A Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life

My take is it has absolutely nothing to do with why I think philosophy is complete garbage.

Think of it this way. If let's say a cultist religious sect believes in science and contributes to science then at the same time this cultist religion also believes that the universe is a bubble sitting on the nose of a cosmic hippo.... Then despite the good science, the entire cultist religion is still utter bullshit.

That being said it is still highly questionable how large and how meaningful philosophies contributions are to math and science. Historically they may have been one in the same field, but today there is clearly a category error.

I would say philosophy contributed nothing to math and science. It only seems that way. What's actually going on is if a philosopher contributes something to math, he is actually doing mathematics, he is not doing philosophy. Same with science. If a philosopher reshapes science he is doing science, he is not doing philosophy. Because philosophy is a bullshit category that literally encompasses everything under the sun I dismiss it entirely.

I didn't read the article or listen to the audio you sent me. I may if I have time later on in the week. But in my opinion, that is an article on math, not philosophy. Nothing is philosophy it's all bullshit to me.

Also please don't tell me my argument here is philosophical and therefore contradictory. Absolutely please don't sink that low.

Purely out of curiosity, have you ever even taken an elementary university-level philosophy course? I'm wondering what the basis for all of these rather absolutist conclusions might be.

> However, belief in a deity whose primary act of creation wasn't modelling Adam & Eve from clay but instead defining the laws of physics & mathematics means that by definition the pursuit of science is compatible with religion.

If you believe in a "whose primary act of creation wasn't modelling Adam & Eve from clay but instead defining the laws of physics & mathematics means" and still claim to be a Christian, then you are a heretic. That is fine. Actually most religios people, are heretics of their own religion.

You can try to be compatibilist (I was for a long time), and try to metaphorically reinterpret chapters of scripture so that they do not contradict reality, but all you are doing is cutting out parts of your religion. Believe me, compatibilism leads nowhere and all theodicies are empty of actual meaning.

I would say that the dichotomy of religion vs science goes way beyond just fiction (faith) vs reality (evidence). Religion is amorphous yet rigid and complete while science is sharp yet flexible and forever a work-in-progress.

Religion is amorphous because it is full of self-contradictory parts. Yet as long as no one pays attention those self contradictions can live happily in the minds of believers. Being self-contradictory is essential because it allows a religious person to always find a relevant fragment to suit their viewpoint on anything therefore making it complete. It is rigid because by design, religions protect their scriptures. Being complete is essential because it enables a religious person to have a unique type of hubris where their religious beliefs are sufficient to compensate for their ignorance in any other field.

Here is an example: If you are a Christian and hate sexual minorities there are plenty of fragments that will allow you to feed your hate. If you do not hate them, there are plenty of other fragments about how you should love your peers. You can see this very distinction as a gradient across Europe, and how churches approach the topic depending on how socially accepted those minorities are in their societies. Being inconsistent and self-contradictory is essential because this way a priest will always be able to use some fragment that is socially accepted. The goal of the church is not to provide a framework to understand reality. Instead, the role of the church is to preserve is own authority and the social hierarchy it imposes and influence society in a way that benefits those at the top of that hierarchy.

To contrast, science acknowledges the contradiction between competing theories and seeks proof for either of them or seeks better more encompassing theories. Science is flexible because it is capable of self-updating. If a theory that describes reality better is created, it replaces other theories because it has a higher explaining power. And science is a work-in-progress because it is able to acknowledge that some things are not yet known.

I would go even further and call religions, especially Abrahamic ones, to be a Stockholm syndrome pandemic.

As opposed to what, science? That thing relying on the axiom that perception somehow lets us predict reality? No, science is nothing more than the arbitrary notion that a pattern perceived right 'now' will continue into the 'future', one after the other. This is not necessarily true, and hardly something to derive absolute truths from.

> Your claim is, given a conversation thread that appears to be between two sentient beings your claim is that one of these beings is not sentient and is only imitating sentience in a way that is indistinguishable from actual sentience.

It's only indistinguishable to an outsider, because one side of the conversation has practiced puppeting the other and is looking for confirmation instead of probing for flaws.

> This is an actual possibility. What you say may be true. The irrationality occurs because this claim is possible for ALL possible conversation threads here on HN.

It's just not worth it to spend much time considering whether every single conversation thread is fake, but sure it's possible. That is not irrational, and it's not a contradiction with dismissing the AI.

Neither kind of conversation proves there are two sentient actors to an observer. So "this isn't good enough" isn't a claim exclusively for the AI chat log.