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In Search of AI Psychosis

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241–250 of 258 posts

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem unable to communicate clearly what it is you are trying to say. Honestly i would be interested but I can't follow you. Your use of words is non standard. You say words are about social interelations, e.g. domninance, exchange, etc but then you also say that words don't communicate information. Of course thought is fundamentally non-verbal but since telepathy doesn't exist we use symbols, i.e. words to commun…

Words don't represent thoughts in any way shape or form. They externalize bias as a pretext to communication, which is arbitary. Every word is a metaphor, every word is mythological. These are empirical facts developed from Aristotle, Cassirer, Halliday into Fedorenko, yet CS takes not note of it. Language has no form that refers or represents anything in reality in any sense of concatenation. They are gibberish. Thi…

[deleted]

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#242
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but "what is the effect of tasers on hearts" is an interesting question when tasers are brand new. If it kills people with obvious pre-existing risks then that is not very surprising. If it kills 50% of otherwise healthy people in a way we didn't anticipate, that is alarming and important to distinguish. Imagine someone does a quick survey to estimate that tasers aren't killing people we don't expect, and some re…

> Imagine someone does a quick survey to estimate that tasers aren't killing people we don't expect Given that the quote you cited was, "Are the chatbots really driving people crazy, or just catching the attention of people who were crazy already," I'd say the equivalent would be something like, "Are tasers really killing people, or were tasered heart attack victims dying already?" And yeah, I'd be mad about that fra…

Shoving full implicit context into the analogy, it would be more like "are tasers really killing otherwise physically healthy people, or are the recent notable deaths primarily from people with pre-existing risks?"

I can agree that Alexander might appear flippant or even callous about mental health at times (especially compared to modern liberal social media sensibilities), but I chalk that up to the well-earned desensitization of a professional working in the field for decades.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem unable to communicate clearly what it is you are trying to say. Honestly i would be interested but I can't follow you. Your use of words is non standard. You say words are about social interelations, e.g. domninance, exchange, etc but then you also say that words don't communicate information. Of course thought is fundamentally non-verbal but since telepathy doesn't exist we use symbols, i.e. words to commun…

Words don't represent thoughts in any way shape or form. They externalize bias as a pretext to communication, which is arbitary. Every word is a metaphor, every word is mythological. These are empirical facts developed from Aristotle, Cassirer, Halliday into Fedorenko, yet CS takes not note of it. Language has no form that refers or represents anything in reality in any sense of concatenation. They are gibberish. Thi…

So you are saying that your words are arbitrary and meaningless? You are writing gibberish because you have no choice?

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Words don't represent thoughts in any way shape or form. They externalize bias as a pretext to communication, which is arbitary. Every word is a metaphor, every word is mythological. These are empirical facts developed from Aristotle, Cassirer, Halliday into Fedorenko, yet CS takes not note of it. Language has no form that refers or represents anything in reality in any sense of concatenation. They are gibberish. Thi…

So you are saying that your words are arbitrary and meaningless? You are writing gibberish because you have no choice?

[dead]

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#245
post #192
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NYT wanted to report on who he was. They wanted to report specifically his birth/legal name, with no plausible public interest reason. If it wasn't "stochastic terrorism" (as the buzzword of the day was) then it sure looked a lot like it. > He doxxed himself years before that Few people manage to keep anything 100% secret. Realistically private/public is a spectrum not a binary, and publication in the NYT is a pret…

> They wanted to report specifically his birth/legal name, with no plausible public interest reason. Siskind is a public figure and his name was already publicly known. He wanted a special exception to NYT's normal reporting practices. > Realistically private/public is a spectrum not a binary IIRC his name would autocomplete as a suggested search term in the Google search bar even before the article was published. He…

> He wanted a special exception to NYT's normal reporting practices.

The NYT had already profiled e.g. Kendrick Lamar without mentioning his birth/legal name, so he certainly wasn't asking for something unprecedented.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#246
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's neurobiological, psychology and particularly cog-sci is in error, as both place language ahead of concepts. Our understanding of reality per language is post hoc, it's an illusion. Life is always ad hoc, any violation of a narrative model is easily evaded for survival. This is simple stuff folks!

You like to use big words. But you're not making any sense. Notice this.

The irony is intense. Classic psychotic dysphasia.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to get political but I suspect this kind of thing is also pretty analogous to how many otherwise normal but often unintelligent people get into things like neo-Nazism through online influencing. (I am just speculating that the person you're referring to is unintelligent.)

Behold, irony!

Can you explain?

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#248
post #216
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've struck at the essential problem of dualism. If thoughts are nonphysical, how can thoughts influence our physical bodies? If consciousness does not interact with the physical world, but merely arises from it, then how can we possibly discuss it, since anything we describe is causally linked to our description of it? Descartes thought the soul was linked to the body through the pineal gland, inspiring a long tra…

I mean it's funny you mention Descartes, because I find the argument that consciousness is the ONLY thing you can really know exists for sure to be pretty compelling. (Descartes then significantly loses the thread, hah.) I agree with you that consciousness is much more fragmented and nonlinear than we perceive it to be, but "I exist" seems pretty tautological to me (for values of "I" that are completely unspecified.)

Since "I think therefore I am" is meant to be a foundation for reasoning, it precedes any real definitions of "I," "thinking" and "being." So I think it's really more of a set of definitions than a conclusion.

We have a noun, "thought," which we define very broadly so as not to require any other definitions, and another noun, the self, which those thoughts are assumed to belong to. I think this is presumptive; working from first principles, why must a thought have a thinker? The self is a really meaty concept and Descartes just sneaks it in there unremarked-upon.

If you take that out, all you get is "thoughts exist." And even then, we're basically pointing at thoughts and saying "whatever these are doing is existing." Like, does a fictional character "exist" in the same way a real person does do? No, I think it's safe to say it's doing something different. But we point at whatever our thoughts are doing and define it as existence.

So I don't think we can learn much about the self or consciousness from Cartesian first-principles reasoning.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#249
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine someone does a quick survey to estimate that tasers aren't killing people we don't expect Given that the quote you cited was, "Are the chatbots really driving people crazy, or just catching the attention of people who were crazy already," I'd say the equivalent would be something like, "Are tasers really killing people, or were tasered heart attack victims dying already?" And yeah, I'd be mad about that fra…

Shoving full implicit context into the analogy, it would be more like "are tasers really killing otherwise physically healthy people, or are the recent notable deaths primarily from people with pre-existing risks?" I can agree that Alexander might appear flippant or even callous about mental health at times (especially compared to modern liberal social media sensibilities), but I chalk that up to the well-earned dese…

There's flippancy that crosses social lines, and there's flippancy that blurs technical distinctions. The difference between someone whose mental disorders are under control vs someone experiencing psychosis is like an oncologist handwaving the difference between terminal cancer and cancer in remission. The difference is enormous, to the point that the whole purpose of the psychiatric field is to move people from the one category to the other. I don't think technical experice justifies glossing over that distinction.

Re: In Search of AI Psychosis

#250
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it's funny you mention Descartes, because I find the argument that consciousness is the ONLY thing you can really know exists for sure to be pretty compelling. (Descartes then significantly loses the thread, hah.) I agree with you that consciousness is much more fragmented and nonlinear than we perceive it to be, but "I exist" seems pretty tautological to me (for values of "I" that are completely unspecified.)

I definitely share this intuition - it almost, in some sense, feels like the only thing we can really know . It makes it rather tough for me to accept the sibling comments arguing that "actually, the answer is that consciousness is an illusion." That just seems... transparently experientally false, to me.

Here's my issue, though: Consider that our thoughts are encoded in physical matter. Something about the arrangement of the chemicals and charges in our brain holds our thoughts as real-world objects, just as ink and paper can hold a piece of writing.

Given a piece of paper with some information written on it, does the contents of the message tell you anything about the paper itself? The message may say "this paper was made in Argentina," or "this message was written by James," but you can't necessarily trust it. You can't even know that "James" is a real person.

So just because we feel conscious—just because strong feelings of consciousness, of "me-being-here"-ness, are written into the substrate of our brains—why should that tell us anything?

Whatever the sheet of paper says, it could just as easily say the exact opposite. What conclusions can we possibly draw based on its contents?

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