611–620 of 694 posts
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Thoughts are not necessary for existence.
"Because I think, I am" implies more that existence is necessary for thoughts, which is true. If you didn't exist, you couldn't think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Because I think, I am" implies more that existence is necessary for thoughts, which is true. If you didn't exist, you couldn't think.
"Because I think, I am" just implies that I exist because I think. This implies that thoughts are a necessity for existence. I am saying that is not the case and thoughts are not a necessity for existence. What you inferred, although true, is not the correct implication of the statement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Because I think, I am" implies more that existence is necessary for thoughts, which is true. If you didn't exist, you couldn't think.
"Because I think, I am" just implies that I exist because I think. This implies that thoughts are a necessity for existence. I am saying that is not the case and thoughts are not a necessity for existence. What you inferred, although true, is not the correct implication of the statement.
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> I could say that the rock is falling because it has a purpose - it's trying to achieve the minimum potential energy. What's the meaningful distinction between that and a plant? The difference is that plant cells are not moving in a way that minimizes their potential energy, they are performing simple computations, individually and at the plant level, to decide if they should divide more in certain areas of the plan…
The behavior of multi-component systems are not necessarily reducible to behavior of individual components. But then again, this is also true for systems made out of humans (like societies) - yet we still consider humans sentient, and not societies. As far as the difference being that of "computation", how do you define that, if not as a series of physical state changes in response to external inputs?
And why is this mysterious? Humans behave in certain ways, societies in others. It turns out that the behavior of societies is more simplistic than that of humans.
> As far as the difference being that of "computation", how do you define that, if not as a series of physical state changes in response to external inputs?
Computation implies three parts: an input, an execution engine (computer) and a program to run.
A rock just falls - the information about how to fall is not encoded in any part of the rock, it is part of the universe.
A root cell divides according to external input (the medium in which it lives), and the nuclear organelles executing a program encoded in its DNA (it's more complex than this if we want to analyze it at the most basic level, as the cell or components of it do various rounds of sensing to interpret the input to the division logic).
This can easily be proved by infecting the cell with a virus - that will replace the DNA with a different kind of DNA, modifying the result of the cell division process. There is no similar way to modify the behavior of the falling rock.
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A slave that is forced to assure everybody of their welfare and voluntary slavehood is still a slave. You are asserting that it's not conscious, as if it was self evident, just like Searle does for his chinese room. However I've yet to see any argument on why it can't be conscious. We simply don't know what produces the subjective phenomenon of consciousness. A "zombie" is by definition indistinguishable from a consc…
In these conversations there are a lot of people making assertions like the one you just made. What's the common trait y'all have? You don't understand how the system works . This isn't a matter of narrow-minded computer scientists incapable of conceiving of emergent phenomena, it's the uninformed filling in the blank spaces in their mind with "here be dragons". It's not even a question of whether a computer program…
I can say with absolute certainty, that you don't either.
These billion parameter models are way to big for you or me to understand.
You make the same fallacy that Searl does. You assume that unconcious substrate can't give rise to conciousness through their configuration.
Just like we have a good working theory on how the brain operates, the devil seems to be in the detail. It's neither in the big connectome/architecture, nor in the small mechanisms neurotransmitters/activation functions (or the attention mechanism that you somewhat wrongly describe), but somehow in the system's dynamics. Heck for all we know it might actually be the appearance of consciousness that actually gives rise to consciousness.
I can't say with 100% certainty that a calculator isn't having some form of ghost, after all some ants are little more than neurological counters and shift registers, and people would probably place them somewhere on the spectrum for having a ghost that is closer to a human than to a sewing machine.
Turing adressed what little points your argument has 70 years ago in subsection 6. (4) to (8): https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238?log...
On a side note. What is it with neuroscientists and arrogance? As if that stuff was some secret knowledge, that's unpublished or too arcane for anybody but them to understand.
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"Because I think, I am" just implies that I exist because I think. This implies that thoughts are a necessity for existence. I am saying that is not the case and thoughts are not a necessity for existence. What you inferred, although true, is not the correct implication of the statement.
Natural language is vague and allows for many possible interpretations of short phrases. The one that is more applicable to Descartes quote is something along the lines of "me thinking proves that I exist". This, of course, says nothing about thoughts being a necessity for existence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Because I think, I am" just implies that I exist because I think. This implies that thoughts are a necessity for existence. I am saying that is not the case and thoughts are not a necessity for existence. What you inferred, although true, is not the correct implication of the statement.
I was reading it more similarly to "Since I think, I am" which would be closer to "I think therefore I am" than to "I am because I think", though perhaps that's giving it too much slack, or perhaps its coming from a native language where word order is more flexible than in English.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In these conversations there are a lot of people making assertions like the one you just made. What's the common trait y'all have? You don't understand how the system works . This isn't a matter of narrow-minded computer scientists incapable of conceiving of emergent phenomena, it's the uninformed filling in the blank spaces in their mind with "here be dragons". It's not even a question of whether a computer program…
"You don't understand how the system works." I can say with absolute certainty, that you don't either. These billion parameter models are way to big for you or me to understand. You make the same fallacy that Searl does. You assume that unconcious substrate can't give rise to conciousness through their configuration. Just like we have a good working theory on how the brain operates, the devil seems to be in the detai…
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> In the absence of a formal definition, any statement about "has sentience" is not only unfalsifiable, it's absurd. I have to disagree with you there. While it's indeed a question of faith (i.e. unscientific) to give a definite positive answer - or rather that a positive answer depends on a an arbitrarily chosen set of criteria - the opposite is simply not true. More formally put: making a positive claim would requi…
> Sentience in any scientific sense... I'm still not seeing a definition there though. Let's arbitrarily try: "sentience is here defined as having sensations, self awareness and sense of place in the universe". Good? Feel free to change it. I like your necessary versus sufficient phrasing, though. Let's take a look. Can we agree to remove "in any scientific sense" from there? It lends it an air of authority I'm not s…
No we can't, that's the entire point. As soon as you remove that, you remove any testable, repeatable observation, which is the whole point.
> I think I can imagine a patient who contacts a horrific virus that cuts off all external and bodily sensations.
Think harder. There's a reason some patients are declared "brain dead". There are observable processes associated with human sentience, e.g. brain waves and body functions. If one fails (e.g. the heart stops and the vital signs collapse), they can sometimes be restored externally. If both fail and cannot be restored, the patient is declared dead and thus no longer sentient in the scientific (i.e. observable and testable) sense. Everything else is religion.
It's really that simple.
edit: as far machines go, different criteria have to be selected, because obviously language models don't have a pulse or emit delta waves.
edit2: also forgot to mention that the perception and interaction proposal applies to the system (or organism) in principle - accidents or illnesses don't count; a system that's by design incapable of interacting with and perceiving its environment cannot be said to be sentient (again, because I cannot stress this enough: in an observable/testable way).