241–250 of 310 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Yes, because we all know that humans care so much about the suffering of others" Many humans really do care about this.
No, many humans like to virtue signal or pretend to feel good about themselves.
> We think we’re intelligent, know we’re conscious, and so assume the two go together. Excuse me, I know _I_ am conscious. There is literally nothing you can do to proof that there's anything outside of what I am conscious of. The world could be a very stable illusion, a dream, a simulation and it would all be the same. I don't understand why people think that it matters whether AI is conscious or not. We can't even…
I am baffled when smart people say something like this. Without consciousness, without a stake in the game, the behavior is pure statistics. Statistics is limited by probabilities and logical gates. Nothing else. Consciousness is about being aware which means insights about context and harm. People are limited in ways that a statistical engine is not and that makes all the difference in the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is suffering? Can you define it objectively/empirically? If there is indeed such a phenomenon, then why should I care about the suffering of non-humans? Granted, it may be a very bad idea to ignore the suffering of some superhuman AI that was recently invented... don't piss off your godlings after all or they'll smite you. But animals? If suffering made chicken taste better, I don't see any problem with Torture…
> What is suffering? Pain is one of the few sensations that is unmistakeable. If you think you are in pain, then you definitely are.
Pain is a signal of impending damage/injury, or existing damage/injury that may well worse if not dealt with immediately.
All signals within a human nervous system can be mistaken in principle. Why would this one be different? Phantom pains that indicate no injury seem plausible.
> We think we’re intelligent, know we’re conscious, and so assume the two go together. Excuse me, I know _I_ am conscious. There is literally nothing you can do to proof that there's anything outside of what I am conscious of. The world could be a very stable illusion, a dream, a simulation and it would all be the same. I don't understand why people think that it matters whether AI is conscious or not. We can't even…
>What I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter if the subject is actually conscious. All that matter is we (I), feel/think that it is conscious, or deserving of care and respect. The law of gravity is nonsense. No such law exists. If I think I float, and you think I float, then it happens.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What is suffering? Pain is one of the few sensations that is unmistakeable. If you think you are in pain, then you definitely are.
If "pain" is synonymous with "suffering", then I suspect that using the latter term is a deliberate attempt to emotionally manipulate me. Pain is a signal of impending damage/injury, or existing damage/injury that may well worse if not dealt with immediately. All signals within a human nervous system can be mistaken in principle. Why would this one be different? Phantom pains that indicate no injury seem plausible.
Pain is not necessarily associated with injury.
>All signals within a human nervous system can be mistaken in principle. Why would this one be different? Phantom pains that indicate no injury seem plausible.
What would phantom pain feel like? Would it hurt? Then it is incidental that it phantom and is nevertheless pain. If you believe you are in pain even if there is no stimulus associated with it, then you are in pain. You can not mistake pain regardless of whether it is "real" or not. What makes pain so special? It hurts, it is painful.
> We think we’re intelligent, know we’re conscious, and so assume the two go together. Excuse me, I know _I_ am conscious. There is literally nothing you can do to proof that there's anything outside of what I am conscious of. The world could be a very stable illusion, a dream, a simulation and it would all be the same. I don't understand why people think that it matters whether AI is conscious or not. We can't even…
The problem goes deeper in that we don’t even have a good grasp on what we actually mean by “consciousness”, and that there are wildly different opinions on what significance it has.
Right now it's like we didn't learn anything from Wittgenstein who said most philosophy was just argument about language and definitions ... which is a lot plus anecdotes of what we read here
> We think we’re intelligent, know we’re conscious, and so assume the two go together. Excuse me, I know _I_ am conscious. There is literally nothing you can do to proof that there's anything outside of what I am conscious of. The world could be a very stable illusion, a dream, a simulation and it would all be the same. I don't understand why people think that it matters whether AI is conscious or not. We can't even…
I am baffled when smart people say something like this. Without consciousness, without a stake in the game, the behavior is pure statistics. Statistics is limited by probabilities and logical gates. Nothing else. Consciousness is about being aware which means insights about context and harm. People are limited in ways that a statistical engine is not and that makes all the difference in the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is suffering? Can you define it objectively/empirically? If there is indeed such a phenomenon, then why should I care about the suffering of non-humans? Granted, it may be a very bad idea to ignore the suffering of some superhuman AI that was recently invented... don't piss off your godlings after all or they'll smite you. But animals? If suffering made chicken taste better, I don't see any problem with Torture…
Well, suffering is bad, and more suffering is worse than less, and knowingly acting in a way which increases suffering is wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sure, just the fact that billions of hours of pointless, tiresome human activity will be freed to do whatever is enough of an incentive. Just like when we “automated the boring things”? Instead one of the primary goals seems to be to prevent people in fields one doesn’t understand from making a living. I have my doubts about people ever being “freed”. And what is free, really? There is a reason monks sitting on mou…
Yes, it's very meditative to do the dishes once a month. The problem is how do you alleviate the pain of the single parent with 2 human children today. And my point is, if I could put together 2 Python packages to make a robotic arm able to listen to that parent's commands and do the dishes, clean after the kids, and so on, I would do it as fast as you can type "zen", even if the Python packages in cause would "feel"…
In your analogy, the stressor isn’t the dishes or the children. They’re not problems to be solved. They’re inevitable. Like the sun setting.
The issue there is some prescription that you should be doing anything else under the circumstances of dirty dishes and your children needing attention.
There are certainly a lot of people who have given much thought about AI and consciousness, but how can we talk about sentient machines when we clearly do not understand consciousness in us, human beings[1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
I haven't heard of the idea of the "hard problem of consciousness" before, but after reading this Wikipedia article, it sounds like nonsense. Like, take this passage: > For example, it is logically possible for a perfect replica of [David] Chalmers to have no experience at all, or for it to have a different set of experiences (such as an inverted visible spectrum, so that the blue-yellow red-green axes of its visual…