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…
> What is this obsession with making computers human-like? Replacement of human labor on the cheap, the most capital intensive part of many businesses. Alternatively as a productivity multiplier of human labor.
"Cheap"
OpenAI loves to talk revenue but I'd like to hear more about their unit economics.
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…
I think there's practical value to knowing what would make a very complex AI system conscious in order to explicitly and intentionally avoid it - we want to create powerful artificial systems to do all the tasks that humans don't want to do, but there's no reason for those systems to have the capability to experience suffering by being 'enslaved' to do all these tasks; arguably consciousness isn't necessary nor usefu…
We're kind of failing by making AI that automates the things humans want to do.
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…
> it’s particularly important to explore these discussions as dispassionately as possible if you regard materialism as the only theory of mind that has any scientific credibility or validity
You're making it sound like I'm about to watch a proverbial Giorgio Tsoukalos make bold claims on pure speculation.
Human consciousness has logically to be a product of the physical structure of human beings.
To be fair, there is absolutely nothing within known physics that would explain why we're more than a complex biological computer and how subjective experience and qualia arise from it. So we genuinely cannot even begin to guess as to what actually imbues consciousness into our neural processes. It could be anything from "it's actually just the physical processes" through "there's a soul piloting our brains by influe…
There's currently no reason to assume that we're more than a complex biological computer - while it's indeed interesting to explain how subjective experience and qualia arise, it's certainly plausible that this can arise as emergent behavior once a specific type of computer is doing a specific type of computation, and we 'just' need to study that complex computation.
Unless we obtain any evidence whatsoever that this can't be the case, Occam's razor would suggest that this is the hypothesis to explore, without looking for new physics or other unlikely assumptions.
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…
Any body of academic thought whose paradigmatic communication medium is video rather than text is prima facie suspect. Might you please link a written statement of the salient position(s) of any one of these gentlemen?
I think it's pretty elitist to judge the quality of a content via whether it's in a book/journal or not. In fact, the recent wave of scientific fraud discovery shows that one can hide data manipulation pretty effectively in an academic journal. I'd much rather scientists spend their time making eli5 videos.
Yes, the beauty of nature is, there is no magic. Everything is governed by laws, when we uncover it, we can replicate it.
>Everything is governed by laws, when we uncover it, we can replicate it Sure, but it's precisely because everything is governend by laws that you can't make it how you want. It's perfectly possible that consciousness is a specific property of organic brains rather than digital computers. I can understand the laws that govern the properties of the Golden Gate Bridge, doesn't mean I can build it out of jello. That was…
But organic brains aren't some magic unknowable mush, we know how they work on a low level, we can trace how visual processing is done, etc, etc. As far as we see, the raw computing capabilities of biological neurons that we understand are sufficient to explain the behavior of animals, and as far as we see, biological brains don't do anything that can't be replicated with sufficiently powerful digital computers. So while it's technically possible that consciousness is a specific property of organic brains, we have no evidence at all that it would be the case and some (although not conclusive) evidence that there's nothing special, so unless we identify some difference, those hypotheses are not comparable and we should assume that according to our best current knowledge there aren't any specific properties of organic brains.
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,…
I suspect you might be arguing with either an LLM, or someone using LLM help to write their responses...
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,…
> Communication is about being understood. > 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…
I want to open a side thread about your definitions or descriptions of what "consciousness" is. I think that could be pretty interesting after reading all the comments, and I think there's a lot of knowledge hidden here that we could throw together. Some things that I understood, in my words: - consciousness is probably not reducible to smaller, non-conscious parts of which it is composed. You could maybe say it is i…
The fact a conscious mind loses capability when brain damage happens shows quite clearly that consciousness as a process is reducible to smaller non-conscious parts though. There's also an innate problem in assuming the human experience of say, "green" is consistent. What I actually see when I see the colour green only appears consistent with the physical behaviour of light. Whether any two people really see colours…
I think there's a consensus that you don't assume that the human experience of "green" is consistent, only that people do have such an experience. We can possibly try to "align" those experiences with communication and referring to a shared real world, but for that an interesting experiment scenario is communication between a person with the common trichromatic sight, a person with a tetrachromatic retina, and someone with partial color blindness, as the experience of "green" for them is not only inconsistent but also likely incompatible, without a possibility to align them.
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…
Please stop with the appeal to authority!! "The argument from authority is a logical fallacy (also known as ad verecundiam fallacy), and obtaining knowledge in this way is fallible." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority The meta logical fallacy of treating Wiki itself as an authority isn't an intended pun.
The problem is that while the post looks structurally like an appeal to authority, the first two appear to be advanced qualifications in areas completely unrelated to the question and the third is at best vaguely related. (It threw me on first reading too...)