371–380 of 380 posts
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It's having condciousnedd while it acts as if it's having consciousnes. It is powered while it is powered. Under general anesthesisa you are still alive, but you don't have consciousness.
Cool. I've never seen a computer act as if it's having consciousness.
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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.
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>So why would it be different for the brain? If nuclear energy can’t arise from abstract relationships, why would consciousness or anything else? Because consciousness isn't something the brain produces like a hormone or an excited particle. Consciousness isn't an output of the brain that is somehow separate from it, it is the manner in which the brain processes sensory information and makes decisions to produce outp…
This is a decent summary of functionalism but it doesn't provide any concrete justification for it. We both agree that the brain processes information. The question is if a sufficiently abstract description of that processing captures everything physically constitutive of consciousness. How would you support your position that it does?
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>So why would it be different for the brain? If nuclear energy can’t arise from abstract relationships, why would consciousness or anything else? Because consciousness isn't something the brain produces like a hormone or an excited particle. Consciousness isn't an output of the brain that is somehow separate from it, it is the manner in which the brain processes sensory information and makes decisions to produce outp…
You have this backwards. Thoughts and decisions precede consciousness, the sense of authorship is mostly constructed after the fact. See studies on readiness potentials in motor cortex.
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How so?
A corollary of causal exclusion is that two causally identical systems have identical explanations for identical physical events. If you posit some property of a substrate purported to be relevant for consciousness, it will either have a causal influence or non-causal influence. Given causal closure, any causal influence is explained by prior physical events, thus bypassing any relevance of this special property (or…
Wow. I have rarely read anything that made me lose more respect for the author in a single article. And this guy is a VP at Google ? And he leads an AI research team ? His third paragraph, which is the core of his argument, is stupid . He says, "As intelligent, social entities, we decide ... which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Yes, that's correct. "We do not care for others…
the belief that animals are conscious is a somewhat recent development isn't it? being able to feel hunger or pain doesn't make something conscious at least not in the same way humans are. a fly is capable of being hungry and will react to pain but I don't think it's capable of self reflection. there might be some merit to his point though I doubt anyone considering that whales might be highly intelligent and conscio…
Other people use "consciousness" to mean self-awareness, the capacity for what is called "higher" thought, the ability to reason and philosophize and so on. It used to be nearly undisputed that animals do not have this, and even though more people today would claim that animals do have this state, that remains a minority position. (And I do not believe it, BTW). Again for the sake of avoiding ambiguity, I'm going to call this "self-awareness" for the rest of this comment.
I read this guy's article thinking that he meant "awareness" when he wrote the article — and his paragraph about Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum definitely is talking about awareness. The ability to experience qualia: the color red, the feel of heat, and so on... that's awareness. Experiencing those things does not mean that you have self-awareness: it is pretty widely accepted that animals can also experience sight (at least those with eyes), the sensation of heat or cold, and so on, but few serious thinkers would argue that that alone proves that animals have self-awareness the way humans do.
In fact, looking through the article, I still cannot find a single place where he uses the term "conscious" or "consciousness" to unambiguously mean "self-aware" or "self-awareness". Throughout, he seems to be talking about the ability to experience sensations, and perceive the world, the thing I've called "awareness".
And yet... if that's his meaning, then his thesis (that "care confers consciousness", as he phrases it in the paragraph that starts "An obvious worry follows") is staggeringly stupid. Because as I've said many times, and I don't think anyone would disagree with me, everyone believes that animals can experience sensations. Which makes his thesis obviously incorrect.
The only way I can rescue his thesis from the garbage dump for obviously-wrong ideas would be to assume that he meant "self-awareness" when he talks about consciousness. In which case his "care confers consciousness" line means something like "when we care for other people is when we start to treat them as if they were human beings, not mere meat-robots". Which would be a point that could be sensibly argued. I would still disagree with the thesis, mind, but it wouldn't be obviously staggeringly stupid.
But if he intends the word consciousness to mean "self-awareness" throughout, then his paragraph about Descartes is just plain wrong, because it is arguing about consciousness by listing off qualia, sensations (redness, heat) that you experience by perceiving the world through your senses. Those are the factors that make up awareness, not self-awareness.
One possibility remains: that he is sometimes using the word consciousness to mean awareness, and at other times using it to mean self-awareness. In which case his argument rests on calling two different things by the same name and hoping you don't notice. This is called equivocation, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation has an excellent example (in the "Fallacy of four terms" section) of why equivocation leads to bad reasoning, usually without realizing it.
No matter what, whether he means awareness throughout, self-awareness throughout, or he's equivocating, his article is bad reasoning.
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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
We have continuous streams of vision, auditory, sensations including pain or pleasure from our body. An LLM has either a token stream or maybe a series of very fast but effectively separate latent states. If somehow there is some kind of experience, we know it can't have humanlike pain or pleasure because it has no nervous system or body.
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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.
> that never works
Citation needed.
Blaise is trying so hard to be a engineer-philosopher but none of his work here is useful. I'm very confused as to why he gets so much attention here, it's very clear he's in dialogue with no one.
Maybe the flaws make it more engaging because it's less intimidating.