31–40 of 81 posts
Somehow I find it harder to imagine what it “would be like” to be even simpler creatures. As a crab I can kind of imagine having more legs and probably having a great sense of smell. I can imagine the excitement and urgency of spawning. How it would feel to think that a sea floor carcass would be tasty. In the other hand, what the hell would it feel like to be a worm? Would I have an inherent sense of “left” and “rig…
The article mentions bats, and it mentions philosopher Thomas Nagel, but it doesn't mention Nagel's famous 1974 paper, What Is It Like To Be A Bat? . I assume the article title is a riff on that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
The old "how do I even know my red is your red" is a little piece of this puzzle. Perhaps someday the sci-fiction notion of loading a stimcard into the slot behind your ear will let you experience what it's like to be a bat... but the point of the paper is, will you know for certain, or can you know, if that's actually what it feels like?
Now, that was just a rehash, which you didn't need me for. What I want to add on is--everybody remain civil, this is a serious intellectual question--we know what transgender people feel like they aren't, but do they know what it feels like to be what they believe they are? Of course it feels like "you" (or "me", depending the voice I'm supposed to be writing) but comparatively, how would anybody know what else it feels like? Do men and women feel differently? We think they do, but perhaps they don't. Perhaps they just think about different things, with the same feelings. Of course, some would be offended by that suggestion, declaring that men and women don't think differently.
It's a separate series of questions, "I want to be treated as if I'm X" and to preserve the suspension of disbelief, "please don't indicate you doubt I am X because that won't feel like being X". This is the only way I can think of it. I don't understand why other people don't think of it this way.
But, I'm one of those people who doesn't mind talking in theaters, it doesn't ruin anything for me.
A thing that always comes to mind with these kind of news is the claim that octopi have comparable effects from MDMA as humans. For anyone that have an overview of evolutionary history that should be interesting to say the least. https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=octopus%20mdma Another interesting source I have found lately is this talk by Nicholas Humphrey (How did consciousness evolve?). If I'm interpreting him ri…
It's interesting to me that on the one hand, many AI researchers either try to sidestep the hard problem of consciousness ("well, once it has 100 trillion parameters and quacks like a duck, we'll have to accept it's a duck") or refuse to acknowledge that it's a problem at all, and then on the other hand you have folks like that google engineer who readily accept that an LLM is experiencing consciousness because it ou…
Many of the physical adaptations critters on this planet have made were in response to evolutionary pressure. Eat or die. Reproduce or your bloodline dies. Get those resources before something else does or die. At the moment AI doesn’t really face these pressures. They don’t need to get better at “getting electricity” - something else does that for the AI systems so there is no pressure to “be aware of where your nex…
So it seems to me that consciousness is more likely an emergent property of certain kinds of computation.
Somehow I find it harder to imagine what it “would be like” to be even simpler creatures. As a crab I can kind of imagine having more legs and probably having a great sense of smell. I can imagine the excitement and urgency of spawning. How it would feel to think that a sea floor carcass would be tasty. In the other hand, what the hell would it feel like to be a worm? Would I have an inherent sense of “left” and “rig…
We don't live in some weird Cartesian universe where minds can be attached to any old living thing (though, strictly speaking, Descartes only recognized that human beings have minds).
Somehow I find it harder to imagine what it “would be like” to be even simpler creatures. As a crab I can kind of imagine having more legs and probably having a great sense of smell. I can imagine the excitement and urgency of spawning. How it would feel to think that a sea floor carcass would be tasty. In the other hand, what the hell would it feel like to be a worm? Would I have an inherent sense of “left” and “rig…
At least not the way I/we have thoughts.
The article mentions bats, and it mentions philosopher Thomas Nagel, but it doesn't mention Nagel's famous 1974 paper, What Is It Like To Be A Bat? . I assume the article title is a riff on that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
just to add on with a slant toward the types of things HN is interested in, the point of "what is it like to be a bat" is essentially, you can't know what it's like to be a bat unless you are a bat (and I don't mean the paper should be read for that conclusion, you develop far more insight thinking your way through it) The old "how do I even know my red is your red" is a little piece of this puzzle. Perhaps someday t…
He did certainly touch on the question of "if it is like something to be a bat, what is that like?" but it was a secondary question that follows only if you can first conclude that it is indeed like something to be a bat.