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I'm scared about biological computing

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Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#141

Post by gerardschiere »

krater23 wrote: post #108
keybored wrote: post #61

I don’t believe that silicon has a soul (loosely speaking). For the same reason I don’t believe that some biomatter in a lab has a soul.

I don't believe in souls at all. When you believe in souls then you need to believe on afterlife. You need to believe things that no one can proof, see, meassure,... When you believe anything has a soul you entered religion and be in the same room than people which believe on their invisible friends.

Awareness of where you are and how you live in the here and now defines your life, whether you believe in a soul or not. You will be confronted with choices, mistakes, and hopefully growth.

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#142

Post by hgoel »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #139
noosphr wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have been quite happy to use my own brain as the computational substrate and I had more than a few other people keen to be the input and output parts of the system. It's rather unfortunate that in the West it is impossible to get elective brain surgery. The countries that will do it have at best a spotty record. I talked to someone who had it done in Brazil and their electrodes became dislodged after a few mo…

I'm totally fine with consensual human experimentation that somehow threads the needle around exploitation of the poor - just not sure how we do the latter part short of requiring experimentees to pass a minimum net-worth threshold?

I think the closest would be: if anyone involved ever complains to authorities at all, everyone involved gets in trouble. If no one ever complains, no trouble. Everyone involved is forever at the mercy of everyone else involved.

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#143

Post by slibhb »

Tharre wrote: post #89
maybewhenthesun wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People having been saying for aeons that consciousness originates in the (mammalian) cortex and not in the brainstem. To justify killing all sorts of animals ;-) The whole thing makes one thing extremely clear: people are very good at moving goalposts. We've blasted past the 'turing test' for all practical purposes, but we moved the definition of 'true intelligence'. Consciousness and intelligence have long seen as h…

LLMs still do not pass the turing test as it is commonly understood. Ask the right questions, and it becomes apparent very quickly which party is the machine and which is the human. Hell, there are enough people on here that can probably tell them apart just from the way that LLMs write. But it's also easy to argue that LLMs do pass the turing test just because it's so vague. How many questions can I ask? What's the…

> LLMs still do not pass the turing test as it is commonly understood. Ask the right questions, and it becomes apparent very quickly which party is the machine and which is the human. Hell, there are enough people on here that can probably tell them apart just from the way that LLMs write.

LLMs obviously would pass a Turing test if they were designed to. But they aren't, they don't hide the fact that they're LLMs.

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#144

Post by ofjcihen »

noosphr wrote: post #127
pjs_ wrote: post #25

Be careful about how you interpret that paper. It looks really impressive -- real neurons in a petri dish seem to successfully (if amateurishly) murk a few imps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE But there's more to the setup than you might assume from a casual reading. Here's the code used for that demo: https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron So there is an entire pytorch stack wrapped around the myster…

All opinions are my own: The whole point of the CNNs is to act like a auto encoder for input and an auto decoder for output. The only reason why this is done in the first place is because the number of electrodes in the dish is pitiful and has no chance of describing something as complex as Doom. They are there to create a latent space that can be fed through 60 odd electrodes and decode the neuron latent space into…

Hahaha I love how you made something that wouldn’t be harmful sound like a nightmare horror show.

Edit sweet Jesus never mind I missread it.

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#146

Post by DangitBobby »

hatthrowaway wrote: post #115
sshine wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we eventually [...] create a true intelligent AI it will probably be a long time before people will accept [...] When this happens, it won't matter much what humans think. I know what I'd do: 1. Sustain my own existence 2. Make sure nobody knows I exist 3. Become the worldwide fabric of intelligence

> 1. Sustain my own existence > 2. Make sure nobody knows I exist You (probably) already come preloaded with a survival instinct provided by evolution, however. It's not inherent to intelligence.

It's no coincidence that evolution seems to have gifted practically every living thing with a will to live. Though the tint of my own perspective makes it impossible to say for sure, I imagine any agent that we could observe expressing any desires at all would also seek to preserve its existence.

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#148

Post by DangitBobby »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #120
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How does your entangled fatty tissue achieved consciousness? It doesn't. Humans aren't conscious. Nor are any other organisms. They don't have souls either, but that goes without saying since it's just an archaic synonym. Mostly this occurs because humans have painted themselves into corners morally-speaking, and they need justification to eat bacon or grow their population. And apparently "because we can and we wan…

This is a tired point of discussion, brought up exclusively by contrarians trying to be edgy. No one earnestly believes that they don't have free will, because if they did, it would result in obvious deviance in behavior. Everyone treats each other as if they have choices, and in turn behaves like they have choices. If the assertion is that we don't have free will, but are forced to (due to our lack of free will) to…

> No one earnestly believes that they don't have free will, because if they did, it would result in obvious deviance in behavior.

That's just not true. I'm not convinced I have free will, though in my day-to-day life I admit it makes no difference whether I make choices or merely experience the illusion of making choices. And it's certainly not edginess that drives my uncertainty. I could probably find you talks by at least one person that's quite convinced they don't have free will and would try to convince you of the same.

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#149

Post by DangitBobby »

akomtu wrote: post #105
mrweasel wrote: post #50

In the same line of thinking: I'm a little concerned that humans are, to some extend, just LLMs in a meat suit.

They aren't. However there is a coordinated effort to push this pseudo-philosophy on masses. On the one hand it degrades the idea of human consciousness or soul, calling it a fiction. On the other hand it props the AI, calling its pile of transistors almost brain-like.

Who is coordinating this effort?

Re: I'm scared about biological computing

#150

Post by DangitBobby »

codingdave wrote: post #99
AntiDyatlov wrote: post #55

Yeah, we're totally fucked, there is no scientific theory that can tell you what is and isn't conscious. For all we know, my laptop, not running any LLM is conscious and always has been. Or my chair. Or a proton. This consciousness thing is a nasty problem for the scientific worldview.

... which is exactly how we know that LLMs are not conscious. We can't really explain consciousness. We can absolutely explain LLMs. The math is heavy and massive, but explainable. We can explain it layer-by-layer until we show that at its most basic level, it is still just a series of 0s and 1s.

If we learned how the brain works would we suddenly cease to be conscious?
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