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Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

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Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#221

Post by largbae »

arionhardison wrote: post #153
Animats wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it's simply time to expand our ambition. These programs manipulate language and ideas the way we do, but they still don't care beyond our instructions. Things that we(especially software engineers) expect to take a year can now be done in a month. Fantastic! Now let us use this amplified power to solve problems that were previously too hard to tackle. Maybe aim to solve aging next so that we can stick around long enough to colonize the Local Group.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#222

Post by gqgs »

joshheitzman wrote: post #211
gqgs wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who exactly are these people confidently claiming that stones possess consciousness you are talking about? I've read a number of panpsychist publications, yet I have yet to encounter an author who asserts with certainty that stones are conscious exactly in the same way human beings are. The more common panpsychist interpretation, that everything exists on a spectrum of consciousness, with stones at the low end and hu…

What's the difference between a computer and a stone?

A lot of answers to this question so it depends which layer you are talking about.

Functionally,I'd say a key difference is that it's probably easier to perform general computation with a computer than to achieve the same goal using a stone.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#223

Post by mannykannot »

GPerson wrote: post #181
mannykannot wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can assert there is no such thing... No such thing as what? As far as I can tell, I have asserted no such thing as there being no such thing, whatever it is.

“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.” What is this then?

What, then, is the thing that you allege I am asserting the nonexistence of in this sentence? Furthermore, this sentence does not state something I am asserting, it is something that ratelimitsteve would have difficulty denying while being consistent with his distinction between simulating and building (this is easier to see when you look at the entire sentence, including the two words that you left out.)

Update: I see ratelimitsteve agrees with that assertion.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#224

Post by Jtarii »

kaangiray26 wrote: post #84

Quoting from the Permutation City by Greg Egan: "Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?"

That is an outstandingly bad argument.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#225

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

joshheitzman wrote: post #211
gqgs wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who exactly are these people confidently claiming that stones possess consciousness you are talking about? I've read a number of panpsychist publications, yet I have yet to encounter an author who asserts with certainty that stones are conscious exactly in the same way human beings are. The more common panpsychist interpretation, that everything exists on a spectrum of consciousness, with stones at the low end and hu…

What's the difference between a computer and a stone?

One is a computer and the other, a stone.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#226

Post by jampekka »

ryanSrich wrote: post #216
lnenad wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there isn't? What does it factually mean to be conscious? How can we claim other living beings aren't are conscious?

Consciousness can factually exist even though another being’s subjective experience is not directly observable. we can measure its behavioral and neural correlates and infer consciousness from them but we cannot directly observe the experience itself or conclusively prove its absence in another being. I don't think we'll ever get to a point where subjective experience in another is directly observable. But I don't th…

Correlates to what exactly? To behavior or processes we assume subjective experience is present in?

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#227

Post by Jtarii »

slopinthebag wrote: post #215
feoren wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you could put this person in a room with a bunch of native Chinese speakers, and he could hold conversations fluently with all of them. Yet you claim he doesn't understand Chinese? How can you possibly defend that? This is very close to "zombie theory" -- everyone else is an automaton except you. Nobody else has real thoughts. That obviously fluent Chinese speaker doesn't really understand Chinese.

If the person was told in Chinese to jump in the air, would they be able to follow that instruction? If they actually understood Chinese they would. But since they don’t and they’re just mechanically translating symbols without actually understanding the language conceptually they would not know to jump.

What's stopping the book from containing that information?

When you hear a certain set of symbols in a certain context you jump.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#228

Post by slopinthebag »

dist-epoch wrote: post #132
kaangiray26 wrote: post #84

Quoting from the Permutation City by Greg Egan: "Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?"

So I see you solved the Simulation Hypothesis - water is wet, so we can't be in a simulation, because in a simulation nobody gets wet.

If we are in a simulation than by definition we cannot get wet, we can only be simulated to be wet. Practically for us it makes no difference tho.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#229

Post by consumer451 »

kulahan wrote: post #213
Animats wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why wouldn't we assume humans are special? We are, by so many metrics. We've become essentially a force of nature, rather than a simple occupying species. I find it much weirder that we're so dedicated to pretending we're normal. Just a normal animal, on a normal planet, in a normal solar system, in a normal galaxy, in a normal universe. I get we have to do that for science to be good, but I don't get why it carries…

> Why wouldn't we assume humans are special?

For me, because the Copernican Principle seems relatively undefeated.

> We've become essentially a force of nature, rather than a simple occupying species.

So are beavers, trees, plankton... they all have huge effects on the planet.

Regarding analysis of animal brains vs. human brains, the more we do, the more we find that we have in common with many other "lesser" species.

Regarding us vs. machines, I certainly believe we are just very complex and sometimes easily programmable analog machines.

This is just my 2 cents on the matter. We are pretty darn neat, but at this point I believe it would be folly to think that we are on some different incomparable plane.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#230

Post by Jtarii »

feoren wrote: post #138
mannykannot wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Searle's main argument seems to be that meat is magic and silicon is not.
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