- Peter Watts’ novel *Blindsight* was discussed as a touchstone for the idea that high intelligence can evolve without subjective consciousness, prompting debate over whether “consciousness” is a meaningful or measurable property.  
- Participants questioned the relevance of the Turing test, arguing that passing it is no guarantee of consciousness and that non-conscious algorithms could convincingly mimic conscious behavior.  
- docl proposed that consciousness might be “low-hanging fruit” in biological evolution (because predator–prey and sexual selection pressures favor it) but could be extremely improbable to arise de novo in digital systems such as large language models like GPT-3.  
- The group speculated that GPT-3’s word-prediction objective differs fundamentally from the ecological pressures that shaped animal brains, making it unlikely to share the same kind of subjective experience even if it appears articulate.  
- A practical suggestion emerged: using culturally unconventional logic puzzles as potential “adversarial” probes to distinguish GPT-3 outputs from human writing.  
- kanzure linked a Cambridge paper on reverse-engineering Flash EEPROM memories with scanning electron microscopy, illustrating open-hardware security research.  
- kanzure also posted DARPA’s “Vanishing Programmable Resources” program, highlighting efforts to create self-destructing electronics for data security.  
- nmz787 characterized bench molecular biology as a paradoxical mix of mostly unskilled tasks (pipetting, weighing, incubating) that nevertheless demand rigorous aseptic technique, while juri_ drew an analogy to programming being “typing class” at its core—both emphasizing the gap between simple operations and critical discipline.