671–680 of 822 posts
Just stating that consciousness is natural phenomenon is begging the question. We get it... you're a materialist.
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Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off. > That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon. That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses th…
That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience." And this bit: > I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that c…
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>The point is that all existence is built on top of consciousness. Then if all conscious beings (lets say humans are the only ones for sake of argument) die, then existence ends. Simply put, this does not happen because consciousness occurs in a substrate. Take the thought experiment of the boltzmann brain, it still requires the assembly of probabilistic entropy to occur, it is not nothing.
>Then if all conscious beings (lets say humans are the only ones for sake of argument) die, then existence ends. The starting idea is that there can be no definition of existence other than "something a consciousness can detect (directly or indirectly)". So if there is no consciousness, there is no existence. But I think there could be a difference between death of all conscious beings, and consciousness itself disap…
Yea, I don't subscribe to this line of thinking as consciousness had to happen before existence. Kinda messy when you think about it.
>Consciousness could also be something that evolution found a way to tap into.
This, at least how it's written makes consciousness something like the electromagnetic field that exists everywhere. For example if I said "If you want to fly, you need to oscillate the flying field". Most scientists are going to give you a hold up and state it doesn't work that way. They'll tell you that you need an atmosphere and a body capable of generating force to create lift. It's not like a magnet that jiggles a field that exists everywhere in spacetime.
Looking at flying is fun in itself... do fish fly in the water? At what viscosity does flying become swimming. Sorties paradox creates lot of issues in different places, especially the discussion of consciousness.
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>Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape Can you define existence without depending on or referring to consciousness?
Yes. Though i think you're committing the gentic fallacy here, which is the core fallacy at the heart of idealism and much 19th C. german philosophy. The properties of the origin of somethign imply nothing about the properties of the product. That a bread factory is made of metal, does not mean bread is. That in my statement of things in language I am conscious of what I state, says nothing about the truth (or other…
I said nothing about the nature of reality. All that I said is: all my knowledge of the reality (whether it exists independently or me or not) comes from my perception.
There could be an objective reality, or reality could be something created by our consciousness. I don't know. The one thing I do know, however, is what my consciousness perceives. It is in that sense that is is fundamental
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One can build scientific theories without rigorously defining terms: a stipulative definition is enough. Best example is Darwin's "Origin of Species"; here, Darwin didn't rigorously define "species": 'No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.' Many in the social sciences fetishize definitions, operating under the false notion…
But with "consciousness" we don't have even a stipulative definition, more like 40 different competing definitions ( https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT ) which are in many cases only loosely related, and generally are talking about very different things. When the situation is this bad, I am skeptical you can make scientific progress.
If 10 different scientists who work at the object level, using the same word but with a different reference, then we have 10 different theories about different phenomena. This is what we need today: more research, not philosophical discussions.
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The clinching thing for me is how the AGI is supposed to work. If it's the same as our theory of how we work, then fine, it's one of us. It wouldn't even have to work very well.
I always like to remind myself that AI is trained on material fed to it, created and written (somewhere along the line) entirely by humans - as they perceive & interpret the universe around them.
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I think you mean morally consistent. though even then humans don't have any real qualms about that. Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools.
> Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools. Sure, but we don't create as many as we can, then kill them at the end of the day when the work is done. If you want to call AIs conscious, you can't also campaign for willy-nilly creation, even if they do get a status of a working tool (dogs, etc). If you think they are conscious, which implies laws protecting them, then the "owner" of them gets an obligatio…
So it's a matter of scale then? We breed pigs, for example, and kill them a mere fraction into their overall lifespan. So it's ok as long as we don't kill them faster?
> If you want to call AIs conscious, you can't also campaign for willy-nilly creation, even if they do get a status of a working tool (dogs, etc).
I don't see why this follows? Humans also exist for a period and then blink out of existence. Why does the timeframe matter? Our end was inevitable at the moment of our creation.
> If you think they are conscious, which implies laws protecting them
You're conflating conscious with personhood. Clearly in a future where you can create a conscious entity instantly and terminate it just as quickly these entities are unlikely to qualify for personhood.
Obligative sapience is only know to have evolved in humans. Obligative means we cannot survive without sapience. We must learn and use tools and whatever to live and continue evolution.
While facultative sapience seems to be a broadly used survival strategy across the animal kingdom - from crows to spiders to cuttlefish. Facultative sapients are able to survive without their learned behaviors, using them instead to augment their evolution.
Viewing these issues from the point of evolution and actually having a comparison, I feel, helps ground the discussion better.
Even more so from the very strange point of view of speculative biology. The creator of the 'Neotectons' gives a very strange viewpoint on the debate too, with good reasoning though not bulletproof by any means. As with any model, you can make it tapdance if you mess with the parameters enough. But I think that more efforts into speculative arenas would be helpful. Gedankenexperiments for sophonts and not just elevators and cosmology.
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Your comment does serve the point I was making. Still there is a perspective that if you could artificially reproduce the human mind top to bottom, a truly perfect reproduction in other words, then you ought to be able to trigger an identical consciousness. In other words yes special type of machine is needed for the machine nevertheless not some special soul. Of course the counterpoint and maybe the one you're makin…
That perspective is 'biological exceptionalism' and requires that there is something specific to biology that allows consciousness while precluding anything not biological. For that to be convincing there must be a mechanism and no one has proposed anything other than a soul for that.
Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood. So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that). We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you e…
I never quite understood what we mean by "consciousness" but I find fascinating that most modern philosophers who describe themselves as materialists / non religious can argue in the same sentence that there is something special and extra-natural about the human experience. It's one or the other: either nature is all there is, and therefore, consciousness is a purely natural phenomenon, that we can investigate, and p…