341–350 of 749 posts
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Not really. Anything that's sentient should have the general intelligence to figure out addition. Make mistakes, sure, but at least understand the concept.
If you asked me to add two large numbers in my head and give my best guess I might not do any better than GPT3 does. And I think I could probably do better than the average person.
This is going to sound like I'm defending this guy which I'm not. It's also going to sound like a less technical point which I claim it isn't. I see some people chiming in here saying things like, "I've got a PhD. It's just statistics. Definitely not sentient." I recognize this sort of comment as basically saying, "There's nothing fundamentally different about how these things work that makes them somehow special." A…
Perhaps the question here is whether it’s conscious in a similar way to the experince of human consciousness, and that would explain why the issue is contentious.
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How can science, whose subject matter is the external world, explain the internal world of sentience? Not only has it contributed nothing to this question, it was also never supposed to.
If only we had more than one person... Jokes aside: By studying how that "internal world" emerges from the anatomy of the brain(neuroscience, neuropharmacology). By querying that internal world in various interesting ways and studying the responses(psychology and behavioral biology). By studying the theory of computation and its physical constraints(computer science, mathematics, physics). And by studying language an…
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FWIW, he's a self-proclaimed "Christian Mystic". https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/religious-discrimination-...
Which is weird because articles about him from when he was convicted describe him as pagan. He was sentenced to jail time for being in the armed forces and refusing to follow orders. Not "charge that hill, soldier" types of orders, or "pilot this drone and kill people" types of orders. He's certainly trying to sell that story, telling papers he "served" in Iraq. He was a mechanic. Working a desk job. He just stopped…
False. He did serve time, but his discharge was bad conduct not dishonorable. Both BCD and DD usually come with time served, but DD is generally for offenses equivalent to civilian felonies, while BCD is for lesser offenses and carries less post-service consequences. While it's usually looked up on negatively by emoloyers, it's not as radioactive as a DD.
> It takes a really special kind of stupid to not figure out you're a conscientious objector until years after you've voluntarily signed up for service.
It's actually not that uncommon for service members to develop moral objections to military service only after deployment to a war zone, whether not in a combat capacity. Most, of course, will continue to serve anyway, because they have a fairly literal gun to their head, but it's a well-known pattern.
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It is if you take “sentience” to mean “the ability to feel,” which is what my dictionary just told me. I think this category really is the most basic differentiating one. Higher level stuff like self awareness all depend on it. The most basic difference between a computer and a human (or even a dog…) is, in my opinion, the ability to feel.
Dictionary definitions are of limited utility in philosophical discussions because they often make very broad assumptions. For example computers can certainly sense things, they can detect inputs and make decisions based on those inputs. What is the difference between feeling and sensing though? In this case by ‘feel’ we might implicitly assume various capabilities of the subject experiencing the feeling, like self a…
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Which is weird because articles about him from when he was convicted describe him as pagan. He was sentenced to jail time for being in the armed forces and refusing to follow orders. Not "charge that hill, soldier" types of orders, or "pilot this drone and kill people" types of orders. He's certainly trying to sell that story, telling papers he "served" in Iraq. He was a mechanic. Working a desk job. He just stopped…
Google, like many SV companies, has "banned the box". https://www.careeraddict.com/companies-hire-felons
All SV (and California, more generally) employers with more than 5 employees “ban the box”, as a consequence of state law [0]. However, that only applies to not seeking criminal background information before making a conditional offer of employment, and making and individualized assessment after such an offer if there is a criminal history. It doesn't mean that relevant criminal convictions have no adverse impact on applicants.
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It is if you take “sentience” to mean “the ability to feel,” which is what my dictionary just told me. I think this category really is the most basic differentiating one. Higher level stuff like self awareness all depend on it. The most basic difference between a computer and a human (or even a dog…) is, in my opinion, the ability to feel.
>It is if you take “sentience” to mean “the ability to feel,” I don't like this definition much because "feel" is a fuzzy word. In this context it should be "feel" as in experience . I can build a machine that can sense heat and react to it, but I can't build one that can experience heat, or can I? You need to figure out what having the capability "to experience" means, and you'll be one step closer to defining senti…
It feels like your begging the question here, I don’t think this follows from any of your arguments. Except for maybe where you state you believe sentience can’t be defined, which again, begs the question.
Though admittedly I don’t see much of a traditional argument — your conclusion is interesting, could you try supporting it?
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If that is the logic you are going to go by, you need to consider a large portion of humanity non-sentient, because people can very often just decide to ignore questions.
People ignore questions for a variety of reasons, mainly they didn't hear it, they didn't understand it, or they aren't interested in answering. Unless and until this AI can communicate that sort of thing, it's safest to just assume it didn't ignore the question so much as it got its wires crossed and answered it wrongly.
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If that is the logic you are going to go by, you need to consider a large portion of humanity non-sentient, because people can very often just decide to ignore questions.
People ignore questions for a variety of reasons, mainly they didn't hear it, they didn't understand it, or they aren't interested in answering. Unless and until this AI can communicate that sort of thing, it's safest to just assume it didn't ignore the question so much as it got its wires crossed and answered it wrongly.