this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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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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- 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
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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.
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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That's a fallacy. Humans do things they don't understand all the time. Humans have been working with complex organic molecules for thousands of years. Humans started using CO2 to change the climate before they understood it. Humans made airplanes before they understood the aerodynamics of an aerofoil. Humans used genetics to engineer an entirely new species, dogs, before they knew what DNA is. And human scientists spent hundreds of years thinking dogs have no feelings because dogs can't talk. Humans are always doing stuff they don't understand.
Your entire argument boils down to "I dunno why neural networks produce qualia, and therefore there's absolutely zero chance our artificial neural networks produce qualia."
How can a human program a computer to create quali if we don't know how quali is created ?
This is not the same thing as using tools in our environment that we don't fully understand how they work.
The structure of a neural network, in terms of how it mathematically produces qualia, is a tool in our environment we don't fully understand. We don't know why neurons in this particular shape produce qualia.
And then we made artificial neurons and tried putting them in similar shapes. Some parts are different, some parts are the same. LLMs definitely share our language skills and produce language the same way our Wernicke's area does. But they definitely don't have the same critical thinking skills. So clearly we copied some functions of the brain, but not all of them.
We don't know if we copied qualia.
No. Llms do not produce language like humans do. I don't know why you would think that.
There is nothing in the brain that is akin to llms.
Children can acquire language words and rules faster than even computers can.
We do not pattern match. We do not only regurgitate what we heard or read somewhere else. We are creative in our word generation.