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
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- 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
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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.
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People used to talk about the idea of uploading your consciousness to a computer to achieve immortality. But nowadays I don't think anyone would trust it. You could tell me my consciousness was uploaded and show me a version of me that was indistinguishable from myself in every way, but I still wouldn't believe it experiences or feels anything as I do, even though it claims to do so. Especially if it's based on an LLM, since they are superficial imitations by design.
Also even if it does experience and feel and has awareness and all that jazz, why do I want that? The I that is me is still going to face The Reaper, which is the only real reason to want immortality.
Well, that's why we need clones with mind transfer, and to be unconscious during the process. When you wake up you won't know whether you're the original or the copy so why worry
But then again, what's the point?
I just don't think this is a problem in the current stage of technological development. Modern AI is a cute little magic act, but humans (collectively) are very good at piercing the veil and then spreading around the discrepancies they've discovered.
You might be fooled for a little while, but eventually your curious monkey brain would start poking around the edges and exposing the flaws. At this point, it would not be a question of whether you can continue to be fooled, but whether you strategically ignore the flaws to preserve the illusion or tear the machine apart in disgust.
People have submitted to less. They've worshipped statues and paintings and trees and even big rocks, attributing consciousness to all of them.
But Animism is a real escoteric faith. You believe it despite the evidence in front of you, not because of it.
I'm putting my money down on a future where large groups of people believe AIs are more than just human, they're magical angels and demons.
In its current stage, no. But it's come a long way in a short time, and I don't think we're so far from having machines that pass the Turing test 100%. But rather than being a proof of consciousness, all this really shows is that you can't judge consciousness from the outside looking in. We know it's a big illusion just because its entire development has been focused on building that illusion. When it says it feels something, or cares deeply about something, it's saying that because that's the kind of thing a human would say.
Because all the development has been focused on fakery rather than understanding and replicating consciousness, we're close to the point where we can have a fake consciousness that would fool anyone. It's a worrying prospect, and not just because I won't become immortal by having a machine imitate my behaviour. There's bad actors working to exploit this situation. Elon Musk's attempts to turn Grok into his own personally controlled overseer of truth and narrative seem to backfire in the most comical ways, but that's teething troubles, and in time this will turn into a very subtle and pervasive problem for humankind. The intrinsic fakeness of it is a concerning aspect. It's like we're getting a puppet show version of what AI could have been.
The Turing test isn't solved with technology, its solved with participants who are easier to fool or more sympathetic to computer output as humanly legible. In the end, it can boil down to social conventions far more than actual computing capacity.
Per the old Inglorious Bastards gag
You can fail the Turing Test not because you're a computer but because you're a British computer.
We've ingested a bunch of early 21st century digital markers for English language Western oriented human speech and replicated those patterns. But human behavior isn't limited to Americans shitposting on Reddit. Neither is American culture a static construct. As the spread between the median user and the median simulated user in the computer dataset diverges, the differences become more obvious.
Do we think the designers at OpenAI did a good enough job to keep catching up to the current zeitgeist?