Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Double Standard of Carbon: Why we grant souls to meat but not silicon

natansessays.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–15 of 15 posts

Re: The Double Standard of Carbon: Why we grant souls to meat but not silicon

#11

Post by JhonOliver »

tredre3 wrote: post #4

> We grant the human a “soul” because we cannot see the trillions of calculations happening in the dark of the skull. We deny the machine a soul simply because we can see the code. We are like children who think a puppet is alive until they see the strings, failing to see how we are just products of the strings of evolution. Much like children grow up to understand that puppets aren't alive, we'll grow up to understa…

Wait I think I missunderstood the article. I'm pretty sure the author is arguing that both LLMs and humans are puppets.

Re: The Double Standard of Carbon: Why we grant souls to meat but not silicon

#12

Post by JhonOliver »

boznz wrote: post #6

We must have been thinking the same thoughts over the past few days, I posted mine a few hours ago also. Your blog post went a different direction to mine but I went through all these same thoughts while writing it.

I would like to see your post

Re: The Double Standard of Carbon: Why we grant souls to meat but not silicon

#13

Post by verdverm »

JhonOliver wrote: post #10
verdverm wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This relies on the assumption that humans have souls, which is unprovable in either direction. The best way to understand this is through the lens of religion and faith. I heed the Buddha's wisdom, attachment leads to suffering, and avoid personification of my tools.

I agree that we need religion. But it requires a religion that says life can only exist in carbon and not silicon. Does Buddism have this?

I did not say we need religion. I said that thinking there is a soul is a religious thing.

I personally don't think man or machine has a soul, if you do, its purely on faith alone, like a religion.

Religion is the number one cause of discrimination and war, you can learn good values without it.

Re: The Double Standard of Carbon: Why we grant souls to meat but not silicon

#14

Post by boznz »

JhonOliver wrote: post #12
boznz wrote: post #6

We must have been thinking the same thoughts over the past few days, I posted mine a few hours ago also. Your blog post went a different direction to mine but I went through all these same thoughts while writing it.

I would like to see your post

https://rodyne.com/?p=3803> Quite short - which is normal when I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea.

Re: The Double Standard of Carbon: Why we grant souls to meat but not silicon

#15

Post by JhonOliver »

boznz wrote: post #14
JhonOliver wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see your post

https://rodyne.com/?p=3803 > Quite short - which is normal when I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea.

I like the "whitelist" concept you brought up and the example of your cat. I would have liked you to have gone further. Why do we create these whitelists? What are the qualifying factors? I think that would go a long way towards determaining if AI will be considered alive in your view.

I find your claim on self-sufficiency interesting but you don't really justify it in the whitelist framework. A rat is self-sufficient but you justify killing it. Perhapse this is why you call the view "naive". But I think that if you keep going you can come up with something robust

Post reply on HN