251–260 of 310 posts
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What are you talking about? I'm not trying to pull an underhanded argument, I'm genuinely confused about others' views.
A rock is unconscious. Is it a 'being'? What is a 'being'? Something you feel bad about treating badly? The argument is circular.
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How do you know other animals are not self-aware? Is self-awareness a criteria for not being killed and eaten? Is it not pain and suffering that really matters?
Because we have numerous tests that test for self-awareness, we can infer from behavior, and we can study brain layout and activity. Pain and suffering are irrelevant given we can kill animals in a humane way. Only the right to life is relevant.
Any intelligence or self-awareness test is also a test on the tester: how good are they in detecting what matters for the biomachine [5]/animal in testing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleaner_fish
[2] video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ujy9EmUzN4E
[3] article: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208420120
[4] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-...
[5] "Xenobots: the Age of Biological Robots", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w77_yhkXzzo
> 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 fact that other humans are so similar to me (all humans are similar in virtue of being human organisms) allows for an analogical inference: You guys are similar to me, I am conscious, therefore you are probably also conscious. And whether or not something is conscious matters a lot ethically. If something is conscious, it may suffer. Conscious and unconscious objects have to be treated in a completely different w…
Some pretty sloppy definitions and a faulty assertion right out of the gate. I’d argue it’s plainly obvious that humans are adapted to living in a world populated by conscious objects, we already treat inanimate objects as if they had personality and intent. If we came across one that actually did have a mind we’d immediately know how to interact with it as long as we could communicate. As for that definition of cons…
You call it badly written, but assert that "we’d immediately know how to interact with it as long as we could communicate"? But not being able to give a definition of consciousness doesn't matter . We all sort of know what it is, and it's not good for a computer to have it.
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
That's part of the reason to be wary about the possibility that our AI models may become conscious. Most people happily dismiss the idea that a GPT-like model can be conscious, but the truth is that we don't know practically anything about how consciousness arises in living beings that are more similar to us and that we have been coexisting with for thousands of years. We don't even know how to tell if such a being i…
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Because we have numerous tests that test for self-awareness, we can infer from behavior, and we can study brain layout and activity. Pain and suffering are irrelevant given we can kill animals in a humane way. Only the right to life is relevant.
The bluestreak cleaner wrasse [1-3] runs back and forth comparing the size of itself from an image with potential threats to know if it must fight or flight. Octopuses are famously smart [4]. Any intelligence or self-awareness test is also a test on the tester: how good are they in detecting what matters for the biomachine [5]/animal in testing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleaner_fish [2] video: https://www.yo…
The animals we commonly eat (chicken, cow, turkey, salmon, cod, etc) though don't seem to meet the criteria.
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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.
You are mistaking consciousness with free will.
You are possibly mistaking free will with being an agent that has a (possibly deterministic) method of updating priors in response to new (unknown to the agent, and possibly deterministic) input.
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While assuming that other human-looking things are conscious is a reasonable starting point, it certainly isn’t a given. There seems to be a wide variety of thinking processes. Some folks don’t have internal monologues. Some folks can’t visualize images at all, and the ones that do, do it will varying amount of detail. Isn’t it also reasonable that other humans have different degrees of consciousness, including perha…
One definition or property of consciousness I find interesting is that it encompasses “what it is like to be ”. If there is something that it is like to be , it is conscious. Intelligence and awareness are separate from consciousness in this framing. And there is arguably a point where we can speculate that extremely simplistic organisms could not be conscious, given the lack of sense organs that seems to predicate e…
I think there are problems with this.
Take something like the roundworm, with 300 neurons.
It has senses, and I assume a base level consciousness to process those senses. It would be something to be like a roundworm.
On the other hand, a roundworm likely has no sense of self, no identity, no awareness..no mental self to be able to acknowledge and reflect on those experience, so there is no 'someone'. And isn't that the point that matters?
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But then it would no longer be the same AI. You can't expect it to experience empathy or sadness if it has no knowledge of the things that cause them in humans, but any text discussing them would be mixed up with the experience of whoever wrote it. Or if you use a less selective filter then it goes the other way. Exclude philosophy texts but not Facebook posts and it would still have what it needs to emulate emotiona…
So you are saying the Turing test is not a good test for consciousness?
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The cogito is lazy and wrong. You don't "know you exist" just because you "appear" to think. Appearance of thought is not the same as thought. P zombies would also proudly exclaim that they think therefore they are...
Thinking does not matter. It only require "awareness" or the fact that "there is" is enough. Thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations and all qualia are something that are seen. The seer is the consciousness. In fact, this can becomes recursive, because the seer can see the seer is seen so that is not consciousness either.
That is just nonsensical.