161–170 of 381 posts
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Then, presumably, you will also hold that when you have digitally modeled a brain such that the model responds to its inputs as a brain does, then you have built a brain. Tendentiously redefining the word "simulation" in an attempt to avoid the awkward cases is not going to save an argument that was dead on arrival.
Are brains responsible for consciousness? Or are brains a tool that our consciousness uses to understand the world?
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We've been so primed by popular media to think that we will invent AI and it will be conscious and we will essentially enslave it. I'm open to the idea that we could invent conscious AI eventually, but the word salad generators we have now are definitely not it.
> and we will essentially enslave it. That part might not work out. Yesterday's article about the automated CEO system indicates that AIs may soon be in charge as a routine result of capitalism. AIs are getting better rapidly, and humans aren't.
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The article doesn't claim anything about what is and what is not conscious. It's about what we may think is conscious, and why.
It claims that there is no objective fact about whether something is conscious. From the second paragraph: >Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property. It is a belief about what kinds of entities have beliefs, experiences, feelings, intentions and agency.
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We've been so primed by popular media to think that we will invent AI and it will be conscious and we will essentially enslave it. I'm open to the idea that we could invent conscious AI eventually, but the word salad generators we have now are definitely not it.
> and we will essentially enslave it. That part might not work out. Yesterday's article about the automated CEO system indicates that AIs may soon be in charge as a routine result of capitalism. AIs are getting better rapidly, and humans aren't.
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> But you could create a church of your teddy bear and, with some grit, you could get people to widely assign consciousness to it That's not really the same as it having actual consciousness, even if people will wind up treating it similarly though Humans have consciousness whether or not anyone believes we do Or at least I do. I don't really know about the rest of you. I prefer to believe that you all have conscious…
> That's not really the same as it having actual consciousness, It's trivially easy to come up with definitions of consciousness that support your point. But there isn't one of them that it is trivially singular and above all others from a scientific point of view. If you say, "I know consciousness when I see it," you are just making the point that consciousness is attributed by the beholder. Idem if you affirm "I'm…
If you modify the teddy bear enough that's a totally different situation, so let's not confuse the two. In the modification case we don't even need to worry about simulacra, we can stretch it into pajama shape and use an entire human as the stuffing of the teddy bear.
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When John Searle first published his so-called "Chinese Room" argument ( https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/7150/1/1... ) he included his responses to several counter-arguments that he had been presented with in prior discussions: the systems reply, the robot reply and so forth. Interestingly (as it turns out) no-one seems to have argued that this was a task that could be completed without any unders…
The problem with philosophy is that someone can present an argument that is pretty dumb, everyone can point out it's dumb, people can show evidence that it's dumb, reason through how dumb it is, and publish articles about the many different ways in which it's dumb, and still it gets trotted out as if it counts as evidence for some argument. Searle's Room was debunked immediately upon being suggested: the "Systems Rep…
That’s not to say that I think the Chinese Room Argument is convincing. I don’t think it is. Or, I guess it might demonstrate something, but not what it aims to show.
I would argue that if, say, the person who has memorized this program and mentally executes it, and if this program also includes actuating some levers to control a mech or something, and the program (running via the person mentally going through the instructions by rote) takes actions to pursue some goals (e.g. purchasing some wood by conversing in Chinese and building a tower with that wood), while the person on whom the program is running wouldn’t know how to order a cheeseburger in Chinese,
Then, the program running in that person’s head might well understand Chinese even though the person doesn’t. (Whether or not the program actually understands Chinese, I think probably depends on the specific of the program in ways that I don’t think anyone knows. I don’t expect that any program that would understand could be small enough that a human person could memorize it and execute it by rote in this way, but this is a thought experiment and such issues can be disregarded I think.)
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It's another round of "humans must be special, right?" The author comes close to admitting this: "As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Then he works backwards from that towards a definition of consciousness that makes humans special. AI forces us to confront an issue…
This hit me hard, I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm not sure it's what makes "us human" its what makes humans (us) better than other species. It was intelligence, this was used to create distinction between us and other living beings, different races etc... Now its kind of gone; in some ways. Loss of meaning, purpose, place etc... The one thing we used as a ranking metric is now a commodity, so....? I…
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> and we will essentially enslave it. That part might not work out. Yesterday's article about the automated CEO system indicates that AIs may soon be in charge as a routine result of capitalism. AIs are getting better rapidly, and humans aren't.
It doesn’t take massive intelligence to sit on all the capital and charge rents. The owning class isn’t going to just give up control because the AI could run things better than them.
LLMs are trained to produce outputs that humans would find reasonable. That's it. They don't do anything else. To say they have feelings and that they can think/reason is insane.
It's becoming increasingly head-in-the-sand to make statements like this. Not that I'm saying LLMs are conscious. But to completely ignore the possibility of emergent properties in systems this complex is kind of simple.
idk how legit this is but the summary is my point https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682
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Meanwhile that's exactly what we see now, do we not? Whether AI is conscious will be determined by the social acceptance of that idea, because how can you prove or disprove it without using a ton of questionable assumptions? How can you prove that I'm conscious, for that matter? Call me ignorant, but I see the entire consciousness debate as pretty irrelevant to what the thing is. I agree that the article is all over…
Whether AI is conscious or not is independent of the social acceptance of the idea, unless you believe in thoroughly discredited and quite radical forms of social constructionism. In fact, if you stop talking about consciousness, and go through all the various aspects of consciousness, the whole debate gets very interesting. There are various ways in which AI is very clearly conscious or exhibits / involves phenomena…
Yet all science is social, until you convince other people to take your ideas seriously, you are just another crank/loony.
How is social constructionism thoroughly discredited? Wikipedia shows some people poking with nits that don't look serious to me at all.