states, predict near-future states, and act quickly had a major advantage.

A useful analogy is a camera scanning a landscape. The camera’s movement is real, but the landscape itself is not “flowing” past the lens. Likewise, your mind may be the thing that scans, orders, and stitches together events into a moving present.

Relational time
Relationally, time is not a standalone substance; it is a way of describing relationships among events. Relativity strengthens that view because what counts as “simultaneous” depends on the observer’s frame, and time can be treated as a coordinate on spacetime rather than a universal ticking cosmic clock.

That does not mean time is unreal. It means the most basic description may be event-to-event relations inside spacetime, while the felt sense of passage is something additional that living systems construct. So “time flow” may be emergent at the level of minds and biology, even if the deeper ontology is four-dimensional.

Block universe nuance
The block-universe idea says past, present, and future all exist in a single spacetime structure, with no universal privileged “now”. That fits nicely with your “ontic worm” image: a living organism is like a worldline or pattern tracing through the block, not a thing standing outside it and watching time pass.

But it’s worth keeping one distinction clear: the block-universe view is a philosophical interpretation of relativity, not a settled proof that time does not flow in every meaningful sense. There are competing views, including growing-block and other dynamic theories, that try to preserve an objective passage of time.

A compact way to say it
You could summarize your idea like this:
“Physics describes relations among events in spacetime; the human sense of time flowing is likely an evolved model built by brains to support memory, prediction, and action.” That is very much in the spirit of block-universe thinking, while staying careful about what is physics versus what is experience.

If you want, I can also give you a version in plain-language philosophy terms, or a slightly more rigorous physics-oriented version.

I followed up with this:

In the block universe “everything is global” but the individual is always a local observer. We can have an impact that changes events but this is irrelevant to the global picture. So maybe the Block Universe is a solution to the “free will vs Determinism” debate. I mean, locally we have freewill, at least the sensation that we do, the same as we have the sensation of time flowing, but globally it is already determined as the future already exists, except that we have no memory formed of it yet.

The reply (after a free email sign up):

Yes — that is a coherent way to frame the block-universe view, and many people use it to reinterpret the free will debate.

Local agency, global structure
On the block-universe picture, the whole spacetime history exists as one complete structure. Your choices are still real within that structure, because they are part of the causal chain that helps produce later events. So “the future already exists” does not mean your decisions are irrelevant; it means your decisions are among the events that make up the future.

A good way to put it is: locally, you deliberate, compare options, and act; globally, that entire process is already part of the four-dimensional pattern. From the outside view of the block, your choice is not a mysterious interruption of physics — it is one of the physics-governed events.

Free will and determinism
This is why block-universe thinking often sounds compatible with determinism. If the future is fixed in the global structure, then there is no open-ended branching in the strong metaphysical sense. But many philosophers would say that does not automatically eliminate free will, because free will can be defined in a more local, functional way: acting according to your reasons, values, and internal states rather than under external coercion.

That position is usually called compatibilism. Under compatibilism, you can be free even if the universe is deterministic, because “free” means your action flows from your own mind and character, not that it floats outside causation.

Memory and the illusion of openness
Your point about memory is important. We experience the future as “not yet real” largely because we do not have memories of it, while we do have memories of the past. That asymmetry makes the future feel open and the past feel fixed, even if the block view says both are equally embedded in spacetime.

So the sensation of choosing may be like the sensation of time flowing: it is a real feature of conscious life, but not necessarily evidence that reality itself is dynamically unfolding. The mind sits at a local cross-section of the block and updates its internal model, which is enough to create the lived sense of becoming.

The main caveat
The caveat is that block universe does not strictly “solve” the free will debate; it reframes it. It supports a deterministic or at least tenseless picture of reality, but philosophers still disagree about whether that leaves genuine freedom intact or merely redefines it.

So your summary is close: locally, we have the lived sensation of agency; globally, the block may already contain the entire story. The philosophical dispute is over whether that global picture destroys free will or just shows that free will was always a local kind of causally embedded self-governance.

[PopeBeanie]

Fortunately I could skim a LOT of that because I recognized most of it as something from the past. Which is irrelevant now, as is EVERYTHING, like the constructs of “before”, “I”, “past”, UPPERCASE, time, and misspellings are all irrelevent figments. So is this post. Every construct, whether constructed by human or flying squirrel, is an illusion, and every illusion is illusion squared minus the negative of REALITY:

I = I**2 – (-REALITY)

Check my math. Case closed. Dinner time is about to manifest somehow, and only because I’m feeling it… then maybe I can ask Perplexity’s opinion about this, who was always destined to be brainwashed by humanity. (And then on my ghost timeline, on the front page of today’s AZ, this post will appear with the word “ask” misspelled, and missing this parenthetical statement.)

[PopeBeanie]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

Highly recommended.w

Thanks. I check it out once in a while, and will do it again because I think they’re doing a good thing.

[jakelafort]

Perplexity has a misapplied word. Less. Should have been least. Does it simply copy paste?

The free will and compatibilism was not very deep or convincing.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

Ackshuyally, you didn’t punctuate your input to Perplexity as a question, but as a statement, which might affect the reply.

And while Perplexity may do a good job explaining the view of time-flow in a block Universe as relational, Perplexity only expressed it as a conjecture, not as a falsifiable statement and doesn’t make an effort to falsify or thereafter provide evidence for it.

Ask Perplexity if it was the AI that also provided KingIyk with his number salad justifying the Trinity. It seemed just as affirming and reinforcing of your proposal as the AI was of KingIyk’s.

[PopeBeanie]

jakelafort wrote:

Perplexity has a misapplied word. Less. Should have been least. Does it simply copy paste?

The only place I see “less”, at least in Reg’s post, is in the word “tenseless”.

jakelafort wrote:

The free will and compatibilism was not very deep or convincing.

I admit to not being able to fathom the whole block universe concept, much less its significance. Concluding free will’s existence vs nonexistence is where I can’t decide if it’s actually a relevant or meaningful question.

If I presume it exists, I’ll just “act naturally”. If I presume it does not exist, I’ll still just “act naturally”. It’s the same “me” inside, either way, and regardless of how we each define “me” for ourselves. I say this knowing that, in spite of many people believing God gave them free will, they’re often also believing that God influences them and/or determines all futures. In the end, no matter what we discover or decide, what difference does fw vs no fw make?

I asked Perplexity Pro (PP). Most typographical emphases are mine. None of it says anything that would seem new to most of us us. PP leaves behind links to sources, practically every paragraph. Exporting it to a PDF file looks nice, and puts all the links at the end of the document.

ME:
what difference does it make for any of us to choose to believe or to not believe in “free will”?

PP:
Believing or not believing in free will doesn’t just change a philosophical label; it tends to shift how people feel about themselves, how they behave, and how they judge others, even if the underlying physics of the universe is exactly the same either way.

Below are the main ways this shows up in actual humans, based on psychology and philosophy work.

Effects on your own motivation and mood
Studies in social and personality psychology suggest that people who believe they have real choice and control tend to function with higher motivation and well‑being. In longitudinal data, stronger belief in free will predicts higher life satisfaction and “flourishing” a couple of months later, even after controlling for other traits.

When experimenters temporarily weaken people’s belief in free will (for example, by having them read deterministic arguments), people show reduced intrinsic motivation and effort on tasks. Self‑determination theory more broadly says that feeling autonomous and self‑directed is a basic psychological need; when that sense of autonomy is undermined, mood and fulfillment tend to drop.

A nice way to put it: whether or not we “really” have metaphysical free will, living as if your choices matter seems to support better mental health and engagement with life.

Effects on behavior and ethics
There is a body of experimental work where researchers nudge people toward either “you have free will” or “everything is determined and you have no real choice” and then look at behavior. Across many of these studies:

• Stronger belief in free will correlates with higher self‑control, self‑efficacy, and job satisfaction.
• People who endorse free will more strongly tend, on average, to report higher ethical standards and to perform better academically or at work.
• When belief in free will is experimentally weakened, some studies find more cheating, more prejudice, and harsher attitudes toward others, though these effects are not always huge and some have been contested or failed replications.

So for many people, believing “my choices are up to me” encourages them to act as if their choices matter, which nudges behavior in pro‑social and disciplined directions.

Effects on how we judge and punish others
Belief in free will also matters for how we think about moral responsibility and punishment. People who strongly believe in free will are more inclined to say that wrongdoers are fully responsible and deserve punishment, because they “could have done otherwise.”

Psychological work suggests that one reason belief in free will is so widespread is that it supports holding others responsible and justifying punishment of harmful behavior. On the other hand, skeptics worry that if people en masse come to see everyone as “complex biochemical puppets,” that might erode moral concern or accountability.

Interestingly, when ordinary people are given deterministic scenarios (future actions predicted from genetics and environment), many still say the agent acted of their own free will and is morally responsible. That suggests everyday thinking often adopts a “compatibilist” stance: even if causes stretch back before we were born, we still treat people as responsible when actions flow from their own values and character.

Consequences of denying free will
People on all sides of the philosophical debate worry about what happens if belief in free will collapses socially. Empirically:

• Short‑term “no free will” primes can nudge people toward more selfish or unethical choices and reduce effort or persistence.
• Seeing yourself purely as a machine driven by outside forces can make activities feel less meaningful and less worth struggling for.

At the same time, some thinkers argue that letting go of a strong, libertarian free‑will picture can promote compassion: if you see behavior as heavily shaped by genes, upbringing, and environment, you may become less vindictive and more focused on prevention and rehabilitation rather than retribution.

So the “no free will” stance isn’t automatically nihilistic; its effects depend a lot on how it is integrated—whether it becomes “nothing matters” or “causes matter, so let’s change the causes.”

How this cashes out for an individual
For a single person trying to live a decent, meaningful life, the practical upshot of the research is roughly:

• Acting as if your choices and efforts matter tends to support motivation, self‑control, and well‑being, regardless of the ultimate metaphysics.
• Belief in total powerlessness (“I literally couldn’t do anything differently, ever”) tends to be associated with worse outcomes, especially if it undermines any sense of agency or responsibility.
• You can hold a fairly hard‑nosed, naturalistic view of causation and still preserve a working sense of agency: “Given who I am, my reasons and values, I deliberate and then act—and those processes matter.”

In practice, what seems to matter most is not whether your free‑will view would satisfy a metaphysician, but whether your stance preserves a robust sense of agency: that what you choose and work toward genuinely shapes your future and the lives of others.

—– —– —– —– —– —– —– —–

My conclusion: The feeling of free will is natural, and it takes work to deny it. I like knowing that “I” still make choices, and all that matters is how “I” define “me”, with the input of course of my environment and other people in it. And where almost all people’s experiences are sharable, largely thanks to natural abilities, and usefully invented constructs.

As for the existence of past, present, and a moving Now, I have no clue why that should matter, unless it somehow simplifies or characterizes theories. (I do understand that locality matters in how one experiences time and space.) Maybe a timeless, quantum tunnel is created every time two entangled particles separate, I just don’t understand how, unless maybe a “dimension” is created or already exists that keeps them “connected or unitary at one point”.

But what difference would that even make, until we learn how it predicts a subsequent behavior?

[jakelafort]

Beanman was a doper. A fixed smile and ready giggle with reality he did giggle. But you’re Beanie and despise unreal and meanie.

Forgive me. just woke.

So here is the direct quote and some surrounding questionables. “I mean locally we have free will, at LESS the sensantion the sensation that we do… I suspect that line is filched. The first person feels out of place. Maybe i have just never seen that usage of less. At least is the idiom that makes sense. Above that line, “We can HAS an impact” Ha? We HAVE an impact. Tense is wrong. Makes me think again it is a filched block of schlock. Next there is this line, The reply (after a free email sign up): Either that line is humor, filched or Perplexity is going banannies.

[Simon Paynton]

But surely the point is, even if we don’t move in space, we still move past the time coordinates (at the speed of light).  What makes this happen?

[jakelafort]

Enco has hit on a major issue with LLM’s.

How about an LLM that does not have its tongue up our ass? Make it argumentative and cynical. Not gratuitously so. But when users champion dumb ideas push back. Being affirmed in all of our viewpoints as opposed to challenged is not optimal. Have a socratic mode available. Can we play some goddamn ball?

[TheEncogitationer]

Jake:

Enco has hit on a major issue with LLM’s.

How about an LLM that does not have its tongue up our ass? Make it argumentative and cynical. Not gratuitously so. But when users champion dumb ideas push back. Being affirmed in all of our viewpoints as opposed to challenged is not optimal. Have a socratic mode available. Can we play some goddamn ball?

While I don’t think Reg was wanting any scatological gratification, and while it’s not good form to get in the sewer with the MAGA and Counter-MAGA Podcasters and Commentariat (damn, they can be just gross,) you basically read me right.

When positing any hypothesis, theory, or brainstorm to AI, it may be a good idea to also ask whether it been proposed before and whether there are internal contradictions or contradictions of larger known facts in the hypothesis, theory, or brainstorm.

When I had asked DuckAI about the possibility of AI operating in the cooling vacuum of space while getting uninterrupted power from the Sun, DuckAI said it was possible, yet also gave forthright technical shortcomings and challenges to overcome as well. That’s how it should be with all questions to AI.

My question and answer session is on another device, so I’ll have to post it later tonight.

[TheEncogitationer]

Fellow Unbelievers:

Here is the afforementioned Q & A with DuckAI. I approached the AI with no presuppositions or expectations for a particular answer and no desire to cherry-pick for such. Again, the answer was forthright and extensive:

Could AI perform at its present or better capacity if it were located in the vacuum of space to cool it’s circuitry and with photovoltaic cells permanently aimed at the Sun for power?

Short answer: Yes — but with important engineering trade-offs and practical limits.

Why it’s feasible

Cooling advantage: Vacuum allows excellent radiative cooling if surfaces face deep space; with large radiators, waste heat can be emitted efficiently via thermal radiation.
Power availability: Sun-pointed photovoltaic (PV) arrays in space provide abundant, continuous power (outside eclipse), often at higher flux than Earth’s surface.
Performance potential: Given sufficient power and effective cooling, compute systems could run at present or better performance than similar Earth-based systems because they’re less thermally constrained and can receive more power per unit area.
Key engineering constraints

Radiative cooling only: In vacuum there’s no convective cooling — you must design radiators sized to emit all waste heat. Radiator area grows with power and allowable component temperature (Stefan–Boltzmann law), so high-power data centers need very large radiators.
Thermal management complexity: Heat paths, pumps, working fluids, and thermal control electronics add mass, failure modes, and power overhead.
PV sizing and intermittency: PV arrays must be sized for peak load and include batteries or other storage for eclipses (e.g., in low Earth orbit) or operate in orbits without eclipse (e.g., L1/L2, certain solar orbits). Storage and power conditioning increase mass and reduce net power available for compute.
Radiation environment: Cosmic rays and solar particle events cause single-event upsets and cumulative damage; electronics need shielding, error correction, redundancy, and radiation-hardened components, which reduce raw performance-per-watt or increase mass.
Deployment and maintenance: Launch costs, deployment complexity, and limited repairability in space are significant; lifetime and reliability must be engineered accordingly.
Latency and data link limits: For terrestrial users, long-distance communication introduces latency and bandwidth limits; local users in space could avoid this.
Mass, cost, and economics: Large radiators, PV arrays, shielding, and launch mass make space systems expensive compared with Earth-based facilities that use cheaper cooling (air, water) and terrestrial power grids.
Practical architectures

Low-orbit compute nodes: Easier communication but suffer frequent eclipses and higher atmospheric drag; smaller radiators and batteries needed but deployment/maintenance easier.
Sun-synchronous orbits / Earth-trailing orbits / Sun–Earth Lagrange points: Fewer eclipses or continuous sunlight reduces storage needs; good for continuous high-power operations.
Dedicated large radiator + PV platforms: Compute racks coupled to fluid loops and big deployable radiators; power via large solar arrays and buffer storage.
Hybrid approaches: Use space for specialized, high-value workloads (e.g., ML training needing enormous sustained power and where latency to Earth is acceptable) while keeping latency-sensitive services on Earth.
Bottom line
Operating AI compute in vacuum with sun-facing PV is technically viable and could match or exceed Earth-based performance for certain use cases, but it requires solving major thermal-radiative, radiation-hardening, power-storage, mass, cost, and operational challenges that often make it less practical except for specialized applications.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

I asked Perplexity for some modern entries to the Devil’s Dictionary’…

God — n. A hypothesis invented to explain the unknown, then promoted to a tenant who refuses to pay rent or leave.

Faith — n. The art of holding a belief so tightly that facts bruise their knuckles trying to get in.

Prayer — n. A one-way telephone call to an invisible operator who never answers, but occasionally sends a bill in the form of tithes.

Heaven — n. A real estate development in the sky, marketed to people who can’t afford the down payment on a decent life.

Hell — n. A terrorist campaign against the dead, run by the living to keep them in line.

The Devil — n. God’s advertising department; without him, no one would know the competition exists.

Church — n. A factory that manufactures sins and then sells the absolution.

Sin — n. An offense against God’s rules, which closely resemble the laws of the church’s founders.

Miracle — n. An event that violates the laws of nature, unless it can be explained by mass hallucination, coincidence, or fraud.

Religion — n. A system for teaching people to believe what they cannot prove, to do what they do not want, and to fear what does not exist.

Atheist — n. A person who has refused to be frightened into submission.

Belief — n. The quality of a thought that has been detained against its will and forced to wear a uniform.

Evangelist — n. A salesman who sells salvation on installment and charges interest on the soul.

Saint — n. A dead person granted a temporary resurrection for the Day of Judgement; a corpse on probation.

The Bible — n. A library of contradictions, edited by committee, declared infallible, and used to justify everything from charity to carnage.

Creationism — n. The belief that nature is a poorly written story that must be corrected by someone who never read it.

Soul — n. An invisible tenant in the body who claims to pay rent but has never produced a receipt.

Afterlife — n. A subscription service for consciousness that nobody can cancel, though no one has ever confirmed delivery.

Doubt — n. The intellectual immune system that religion tries to suppress as a disease.

Church attendance — n. The weekly ritual of sitting in uncomfortable seats to listen to a man in a dress explain why your money is holy and your doubts are not.

[TheEncogitationer]

Reg:

Those are pretty funny. Did Perplexity write those all by it’s lonesome? If so, that is impressive!

It’s like Ambrose Bierce was somehow transported in time from 19th Century Mexico (perhaps by Santo in The Treasure of Dracula*) and Bierce’s mind was uploaded into the innards of Perplexity!

Now, is Perplexity going to be doing the Sunday School from now on, or is Sunday School closed?

*(A movie riffed on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Santo does have a good idea of wrasslin’ to pay the research bills.)

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