361–370 of 749 posts
Just curious, what evidence do we have that humans are sentient, other than our own conscious observations? Is there any physical feature or process in the human brain you can point to where you can say, “aha, that’s it, this is where the lights turn on”? It seems like this is part of a bigger issue that nobody really has a clear understanding of what sentience actually is (with or without a PhD)
Not all humans are sentinent
It's possible that Blake is seeking his 15 min of fame. Despite being fired, he's known now and likely will be hired somewhere. This isn't too bad for Google too. Despite them denying Blake's claims, people will think Google is close to sentience.
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Okay, but is that because brains are just better at optimization of linear algebra? Or is quantum mechanics involved? I think we can agree rocks aren't conscious. But are dolphins?
> Okay, but is that because brains are just better at optimization of linear algebra? Or is quantum mechanics involved? No such magic. The average ML neuron is connected in layers to maybe 100 other neurons. The brain is connected to far more ~1000 -10000 So its the dense interconnectivity at play. Whatever successes we have had with LLM now is because we are increasing the parameters of the network (although we have…
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As a fellow sentient being with absolutely zero credentials in any sort of statistical modeling field, I can simply disagree. And therein lies the problem. How can anybody possibly prove a concept that depends almost entirely on one’s philosophical axioms… which we can debate for eternity (or at least until we further our understanding of how to define sentience to the point where we can do so objectively enough to f…
Disagreement is good! It actually leads to counter thoughts and a more refined idea of what we eventually want to describe. Sentience broadly (& naively) covers the ability to independent thinking, rationalize outcomes, understand fear/threat, understand where it is wrong (conscience) and decide based on unseen information & understand what it doesn't know. So from a purely technical perspective, we have only made so…
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It’s as simple as that.
How extraordinary is it to claim that something capable of holding a lucid and eloquent conversation might be sentient? If a dog did that we'd have a very different opinion wouldn't we?
you've got to squint _real_ hard to think that any of the LLMs are lucid and eloquent.
(and honestly the bar for sentient is probably lower than that. no shortage of people who aren't lucid or eloquent, let alone both.)
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A person can change their mind, attitude & perspective on a dime. The willingness to disbelieve in sentience is fantastically remarkable, as a grevious oversight.
Any ya'll numerous downvoters care to make stance? It seems obvious to me the difference: an AI has to be elaborately re-trained/re-programmed. A more or less total mind wipe. How many AI's can adapt & change, that we've seen? These expert systems seem clearly a product of trained learning, with minimal adaptive capability. Sentience seems much more about having that adaptive, cognizant, realtime model of real realit…
Good, as imagine what you would need to believe to equivocate between people and shell scripts. I really think this view is more indicative of a peer enabled personality disorder than insight or compassion. I'm very harsh about this because when I wondered what belief his equivocation was enabling, it became clear that the person involved could not tell fiction from truth. The belief in the aliveness of the code rein…
No judgment about whether Google was right or not. Same for Lemoine. As a career move for him, this only makes sense if he wants a brief, meteoric career in media or public advocacy. He can get articles published in The New Yorker and go on TV now. Maybe he can sue Google and get a settlement. In five years, there will be AI systems much better than LaMDA and no one will return his calls. He's got a name, whereas if…
> Same for Lemoine. Lemoine got a lawyer invovled and they started filing lawsuits on the AI's behalf. I'm not shocked he was fired. https://fortune.com/2022/06/23/google-blade-lemoine-ai-lamda...
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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…
This is just full of ontological and epistemological assumptions which have been mainstream for a few decades but are very controversial among philosophers. Philosophers don’t sit in bubbles—and use all the evidence they can find—and make great contributions to knowledge, even though what they do is not science. There’s a reason there are other subjects besides chemistry and physics.
I'm not on some crusade against the field of philosophy. Certainly philosophy has contributed mightily, and continues to do so. But I think physicalists like Dennet are making far more tangible contributions. Reading Dennet has been enlightening to me, he's one of the only philosophers I've found who can actually explain his philosophy to non-philosophers.
Chalmers on the other hand reads like a philosopher chasing his own homonculus. I don't find his arguments very clear and when I do manage to decipher him it seems to boil down to a stubborn insistence that fundamentally subjective experience must exist just because it sure as hell feels that way. I just don't see what the epistemic value is in keeping this neo-dualist baggage around. I don't see what it brings to the table. I see nothing that it explains that makes it necessary.