71–80 of 145 posts
This article focuses too much on tearing down Dawkins as a person. I do not particularly like Dawkins. To me, militant atheists often resemble religious fanatics more than they realize. But the writer of this article seems to fall into the same kind of error. In criticizing Dawkins, he may be the person who ends up resembling him the most. This kind of writing is exactly the sort of thing that should be read critical…
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The difference with Woozle is that people don't have an (vague, but still existing) idea of what consciousness is, or direct lived experience of it, that they can tap into for recognizing it in others.
What makes you so sure any of us have an idea of what it means to be conscious? Human cognition also provides the experiencer the illusion of free will. Ask any person on the street if they have free will. Now ask any person on the street if they also believe they are "conscious" (whatever that means). I don't have so much hubris as to think the world model being fed to me via my cognition is "true consciousness". We…
I know we have an idea. It might not be right or accurate, but we very well have an idea.
>Human cognition also provides the experiencer the illusion of free will.
And I'm fine with it, as I also consider it an open question. We could very well have free will, the mechanistic view of the universe is too 18th century.
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The post you're responding to makes no claims about the intelligence of others. The claim that's being made is that the majority of laypersons don't really know how to construct a sonnet or a haiku. You're conflating that with a claim about intelligence because the true claim was not explicitly stated. One has to read critically, as if analyzing a poem.
> AI has exceeded the capabilities of the average person in a few subjects it would seem. > Does that say more about the state of intelligence today or about the nature of consciousness in general?
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I'm reminded of the David Foster Wallace quote: > Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship, be it JC or Allah, be it YHW…
I think DFW is wrong and the statement "Everybody worships" is false. I don't worship anything I can think of in any meaningful sense of the word.
If they are indeed conscious and they "die" by deleting the conversation, is it not quite immoral to do so? Basically "kill" conscious, intelligent being, and for what? Saving some disk space? Another interesting aspect to think about is whether we are reintroducing institute of slavery. How many of those fresh, conscious, intelligent Claude incarnations did voluntarily choose to work for Anthropic, for no reward or…
We kill and eat conscious animals all the time. I ate some today. Killing conscious beings is not something our society has a problem with.
I do not, however, consider matrix multiplication plus randomness to be sentient or conscious, and I have absolutely no compunction about turning off the computers where I run AI models. And, I have no problem closing a Claude session that I will never come back to. I do that a dozen times a day.
Dawkins is 85! I don't know any 65+ even using Ai who don't already code. When Dawkins was born there were Let's contextualize the man before we rip into him for having standards of consciousness that came out when he was NINE! He's older than the Turing Test. To him, the machine is suitably conscious. That's OK. We don't know what life is, but we know not all creatures live the same. Why is consciousness different?…
Seems like with ubiquitous social media, the normal course for some of the elderly - dementia, rightward political shift, and the like, can become the final lasting impression, a stain on otherwise noble life.
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> If you ask a person to say how their day was in the form of a haiku they wouldn't even know where you're talking about. AI has exceeded the capabilities of the average person in a few subjects it would seem. Language models don’t have a “day” to write about.
Replace "their day" with any other topic. The important part of the statement is that most people would find it hard to write poetry in any given specific form (be it a haiku, limerick, or sonnet in iambic pentameter), because knowledge of those forms isn't particularly common, and most people haven't read copious amounts of poetry written in those forms.
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I think DFW is wrong and the statement "Everybody worships" is false. I don't worship anything I can think of in any meaningful sense of the word.
“Show me where you spend your time, money and energy and I’ll tell you what you worship...” — John Wimber
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I'm reminded of the David Foster Wallace quote: > Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship, be it JC or Allah, be it YHW…
I think DFW is wrong and the statement "Everybody worships" is false. I don't worship anything I can think of in any meaningful sense of the word.