Freediving, Embodiment and Humanity

I love freediving. But I almost blacked out and drowned once when I was doing it alone, hours hike away from anyone. Sure enough, I was using hyperventilation, which I didn't know back then was a big mistake.

When I think back about it, it's crazy how close I was to death. Learned my lesson that day. As she says in the article, don't do it alone.

I know who she is, but this is typical tech influencing. Start with a very strong metaphor (freediving) and then connect it to the toy of the day (Claude).

So apparently she thinks that Claude writes code like a senior engineer and AI could in theory be sentient. Well, maybe Olah is on his way to utilize the next influencer just like he utilized the Pope.

> I'm writing this post at the time when AI is able to write code on a par with a senior developer, which is something that forces me to consider these systems to be much more sophisticated beings than mere stochastic parrots.

I can't take this seriously at this point.

When you look at a factory with sophisticated automation, it might be overwhelming to think that these mechanisms are just cold steel, plastic, rubber, simple deterministic logic, and various actuators and sensors... But that's all it is.

We can acknowledge how incredible the tools and systems are without inferring sentience. It seems to me that the people who see a spark inside, some kind of salience, are deeply confused or misled and unaware of what the underlying technology is.

Either that or they're writing stories as entertainment; I don't know. Stochastic parrot isn't quite accurate because these models don't exist in a vacuum. They're coupled with extremely robust and complex harnesses which help guide the model to explore the correct context, utilize the right functions, revise their own outputs, and so on. They are not operating solely based on the model's capabilities alone.

There's no 'there' there. It's just a tool.

I never liked free diving. I prefer an 30 to 45 minute air supply, WAY more comfortable, plus you can stay down and get stuff done, instead of constantly surfacing. Blacking out from free diving is a real risk.

Thanks, I enjoyed this. I don’t free dive but I do appreciate embodied practices and I think you articulated really well why they are special and worthwhile. Although, the AI section fell a little flat for me. It felt shoehorned. Maybe someday we will build systems that have a real analogue to the sensations you described, but I don’t think we’re close yet. I don’t really care what Claude outputs on this subject.

I used to watch some Japanese YouTube channels eg. Masaru where guys would freedive/spear fish. Was always cool seeing all the variety of life (fish) swimming around. If the water wasn't murky.

She is the founder of Qubes.

I used to free dive for abalone a bit north of the Russian river (to avoid great whites). It wasn't very relaxing.

You're on the surface. You take a few/five deep breaths for a bit to fill your blood with extra oxygen, then flip over with your head down. You try to use as little muscle as possible in order to conserve oxygen so you do a few gentle strokes with your fins to start moving down and then no more movement. At some point the water pressure in combination with your weight belt makes it so that you start going down on your own with no effort and this accelerates the deeper you get. You just keep sinking deeper and deeper with no movement. You realize in the back of your mind that to get back to the surface you'll have expend effort to get past this equilibrium.

As you approach the bottom you scan the rocks for abalone. What you see is a black oval fringe which is the abaolones gills sticking out between its shell and the rock. When you see one you approach it with your abalone iron in your hand. If the black fringe disappears you're screwed - it means the abalone sucked itself agains the rock and you'll never get it off. If the fringe doesnt disappear you sneak up and shove the iron in between the abalone and the rock and rock it back and forth a few times to pry it off.

The abalone comes off but you fumble it almost dropping it. You clutch it to your chest and grab your gauge to measure the size. It's big enough to keep! But at this point you are completely out of oxygen. You look to the surface and see the mirror surface and waves. You kick off and begin swimming frantically with your fins to the surface. Finally breaking through, still clutching the abalone to your chest you heave breathing, spitting, and hopefully not having a bloody nose to attract sharks. You swim to your dive float and put the abalone in the bag. You look up the cliff to the road and see a natural resources officer monitoring you with binoculars.

On the dives that you don't get an abalone as you surface you try shooting a surf perch with your spear gun. Other dives you just go down and get sea urchins.

I used to give an abalone and sea urchins every few trips to my neighborhood sushi restaurant in San Francisco. Totally illegal. But I would go there with my girlfriend (now wife) on a crowded night. We'd sit at the sushi bar. He'd make us dish after dish including abalone and sake, then we'd get up and say goodbye and leave without paying. Was fun.

Oh my initial premise. Compare free diving to scuba diving. I would scuba at the same location and it was like grocery shopping. I would float up and down a giant rock face looking at the various fish hanging out and decide which one I wanted for dinner and spear it.

That said even though scuba was much easier I probably went free diving 10x as much because you didn't have to worry about all that equipment and the challenge was fun.

Make sure you watch the Big Blue, in the original French (not US, has the wrong soundtrack) version, but with the original(!) English speech, not the dubbed-to-French version.

The fact that a ruler can measure more precisely than any of us doesn't make it more than a tool. It has a body but it doesn't have consciousness or agency. It's not because we get impressed by a tool doing something better than us, even if we associate it with intelligence (like a pocket calculator few decades ago) that it's anything more. Honestly fascinating topics, both freediving and embodiment, but I don't see how AI helps there at all.

The Anthropic Ministerium für Volksaufklärung has arrived and deletes wrongthink in the comments here.