Top all-time · #16610
Sai Gaddam
Personal blog · saigaddam.medium.com · on HN as ChaitanyaSaiphilosophyai
Sai Gaddam's personal blog at saigaddam.medium.com covers philosophy and ai. Since 2021, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 44 times, most often “It isn't just X – it's Y”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Sai Gaddam's posts cover the AI backlash against tech giants and how AI is changing competitive moats. One comment cites a post's speech patterns; another critiques its phrasing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- It isn't just X – it's Y3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-05-20
- Consciousness is simple. Simple is hard. AI can have it2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-06-02
What Hacker News says?
There's an even more profound truth here. You are what you experience, even if you don't always remember each one. You are a constellation of experiences. Consciousness is the consensus mechanism that stitches them together to make you. This can sound like spiritual woo-woo but that's the distillation of a pretty good scientific model. More here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...
Comment linking /consciousness-is-a-consensus-mechanism-2b399c9ec4b5
on “You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it”Submitted Where are all the self-directed learners? as a story · 71 points
HN discussionLovely article. The subjective nature of entropy and information immediately makes me think of the IIT theory (integrated information theory) of consciousness and its foundational futility. Information cannot be discussed without perspective. Someone has to define the states. A die have 6 states only to us humans. What about an ant that's likely to have the die land on it? Bringing the observer back into discussions…
Comment linking /consciousness-is-a-consensus-mechanism-2b399c9ec4b5
on “What is entropy? A measure of just how little we know”Submitted One AI Tutor Per Child: Personalized learning is finally here as a story · 58 points
HN discussionHere's a fun little game. Try and get GPT3 to reconstruct the story, based on the headline (and maybe just a wee nudge). Here's one attempt: ===== Story of the day: Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer’s downfall “In an awe-inspiring display of the power of the internet, police in Liverpool have arrested a drug dealer in connection with an online cheese sale. A 28-year-old man has been charged with controlled…
Comment linking /cheese-photo-leads-to-liverpool-drug-dealers-downfall-and-gpt3-tries-to-figure-out-how-adedfae4c8e3
on “Cheese photo leads to Liverpool drug dealer's downfall”Submitted Consciousness Is a Consensus Mechanism as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAs always, so much is written about consciousness without attempting to define it, or state clearly what its function might be. There's usually a pattern. After a lot of preamble, the non-definition of "what it feels like" is offered. This itself is an indication that our understanding of consciousness is so poor that we cannot articulate the question itself. Why are some experiences conscious and some experiences n…
Comment linking /the-greatest-neuroscientist-youve-never-heard-of-17c61b654a3e
on “Consciousness is not computation”Submitted Schooling Has a Meaning Crisis as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYup, it's the short sentence cadence. "And yet, hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To her eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window." The usage of these short sentences (which, people do use, but sparingly) is a good marker. My hunch is this is because of how they call atte…
Comment linking /it-isnt-just-x-it-s-y-54cb403d61a8
on “What brain surgery taught me about the fragile gift of consciousness”Submitted Learning from Error Is Not the Same as Learning from Experience as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAs brains get bigger, you get more compute, but you have to solve the "commute" problem. Messages have to be passed from one corner to the other, and fast. And there are so many input signals coming in (for us, likely from thirty trillion cells, or at least a significant fraction of those). Not all are worth transporting to other corners. Imagine a little tickle on your toe. Should that be passed on? Usually no, unl…
Comment linking /the-greatest-neuroscientist-youve-never-heard-of-17c61b654a3e
on “What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours”Submitted Schools should be businesses, but what's the product? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA lot of the discussion around AI now is about the transition of AI from tool to tool-user. Very few are considering how close we might be to the tool-user to tool-maker transition and how much more world changing that will be. We are at the cusp. https://saigaddam.medium.com/understanding-consciousness-is-...
Comment linking /understanding-consciousness-is-more-important-than-ever-7af945da2f0e
on “The AI Unbundling”Submitted Dear AI from the near future. Here’s how you become sentient. as a story · 2 points
HN discussionConsciousness is the constellation of your past experiences transforming reality into your next experience. Every major consciousness theory out there fails because it does not account for how a consciously experiencing self is created. You cannot explain away consciousness without explaining the self. And there is a theory that offers a model for both (not my own!). Our book Journey of the Mind discusses this. Here…
Comment linking /conscious-is-simple-and-ai-can-have-it-d51dcec709e7
on “Is the Sun Conscious? (2021) [pdf]”Submitted What balance bikes teach us about learning as a story · 2 points
HN discussionGreat article! SDT has fascinating parallels in consciousness science that no one to my knowledge has actually explored. This is because in consciousness research, the experiencing self is a given, it just happens to be taken for granted that there's an "I" experiencing, and the wonder and magic is focused on the experience itself. What about the self that is experiencing? On the other hand, SDT operates at a level…
Comment linking /consciousness-is-a-consensus-mechanism-2b399c9ec4b5
on “How to build Intrinsic Motivation: a review of the science”Submitted Consciousness is simple. Simple is hard. AI can have it as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt helps to have both a computational understanding, and a computational perspective of what minds do to understand why consciousness is needed. Consciousness is a consensus mechanism. I've co-authored a book where we talk about what's the most computationally robust and biologically plausible model of consciousness. It is only now, two years after the book, that I realized that the best phrasing for what consciousn…
Comment linking /consciousness-is-a-consensus-mechanism-2b399c9ec4b5
on “Insects and other animals have consciousness”Submitted Map Memorizers or Explorers: Hiring Well Needs Systems Thinking as a story · 2 points
HN discussionDisclaimer: I have a PhD from the department Stephen Grossberg founded. Gail Carpenter, the co-creator of ART, was my advisor. I am also co-authoring a neuroscience non-fiction book that features Steve's work, along with other stuff. (Just so you know I am a reasonably biased observer). Most of you have probably not heard of Stephen Grossberg. He is in my opinion one of the greatest neuroscientists of this generatio…
Comment linking /the-greatest-neuroscientist-youve-never-heard-of-17c61b654a3e
on “Deep learning can’t be trusted, brain modelling pioneer says”Submitted Understanding consciousness is more pressing than ever at the dawn of the AI age as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>1) None of those had an Em dash I was responding in particular to the "you write like a late night kitchen gizmo ad?" ... which would be a speech pattern people hear . In the audio case, it doesn't matter what punctuation symbol separates the "it isn't/it's" pattern because the comma or em dash would be invisible . E.g. a blog author also complains about "it isn't/it's" separated by a comma here: https://saigaddam.…
Comment linking /it-isnt-just-x-it-s-y-54cb403d61a8
on “The AI Backlash Is Here: Why Public Patience with Tech Giants Is Running Out”Submitted Understanding consciousness is more important than ever as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAnother way to rephrase this is: Does the person who has read absolutely everything about love, know what it feels like to love? This thought experiment relies mostly on how fuzzy our understanding of consciousness is, and how vague our definitions of it are. It confuses conscious 'knowing' and conscious 'seeing' (or 'feeling' in the love example), which are two different things. How can I state this confidently? Be…
Comment linking /understanding-consciousness-is-more-important-than-ever-7af945da2f0e
on “What did Mary know? A thought experiment about consciousness (2013)”Submitted We Finally Understand Consciousness as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere's a fully fleshed out theory of how specific synchronizing oscillations, resulting in "resonance" generate conscious experiences, including the kind of memories discussed here. Before you dismiss this as another kooky consciousness theory, please let me add that this the only mechanistically precise one out there. All others are black-box models (yes, a bold claim!) Sadly, it is completely ignored within neuro…
Comment linking /understanding-consciousness-is-more-important-than-ever-7af945da2f0e
on “How We Remember Last Weekend”Submitted Typical pop-psychology bloviating: using bad reviews to discover good books as a story · 2 points
HN discussionConsciousness is an engineering problem not a philosophical one. How do you get a tiny fraction of the many billion experiences that cohere to create your self to listen to, and decide what sensory data to turn into your next experience? The engineering problem is that this decentralised moment to moment consensus has to span the galactic distance of your mind (from the perspective of a neuron) and do it fast and ch…
Comment linking /consciousness-is-a-consensus-mechanism-2b399c9ec4b5
on “The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness”Submitted Stephen Grossberg: The greatest neuroscientist you’ve never heard of as a story · 2 points
HN discussion