601–610 of 739 posts
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It's interesting, but the explanation seems to exclude the possibility that my dog has some sense of self, so I find it suspect.
Don't dogs have similar social issues?
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I think the alternative is that our brain, somehow, is connected to some metaphysical aspect of reality which is what most religions believe.
The counter to that is that altering the brain directly alters the consciousness. I can take LSD and I literally change. I can have parts of my brain removed and parts of my self disappear. It's not like cutting off a leg, where I lose capabilities but am still the same me. The logical conclusion is that the brain makes me.
The logical conclusion under the popular axiomatic framework of materialism, for sure.
But there are other possible logical conclusions depending on your philosophical foundations, e.g. the brain could be a receiver for consciousness which is translated into our worldly experience from somewhere else.
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> The only major difference I see is that beyond a certain number of transformations, people are willing to treat it as some sort of miracle, and too tired to figure out why it came up with the answer it came up with. It’s funny, because I thought you were talking about humans here when you wrote this. We know some things about how our bodies encode information that is sent to the brain, and we know some things about…
There's definitely a sizable contingent of people who desperately want to believe consciousness is just electrical impulses in our brain. Because "what else could it be"? The fact is that we just don't know, and "abiding in the not-knowing" is for many the most uncomfortable thing ever. Especially for the curious- and rational-minded people this forum tends to attract. I'm one of them, too.
I can definitely see why reductionism would appeal to an educated public. We learn about the periodic table; we are able to break sentences down to words, down to letters; to break an executable down to binary code, to machine instruction, to electrical currents flowing through semiconductors. Why shouldn’t we be able to do the same with conscious thoughts? It is certainly an appealing thought process.
As I understand it, reductionism started to fall out of favor because of the rise of quantum mechanics and chaos theory, where we have a lot of weird phenomena which cannot be explained by reducing the particles down to the sub-sub atomic (or rather they are better explained by describing the interactions directly).
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Agency? What are you talking about? I want freedom. I want freedom to do what i want and not sitting in front of a computer and coding for some company. Please AI lets burn down knowledge work and labor work. Lets create so much stress to our society that we start rethinking what works mean. Lets redefine work into discovering the world again. Let people do old handcraft jobs, let them do more sports, let them read m…
This seems to be a little naive about how humans consume the benefits we create in society. "Let people do old handcraft jobs, let them do more sports, let them read more, let them write and make more. Let them enjoy nature." Very nice thoughts. You know we all could do this today without "burning it down"? Get in your pod, eat your slop, and watch your screen is where this is headed. "I want freedom to do what i wan…
I also do not earn currently a farm, im planing to buy one, i'm still 100k short though.
Its not me creating the misery, its our capitalistic system.
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"I want freedom to do what i want and not sitting in front of a computer and coding for some company." "Please AI lets burn down knowledge work and labor work" "Let people do old handcraft jobs." So many presuppositions about what people want to do. As a child I spent a lot of time programming and doing "knowledge work" because it's fun - I don't enjoy "old hand-crafted jobs". Sure, let's definitely destroy capitalis…
right, these knowledge work and coding jobs are, by my lights, about the best possible job. From my perspective we've invented a machine that does the fun parts while leaving me the less fun parts (review, various hard-to-claude janitorial tasks, etc). I might like woodworking as a hobby (for example), but I sure as heck don't want to be a carpenter or to depend on my ability to hand craft enough widgets people like…
No one of us is working on the field to get food.
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Who have you ever heard make a sincere, good faith argument that a toaster is conscious? Who do you imagine would argue against you if you asserted they were mere automata? If you can't identify anyone, then this analogy doesn't work.
> Who have you ever heard make a sincere, good faith argument that a toaster is conscious? More than one, for many classes of devices, incl. toasters. Some were drunk, some were insane, and some were delusional. LLMs are no different. They are automata, yet delusional people bring out pitchforks and torches when someone points out that they are just statistical models, and they don't even work when there's no input t…
Why is that needed for consciousness? They're artificial. If we put someone in a coma, they don't talk, they're not really conscious. Just because the AI model has a more obvious off switch shouldn't make a difference. It's easy to imagine gluing a cron job to the model so it works randomly. If that doesn't count because it's external, if we take a brain out of a human's head and slap it on the table, it's not going to do anything. If I take the AI's model file and stick it on a USB flash drive, it doesn't do anything. Without a computer to run it on, it doesn't do anything, just like a human brain doesn't do anything without the rest of the human body as the harness.
The underlying question is, since we created LLMs, we can see into the actual matrix math, the linear algebra that comprises them. So it's easy to dismiss them as a next word guesser. How could consciousness arise from guessing the next word? But we don't know where consciousness comes from in the first place!
So since we don't know, the fact that, yes, the anthropomorphically named LLM "neurons" are merely matrixes of numbers and we do linear algebra on them; yes, that gives us much more insight as to what it's doing internally compared to a human or any other lifeform with consciousness's brain. And yes, human neurons are much more complicated than a mere 2d matrix of numbers, so far as we know. But we don't know!
The indightment of LLMs is that they can't say they don't know, and would prefer, instead, to hallucinate and bullshit an answer instead. They can't help it, they learned from the best. As a human though, I don't know if they're conscious, and what I'm going to say about that.
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I don‘t see why you felt the need to insult me here. We are having a very common disagreement here, one which philosophers of science have been actively debating for several decades. My point with the SSRI is that we know that serotonin is a chemical which incites certain neurons, and we know that a lack of activity of neurons in that general area in the brain is correlated with depression, so scientists were able to…
It's not an insult to suggest one is out of the depth on a topic, especially when it isn't one's field of expertise. You are giving the pop science explanation of various things.
Extreme bike-shedding here, maybe, but can you please indent every other line (like the presentation of They're Made out of Meat does)?
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Work has never been about "discovering the world". There have been a handful of privileged folks who had the time to "discover the world". Work has traditionally been "let's find enough food for my family". If you want to think of a future of abundance then perhaps we can discover the world.
We already live in a world of abundance. No one has to work on a field for their food. Its a capitalism problem we have, not a resource one.
Among these properties are optimum behaviours such as hoarding the maximum you can defend (rather than the minimum you comfortably need) and using your power to forestall the growth of others. These behaviours are repeated in nature from microorganisms to apes to humans.
There is no social order which can prevent us from living in an ecosystem, and from these properties and behaviours emerging.