It's difficult to say anything about experiential/first-person consciousness as we don't know what it is. Some say it doesn't exist and everybody is a p-zombie. That aside...
As you mention, there's a problem where if you want to know yourself fully - including observability of your mind - you need to be aware of the thing that is aware, and aware of the thing that is aware of the thing that is aware, etc, down to infinite regress.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible. It would suggest that such a being works by moving along a set of fixed point. Suppose x is the state of the physical mind (whether that's a brain, a set of chips, or something else). Suppose f(x) returns the updated state after this mind takes into account what it knows (i.e. f(first-order aware) = first- and second-order aware). Then if the mind-state always changes so that x is a fixed point of f, then the mind already knows all there is to know about itself.
So the question, on the mind side, is whether there exists a sufficiently generally intelligent type of mind for which moving along fixed points is computationally easy. I don't know. It could be possible, it could be impossible. Finding fixed points is hard in general, though.
There's also the problem of sensors, which may seem simpler but hides a similar difficulty. What happens if whatever thing that measures blood sugar fails? Or if the immune system goes auto-immune due to an immune cell defect that makes it report benign cells as foreign? Then you need an integrity sensor for the sensors - then you need an integrity sensor for the integrity sensor... At least this fixed-point problem for sensors should be easier than the one for general minds.
The consciousness:complexity ratio would probably express itself in that a mind of a certain complexity with the fixed-point-of-f constraint would be less intelligent on average than a mind of the same complexity without such a constraint.
If the mind is supported by or comes from the physical world, then the hard question is "why is there something it is like to be me"?
If the physical world is supported by or comes from the mind, then the hard question is "why is the product of my thoughts sometimes incredibly malleable and other times not at all?"
From a pragmatic perspective, there are certain events that behave the same whether the mind came first and is somehow restricted in certain capacities, or if the natural world came first and is imposing itself on the mind (through whatever supports it).
For instance, falling down stairs is going to hurt in either case. If the physical world exists independently, that happens because you either are or have a body which is also subject to its laws. If there's a mental monism, that happens because you can't shape all your thoughts, and those thoughts you can't shape act on some other part of you in a way that injures what you think of as your body.
> Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.
But you can view consciousness as a natural phenomenon without being reductionist. In a Hempel's Dilemma-like turn, you could say something like: "consciousness, like mass, is a property of arrangements of matter and exists wherever matter is arranged in a particular way. Disrupt the arrangement, as with anesthetics, and the consciousness goes away."
From such a perspective, the article's byline, "Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world", is true. Like mass or charge, consciousness is merely another property or feature of stuff of combinations of matter that exist in the physical universe.
But there's still a "hard problem of consciousness" with such a theory. The distinguishing feature of qualia-like consciousness remains: it can only be properly verified from the inside. Researchers may devise theories that say "if property X holds, then the lump of matter is conscious" (like Tononi is doing with IIT). And the theory they develop may be quite tight - for all actions where it predicts temporary loss of consciousness, people exposed to the experiment say "I wasn't conscious at that time". But until they can solve the hard problem - being able to detect the what-its-like from the outside, the hard problem remains.
Though, as you're saying, if you just want something that predicts observable outcomes, then consciousness theories that say "this anesthetic-like thing produces what, to the outside observer, is indistinguishable from loss of consciousness", might be good enough.
Largely, I think, because devs are given too powerful computers. It's easier for companies to "fix" or preemptively had off performance bugs by giving developers high-end computers than to spend extra development time truly fixing them.
I think SV was asking what onion services, which can't really use recaptcha, do to prevent the DDoS storm.
And I would imagine the answer is obscurity, since the dark web isn't nearly as well-mapped as the public web. That and some Anubis or other PoW would probably go far.
If it's just a contact form on some random site that isn't particularly valuable to spammers, a bespoke solution like hidden input fields, obfuscation, or some kind of token calculated client-side by JS will probably work just as well.
That used to be the case, unfortuantely today even bespoke solutions can be completed by automation - any anything that just requires running JS in a headless browser was ineffective for a long time already.
Certain esters have been found to be much safer (in mice, at least):
> The glutathione hepatic values in mice obtained by intraperitoneal injection of the ester are superimposable on controls and the oral LD50 was found to be greater than 2000 mg kg^-1 and the intraperitoneal LD50 was 1900 mg kg^-1 ...
and more general analogs apparently can also be designed to not produce NAPQI:
> Thus, in 2020, N-sulpharyl-APAP prodrugs 39–40
(Fig. 11) were developed. [...] They are not hepatotoxic because they do not generate toxic metabolite NAPQI, even in concentrations equal to a toxic dose of APAP (600 mg kg^−1 in mice).
The code lets you shoot yourself in the foot in a lot more ways than a spec does, though. Few people would make specs that include buffer overflows or SQL injection.
That sounds like a good way to get extreme short-term optimization.
Say a particular finetune prioritizes profits right now and makes recommendations like "cut down on maintenance, you can make up for it later with your increased profits and their interest". It produces more profits, and wins the AB test. Later the chickens come home to roost.
You can reduce the problem by using long-term indicators, but then each AB test is very slow.
As you mention, there's a problem where if you want to know yourself fully - including observability of your mind - you need to be aware of the thing that is aware, and aware of the thing that is aware of the thing that is aware, etc, down to infinite regress.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible. It would suggest that such a being works by moving along a set of fixed point. Suppose x is the state of the physical mind (whether that's a brain, a set of chips, or something else). Suppose f(x) returns the updated state after this mind takes into account what it knows (i.e. f(first-order aware) = first- and second-order aware). Then if the mind-state always changes so that x is a fixed point of f, then the mind already knows all there is to know about itself.
So the question, on the mind side, is whether there exists a sufficiently generally intelligent type of mind for which moving along fixed points is computationally easy. I don't know. It could be possible, it could be impossible. Finding fixed points is hard in general, though.
There's also the problem of sensors, which may seem simpler but hides a similar difficulty. What happens if whatever thing that measures blood sugar fails? Or if the immune system goes auto-immune due to an immune cell defect that makes it report benign cells as foreign? Then you need an integrity sensor for the sensors - then you need an integrity sensor for the integrity sensor... At least this fixed-point problem for sensors should be easier than the one for general minds.
The consciousness:complexity ratio would probably express itself in that a mind of a certain complexity with the fixed-point-of-f constraint would be less intelligent on average than a mind of the same complexity without such a constraint.