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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

#341

Post by bena »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #120
bena wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're being pedantic. The person you're replying to seems like he wants to cut off the solipsistic argument; the only thing we can be sure of is our own consciousness, everything else is debateable. So while I know I am conscious, I do not know that everything I experience aren't just impulses fed to my brain by some external force. And I can't prove it either way. I have no way to test whether or not…

>And I can't prove it either way. Not true. This is "provable" aspects of you and your personality can be changed by physical changes to the brain. There are thousands of instances of this including experiments that verify this. While you can't "prove" this simply by observing this phenomenon among other people that level of "proof" is impossible. You technically can't prove anything and what we see with physical cha…

I'm a little unclear as to what the disagreement is.

I still think in your scenario, we would not be able to prove that that is what actually happened as opposed to someone manipulating the inputs to the brain to make it think that's what happened. Or to change it completely.

Like that's the entire solipsistic problem. The brain is just sort of self-contained. Everything is essentially input. We are incapable of really knowing the experience of someone or something else. Or if what we perceive is what's actually happening. Because, as you note, the brain can be manipulated to act in ways counter to the manner it had been acting previously. We can induce sound and vision. If we were better at it and could keep the brain alive, we could full on do a brain in a vat.

And I agree that sort of proof is impossible to acquire. Like, there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone else is conscious. But that's why we instead treat it as an axiom instead. We basically say "We're not going to prove it, we're just going to accept it as true". And that's fine.

Mostly because it not being true is an existential horror no one wants to truly confront.

And even with all of the more absurd conjectures, basically any form of "Last Thursdayism" of which simulation theory falls under, it's quicker to just assume that it's not true and treat the world we perceive as real with real rules that can be discovered through observation, testing, and experimentation. Because that's the only way we've been able to make any progress.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#342

Post by milgrim »

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?"

And a few sentences later:

“Paul had rapidly decided that this whole debate was a distraction. For any human, absolute proof of a Copy’s sentience was impossible. For any Copy, the truth was self-evident: cogito ergo sum. End of discussion.”

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#343

Post by edgyquant »

mannykannot wrote: post #275
edgyquant wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness does not appear to be biological, that is an opinion and a highly debated one

Where does it appear outside of biology?

Where does consciousness appear in biology? It’s a philosophical/metaphysical concept so far as I can tell

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#344

Post by 4rffs »

seethishat wrote: post #102
eureka7 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you making this confident of a claim? Do you have insight into how consciousness is a thing, allowing you to definitely say it doesn't exist in this case?

Because it is common sense. This is software trained to produce outputs. It doesn't feel anything.

I genuinely think there's a lot of deluded people on here.

Which shouldnt be a surprise - most CS folks are disconnected ironically from reality.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#345

Post by 4rffs »

wtallis wrote: post #289
mcmcmc wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By social norms, not running matrix multiplication in their head ad nauseam

I don't think that argument holds water, because the scope of what can be reasonably approximated by matrix multiplication is extremely broad (especially when the matrix multiplication is also paired with a source of randomness).

Dude we aren't performing some nonsensical calculation in our brains.

Mathematics is an invention of humans.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#346

Post by b112 »

cwmoore wrote: post #336
b112 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many, many places have tried giving money to have kids. Many. Thst never works. It's not about money. It's about biology, likely microplastics acting as hormone inhibitors. Sex drive and reproductive drive are not the same.

s/“That never works.”/“mine,mine,mine,mine,mine”/g

Your response doesn't make a lot of sense, are you able to actually state your point? Doing a search and replace as you suggest, doesn't actually create anything that makes sense.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#347

Post by b112 »

kulahan wrote: post #292
b112 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many, many places have tried giving money to have kids. Many. Thst never works. It's not about money. It's about biology, likely microplastics acting as hormone inhibitors. Sex drive and reproductive drive are not the same.

It's almost always about the money. Some studies have shown something as simple as free car seats can influence fertility rates. We know next to nothing about microplastics - pseudoscience can wait at the door.

No credible studies have shown anything of the sort. A sensible look at things, is that every single country on the planet, has a fertility problem. Almost every single country has a below-replacement birth rate now.

It doesn't matter whether it's a highly populated nation or not, an aged population or not. What the culture is, the religion, access to birth control, health care, income. For example, some places don't really use cars, think The Netherlands as a Western example, or poor agrarian nations.

The culture of Japan is very Western centric, yet also as far from any Western culture you can get. EG, high-tech, cities, cars, the trappings of "modern life", yet a culture entirely unique, wrapped in strong levels of duty, and with a different culture for woman.

Iran has a birth rate problem. A very rigidly controlled, religious nation, where women really have no say. Where people are paid to have kids, like many Western and other nations.

If you think "car seats" have anything to do with child rearing in much of the world, you're completely, US-culture out of touch. And further to that, my point is that every single culture, and whether rural farmers or people living it cities, it does not matter.

So whatever reason you want to give? Cost? Car seats? Contraceptive? Women's rights? Woke or not woke? Religion? Culture? Finances? None of it makes one iota of difference. None of it. Whether a poor or rich country? Nope, doesn't matter.

It's none of those things. Not a one.

If it was, then it wouldn't be all nations with a collapsing birth rate.

So to everyone reading this, know this truth. It's not economics, culture, the place you live, wealth, it's something else.

Something affecting us all.

It may not be microplastics. I could be something else.

But it's something which no amount of money will help.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#348

Post by ratelimitsteve »

slopinthebag wrote: post #234
mannykannot wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If someone digitally modelled a nuclear reactor, would any energy be produced? No, because the simulation is actually missing an important aspect, namely the causal part that exists with the physical material but not in the simulation. It’s actually that it’s missing these components that makes it a simulation and not the real thing. But for that you need the physical material. So why would it be different for the br…

>If nuclear energy can’t arise from abstract relationships, why would consciousness or anything else?

because consciousness is a function of intangible relationships and energy is not.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#349

Post by vinceguidry »

txrx0000 wrote: post #303
consumer451 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

These are good intuitions. I'll add some more: Orangutans can drive a golf cart, there are videos of that from the pre-AI era. General anesthetics that work on humans also tend to work on them. There is just a smooth gradient of brain evolution. We don't know exactly what in the brain gets disrupted during general anesthesia (or a baseball bat to the head, for that matter) that causes consciousness to go away, but in…

> Solipsism or simulation theory type of metaphysical positions remain undefeated, but they don't matter for practical purposes because materialism and its accompanying theories of physics have the same predictive power about what I will observe in the future regardless of whether solipsism is true (def true: as real as my own consciousness).

Materialism determined that you wrote this essay? I'd love to see you demonstrate that with physics.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#350

Post by aeve890 »

exe34 wrote: post #337
mcmcmc wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s also no evidence that current AI can think or have thoughts.

It can produce better thought out arguments than a lot of people though.

It can REPLICATE better thought out arguments it learned from the internet, which were thought by people.
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