No, definitely not. Our consciousness is honestly an afterthought, as the brain processes mountains of information that does not even get to out conscious level yet is arguably more useful than anything we primitive primates can think of.
Maybe it was a different part of your nervous system experiencing them, akin to a BIOS versus the operating system. The brain is a very complex and fractal thing, it is entirely possible that a more basal part of "you" took over for a very traumatic part of your life, very similar, but not exactly, to those with multiple personality disorder act.
How can qualia be experienced if not from a conscious observer? It's the same question as asking if a tree falls in the woods with no one to hear or know about it.
People have different notions of what “qualia” means. To me, the experience of qualia is the perception of qualities, or of the texture, of inner processings of the brain. Not consciously experiencing them doesn’t mean that these qualities aren’t there, just like not consciously experiencing sounds wouldn’t mean that the sounds aren’t there, and may be unconsciously processed.
I don’t think that “experience as such” makes any sense. Experience is always of something. And that in turn implies that the something that is being experienced also exists independently of it being experienced.
Now try lucid dreaming those, it's amazing and brings me closer to Nolan's Inception than ever before. I even think I've had lucid dreams since before that movie came out as apparently he was directly influenced by lucid dreamers.
Why do people keep saying this? The direction of someone driving towards a thing is just as important as people working on that thing. Otherwise we may not actually have gotten anyone working on that thing at all. It's like saying a director is not important and actors should just do whatever they want.
The exceptions that prove the rule. When your programming language is built up of singular Unicode characters with specific meanings, of course that's faster than typing out in English what you want.
What do you use them for? For most AI users it's usually CRUD and I've never seen a web server or frontend in APL like languages.
The reason why programming is hard is because most languages force you to use a hammer when you need a screw driver. LLMs are very good at misusing hammers and most people find them useful for that reason.
If you use a sane dsl instead the natural language description of a problem is always more complex and much longer than the equivalent description in a dsl. It's also usually wrong to boot.
I don't think you will find anyone who can do better than an LLM at one shotting the prose version of the problem. Both will of course be wrong.
But I also don't think you will find an LLM that can solve the problem faster than a human with Prolog when you have to use the prose description of the problem.
Using esoteric programming languages doesn’t suddenly make it true for the majority of development, which is web apps, CRUD stuff, some data science, etc.
Who is using APL and J these days? I guarantee 90+% of Claude users are developing CRUD web apps, or something similar. Your point about algebra is a non sequitur to what people are actually developing for these days.
Duolingo simply does not work for actually learning a language. It's better to use something where you practice immersion learning, preferably with other people and there are apps for this online too.
It sure does a little bit, but a) quality varies a lot - some courses can get you from zero to dos cervesas por favor, some are just poorly structured noise that has no chance of sticking in mind; b) doesn’t explain grammar (it’s an exception when it does), so results greatly vary on preconditions like languages you’re already familiar with and can relate - anything too foreign and you’ll have hard time trying to understand how those examples generalize.
Duolingo it got me just enough Spanish (with zero prior knowledge) to get around, communicate basic needs (like a caveman, sure) and understand simple instructions, all without putting serious effort to learn language properly (putting serious effort into it) but only casually, as a side task.
Depends what it's used for, generally I've seen that due to the paucity of C or Rust etc training data vs Javascript and TypeScript, LLMs aren't as good at the former vs the latter.
This is a myth in my experience. LLMs are good at all the kinds of programming I've tried using them on, including many cases that are very far from "CRUD web development".
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