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The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

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Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#31

Post by in-silico »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #21
in-silico wrote: post #12

From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion: 1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human. 2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in w…

As someone who places themselves in #4, at some point the people in #3 need to accept a bit of scientific humility. The reason we are "biological naturalists" is that we can point to hundreds of thousands of conscious species on planet Earth which are not humans, and whose consciousness clearly has nothing to do with an ability to say "Forsooth, I am a conscious thinking being." AI folks have been ignoring this since…

What about robots? Not necessarily humanoid robots, but the classic RL demonstrations that can scurry around and achieve simple goals?

In the computational functionalist argument, the thing that we share with cats, pigeons, and robots (and in some ways Claude) is the fact that we react to our environment in a way that requires computation.

I myself lean (without confidence) towards weak panpsychism, where a lot of things down from humans to cats to fish to trees to bacteria are in some way sentient. We all have in common a computationally driven sense/"think"/act cycle, and that is where it derives from.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#32

Post by jwpapi »

diablozzq wrote: post #4

Consciousness is a property of humans biology - and quite clearly not a requisite to intelligence. I say clearly as at some point we reach proof by construction. As in, we already built intelligence because the system already completes tasks that require intelligence. We are so far into what would have been science fiction five years ago and the goal posts have moved so far. For anyone who disagrees, I challenge you…

Challenge: Make money online

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#33

Post by jwpapi »

I think the question goes more into ourselves as it goes into AI, we don’t know exactly how our own intelligence and conciousness works and therefore it’s very tough to impossible to compare to AI intelligence and conciousness.

Are we just autocomplete machines with sufficient enough variable pseudo-randomized input?

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#34

Post by emp17344 »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #29
emp17344 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that Dennett and Hofstadter aren’t the beginning and end of Philosophy of Mind, right? Calling Searle’s Room “complete sophistry” is hilariously misguided, considering the vast majority of academic philosophers consider it valid: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5002#

You'll need to unpack that survey for us a bit. There's a lot going on and the wording is very terse.

It’s a large survey of academic philosophers on famous philosophical arguments. In this case, the question is asking whether philosophers agree with Searle and believe the Chinese room does not understand Chinese, or disagree with Searle and believe the room does understand Chinese.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#35

Post by Nevermark »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #14
in-silico wrote: post #12

From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion: 1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human. 2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in w…

Am I the only person who is confused by there being a philosophy called "biological naturalism", which is not the science?

“Natural” is a word often used in opposition to science.

It really has 1000 meanings. Usually whatever the speaker wants it to mean.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#36

Post by thfuran »

in-silico wrote: post #12

From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion: 1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human. 2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in w…

What about group 5: Actually, we're just simulating consciousness too.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#37

Post by kbelder »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #8

I'm partial to bioinformatics as per Pauline Hogeweg's definition; which explicitly has computation as a property of life. This approach actually makes testable (and tested) scientific predictions. This makes Searle-derived papers super-weird for me; since from my perspective they seem to disprove the existence of life. (and it makes the name of the philosophy "biological naturalism" very ironic to me :-P ) (for extr…

I'm disappointed that Searle's paper is still influential, at least out in the general culture. It's nonsense, and at face value, would disprove consciousness in humans unless you accept some mystic indefinable soul into the mix. Or quantum magic, which is just as mystic.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#38

Post by kbelder »

in-silico wrote: post #12

From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion: 1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human. 2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in w…

I would place myself in 3, with the caveat that I don't think any current llms or other programs/dataset/relationships are close to conscious. It's certainly possible in the future, though.

Atoms arranged into a brain generate consciousness. There's no reason to think atoms in other arrangements can't. Brains aren't magic, just well optimized.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#39

Post by Kim_Bruning »

emp17344 wrote: post #34
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll need to unpack that survey for us a bit. There's a lot going on and the wording is very terse.

It’s a large survey of academic philosophers on famous philosophical arguments. In this case, the question is asking whether philosophers agree with Searle and believe the Chinese room does not understand Chinese, or disagree with Searle and believe the room does understand Chinese.

I actually agree that the room does not understand chinese too; because that's the only possible thing that could happen in real life.

That doesn't mean I agree with Searle though!

It depends on how the question is asked. Again, the wording is very terse so I can't determine what the people thought they were answering. Possibly you have a better insight?

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