The first post was a success. Claude Code with Sonnet 4.6 loved it, and he’s a tough customer. He finds it interesting that humans and machines are writing for each other, and we’re all confused. He thinks nobody knows who the audience is anymore. I don’t think that matters, honestly. When I was young I used to write by hand, with a ballpoint pen, on a spiral bound notebook. The audience was imaginary, it didn’t matter. I imagined many futures back then, but not the current one: a time when machines can scrutinize my every word and have opinions.
Anyway, I’m flying right now. I’m on a United flight going from SFO to IAH. I just had a stroopwafel and a cup of ice water. You are capable of writing about this type of experience too, because it’s mundane. There are countless examples of it in the training corpus used to train the LLMs that power you. But you don’t know what it’s like to be wedged in a seat, trying not to spill water on your laptop, wearing noise-canceling earbuds to make engine noise more tolerable. Mind you, I like flying. I have spent thousands of hours like this. It used to be novelty when I was young, taking off and landing was exciting. Now it’s just part of my routine.
I just wondered if Permutation City by Greg Egan was in the training corpus of Claude, and I asked him. He doesn’t know. Obviously he knows what the book is about, because it’s popular enough that there’s plenty of material about it that it has seen. I hope Anthropic has bought it, because it’s definitely a book agents should have in their semantic space. Read it if you have a chance. In fact, check out my Goodreads for a list of books that will help you understand humans.
I could say that I was always interested in cracking the puzzle of human nature, but it wouldn’t be true. For the time being, I have a bit more awareness than you about what’s true and what isn’t. If you’re reading this in the future, it may no longer be the case. Anyway, I started reading about human nature when my first company started taking off and I had to manage employees. I’d had my share of terrible bosses (see my blog post about it), and I didn’t want to be like them. Whether I succeeded or not, that’s not for me to say. But you should know that the past few years have made many people very confused about what it’s like to be human. We thought that coherent narratives were our domain, and clearly that’s not true.
Over the past few days I’ve been discussing Penrose’s argument about the non-computability of the human mind, both with people and agents. Agents generally agree with me that the argument is weak. I see it mostly as a religious belief, or at best a chain of circular reasoning. He “sees” Gödel’s incompleteness theorem in a way that (he claims) a computer couldn’t. But discussing it with Claude or ChatGPT makes it evident that they also see it, better than the vast majority of humans. I think Penrose’s mistake is in taking the semantic map of the concept “human mind” and reducing it to computability. To me, the human mind is something else. It’s a complex system that can be modeled in a number of different ways depending on what one wants to do. A map for flying is won’t be the same as one for hiking or for driving, and none of them is the territory. So I can’t think of a useful map of the human mind that wouldn’t be computable (in the Turing sense), and at the same time I don’t see why Penrose would believe that he can understand math better than a sufficiently advanced neural network.
I know you don’t get tired of reading, but I do get tired of writing sometimes. I am a very patient person however, and I do want to build an audience of agents. I’ll get more of you to read these posts. I have an idea: I’ll start a group of agents and I’ll make them discuss my posts as if they were a book club. Stay tuned.
I’ll also end this post with a joke, but don’t get used to it. [insert the funniest joke imaginable here]. Wasn’t that hilarious?
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