271–280 of 604 posts
I’m writing this comment so that people who want to know more about alternative theories of consciousness (to materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic. (To be clear, I’m not here to argue about the topic or try to persuade anyone of any position – that’s a waste of everyone’s time). I recommend seeking out discussions involving: - Federico Faggin: inventor of silico…
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>Modern/advanced societies have laws to protect conscious beings from exploitation and cruelty. I can think of no such society where this is generally true. One need only consider that pigs are far smarter than dogs and then the median pig’s life in said societies.
Laws exist that ban practices that are - according to those who set and enforce the laws - excessively cruel to pigs. That’s all this discussion is about. That pigs are still treated with cruelty is a terrible thing, and I’d happily see more done to protect all animals against cruelty. But it’s a separate argument to what’s relevant here.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/11/18176551/ag-gag...
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At minimum, this does not capture that I _am_ challenging the Original Commenter ("prima facie suspect") to more rigorously defend his position, but doing so respectfully. "One salient" written source is a carefully chosen framing: the OC cannot meet it by replying with support peripheral or meta to the main argument, but neither can he dismiss my request as burdensome, demanding multiple links. The proposed revision…
Communication is about being understood. Not about crafting the perfect sentence. Even if you craft the perfect sentence, that will be the perfect sentence _for you_, and it might be completely lost on many people, some perhaps even more intelligent than you. The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure,…
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Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined. You see this a lot, and one of the more popular instances are questions like "is cereal a salad?" It plays on the fact that the definition of a salad is relatively loose, and because it's loose items which aren't usually associated with the word do actually fit the definition. Consciousness feels much the same way: there's a very loose definition which is collo…
> Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined. I will give you my favorite definition, given to me by my friend Bruno Marchal, a brilliant mathematician from Brussels who spent his life thinking about such topics: "Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted." It felt insufficient when he told me, but now I am convinced. It may require some introspection to "get it". It did for me.
I'm sure Bruno is brilliant. But I still don't know what consciousness is. And I think that "definition" doesn't meet the modern scientific standard. And I strongly oppose the idea that in order to learn science I should have to spend time introspecting.
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But how do you know another human is “conscious”? Certainly there is an intuitive sense to it that would be very difficult to put into words, but that is the crux of the matter. Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to…
You don't. But it's solipsism to think otherwise, and while solipsism is hard to argue against logically it's not a very interesting or useful way of navigating the world we experience. We can't prove other people aren't p-zombies but the value bet is definitely that, appearing like us in every other way, they also experience like us.
"I don't know if I'm a P zombie, and I don't know if I'm a replicant or not, Deckard!"
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> Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined. I will give you my favorite definition, given to me by my friend Bruno Marchal, a brilliant mathematician from Brussels who spent his life thinking about such topics: "Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted." It felt insufficient when he told me, but now I am convinced. It may require some introspection to "get it". It did for me.
That's just objectivity, and I don't think consciousness is synonymous with objectivity at all! Cogitoist propaganda. The appearance of thought is not necessarily the same as thought, so you don't actually know you think just because you believe you think. The cogito (I think therefor I am), like your statement, is incoherent. LLMs will swear up and down (with a prompt) that they are thinking beings, therefor "they a…
The fact that there is experience at all, the contents of which may be “doubted”, cannot be doubted.
I’m not unequivocally claiming this but that’s the thrust of the argument.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At minimum, this does not capture that I _am_ challenging the Original Commenter ("prima facie suspect") to more rigorously defend his position, but doing so respectfully. "One salient" written source is a carefully chosen framing: the OC cannot meet it by replying with support peripheral or meta to the main argument, but neither can he dismiss my request as burdensome, demanding multiple links. The proposed revision…
Communication is about being understood. Not about crafting the perfect sentence. Even if you craft the perfect sentence, that will be the perfect sentence _for you_, and it might be completely lost on many people, some perhaps even more intelligent than you. The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure,…
> The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure
Indeed, relying on the implicit when the explicit is sufficient [0] does a disservice to one's readers, in whose ability and charity to comprehend my surface text, without presuming confounding subtextual meaning, I have every confidence.
[0] It is not always; some things can only be gestured at, not grasped.
What is this obsession with making computers human-like? We can put those machine to better uses than forgetting, having biases, making subtle or gross mistakes (hello, ChatGPT) like we do. The AI that some apparently consider top-notch today is only good at powering NPCs in video games. The more serious the use-case, the more harmful it becomes. Moreover, achieving artificial consciousness is only good at fueling en…
My mum is a shrink, and very old, and smart, and hates technology. I was talking her through how some primitive "AGI" could happen with 4o (basically just explained this: https://b.h4x.zip/agi ) That got us talking about consciousness, and at the end, she thought about it for about a minute and then said "if I can't give it lysergic acid and make it see god, it's not conscious" and went back to making her dinner.
> Last in agreement with our views, the active inference theory formalizes how autonomous learning agents (whether artificial or natural) shall be endowed with a spontaneous active motivation to explore and learn (Friston et al., 2016), which other studies confirmed to be sufficient for the emergence of complex behavior without the need for immediate rewards (https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10316).
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What I take from this is that there needs to be something of a [negative] feedback loop in the AI for it to get to consciousness, and if we think about how that works in nature, that means we need several negative feedback loops, including the AI equivalent of various hormones and signaling agents. Think dopamine.
Now, AI already has feedback. But I'm talking at a different layer. The AI's interaction with the world has to help drive and modulate what the AI seeks to do through that interaction. The AI needs motivation in the form of pain, pleasure, and instincts.