Literally just mainlining marketing material straight into whatever’s left of their rotting brains.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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This is verging on a religious debate, but assuming that there's no "spiritual" component to human intelligence and consciousness like a non-localized soul, what else can we be but ultra-complex "meat computers"?
One doesn't need to assert the existence of an immaterial soul to point out that the mechanisms that lead to consciousness are different enough from the mechanisms that make computers work that the former can't just be reduced to an ultra complex form of the latter.
In what way does consciousness resemble an ultra complex computer? Nobody has consciousness fully figured out of course, but I would at least expect there to be some relevant parallel between computer hardware and brain hardware if this is the case.
What stops me from doing the same thing that neurons do with a sufficiently sized hunk of silicon? Assuming that some amount of abstraction is fine.
If the answer is "nothing", then that demonstrates the point. If you can build an artificial brain, that does all of the things a brain does, then there is nothing special about our brains.
Nobody ever mentioned a “soul” in this conversation until you brought it up to use as an accusation.
“Computers aren’t sentient” is not a religious belief no matter how hard you try to smear it as such.
The claim is that “computers can be sentient”. That is a strong claim and requires equally strong evidence. I’ve found the arguments in support of it lackluster and reductionist for reasons I’ve outlined in other comments. In fact, I find the idea that if we compute hard enough we get sentience borders on a religious belief in extra-physical properties being bestowed upon physical objects once they pass a certain threshold.
There are people who argue that everything is conscious, even rocks, because everything is ultimately a mechanical process. The base argument is the same, but I have a feeling that most people here would suddenly disagree with them for some reason. Is it “creationism” to find such a hypothesis absurd, or is it vulgar materialism to think it’s correct? You seem to take offense at being called “reductionist” despite engaging in a textbook case of reductionism.
This doesn’t mean you’re wrong, or that the rock-consciousness people are wrong, it’s just an observation. Any meaningful debate about sentience right now is going to be philosophical. If you want to be scientific the answer is “I don’t know”. I don’t pretend to equate philosophy with science.
the replicants are people because they are characters writen by the author same as any other.
sentient machines is only science fiction
Why is the concept of a spirit relevant? Computers and living beings share practically nothing in common
Love to see the “umm ackshually scientists keep changing their minds” card on hexbear dot net. Yes neuroscience could suddenly shift to entirely support your belief, but that’s not exactly a stellar argument. I’d love to know how ATP has literally anything to do with proving computational consciousness other than that ATP kind of sort of resembles a mechanical thing (because it is mechanical).
Sentience as a physical property does not have to stem from the same processes. Everything in the universe is “mechanical” so making that observation is meaningless. Everything is a “mechanism” so everything has that in common. Reducing everything down to their very base definition instead of taking into account what kind of mechanisms they are is literally the very definition of reductionism. You have to look at the wider process that derives from the sum of its mechanical parts, because that’s where differences arise. Of course if you strip everything down to its foundation it’s going to be the same. Is a door and a movie camera the same thing because they both consist of parts that move?
Go be a computer somewhere else
Let's assume for the moment that there's no such thing as a spirit/soul/ghost/etc. in human beings and other animals, and that everything that makes me "me" is inside my body. If this is the case, computers and living brains do have something fundamental in common. They are both made of matter that obeys the laws of physics. As far as we know, there's no such thing as "living" quarks and electrons that are distinct from "non-living" quarks and electrons.
How very crude and reductionist just like the source comment says.
I'm having a hard time understanding your reasoning and perspective on this. My interpretation of your comments is that you believe biological intelligence is a special phenomenon that cannot be understood by the scientific method. If I'm in error, I'd welcome a correction.
I could have sworn that the whole point of that paper was to point out that LLMs aren't actually intelligent, not that human intelligence is basically an LLM.
I don't know where everyone is getting these in depth understandings of how and when sentience arises. To me, it seems plausible that simply increasing processing power for a sufficiently general algorithm produces sentience. I don't believe in a soul, or that organic matter has special properties that allows sentience to arise.
I could maybe get behind the idea that LLMs can't be sentient, but you generalized to all algorithms. As if human thought is somehow qualitatively different than a sufficiently advanced algorithm.
Even if we find the limit to LLMs and figure out that sentience can't arise (I don't know how this would be proven, but let's say it was), you'd still somehow have to prove that algorithms can't produce sentience, and that only the magical fairy dust in our souls produce sentience.
That's not something that I've bought into yet.
so i know a lot of other users will just be dismissive but i like to hone my critical thinking skills, and most people are completely unfamiliar with these advanced concepts, so here's my philosophical examination of the issue.
the thing is, we don't even know how to prove HUMANS are sentient except by self-reports of our internal subjective experiences.
so sentience/consciousness as i discuss it here refers primarily to Qualia, or to a being existing in such a state as to experience Qualia. Qualia are the internal, subjective, mental experiences of external, physical phenomena.
here's the task of people that want to prove that the human brain is a meat computer: Explain, in exact detail, how (i.e. the procsses by which) Qualia, (i.e. internal, subjective, mental experiences) arise from external, objective, physical phenomena.
hint: you can't. the move by physicalist philosophy is simply to deny the existence of qualia, consciousness, and subjective experience altogether as 'illusory' - but illusory to what? an illusion necessarily has an audience, something it is fooling or decieving. this 'something' would be the 'consciousness' or 'sentience' or to put it in your oh so smug terms the 'soul' that non-physicalist philosophy might posit. this move by physicalists is therefore syntactically absurd and merely moves the goalpost from 'what are qualia' to 'what are those illusory, deceitful qualia decieving'. consciousness/sentience/qualia are distinctly not information processing phenomena, they are entirely superfluous to information processing tasks. sentience/consciousness/Qualia is/are not the information processing, but internal, subjective, mental awareness and experience of some of these information processing tasks.
Consider information processing, and the kinds of information processing that our brains/minds are capable of.
What about information processing requires an internal, subjective, mental experience? Nothing at all. An information processing system could hypothetically manage all of the tasks of a human's normal activities (moving, eating, speaking, planning, etc.) flawlessly, without having such an internal, subjective, mental experience. (this hypothetical kind of person with no internal experiences is where the term 'philosophical zombie' comes from) There is no reason to assume that an information processing system that contains information about itself would have to be 'aware' of this information in a conscious sense of having an internal, subjective, mental experience of the information, like how a calculator or computer is assumed to perform information processing without any internal subjective mental experiences of its own (independently of the human operators).
and yet, humans (and likely other kinds of life) do have these strange internal subjective mental phenomena anyway.
our science has yet to figure out how or why this is, and the usual neuroscience task of merely correlating internal experiences to external brain activity measurements will fundamentally and definitionally never be able to prove causation, even hypothetically.
so the options we are left with in terms of conclusions to draw are:
And personally the only option i have any disdain for is number 2, as i cannot bring myself to deny the very thing i am constantly and completely immersed inside of/identical with.
I’m no philosopher, but at lot of these questions seem very epistemological and not much different from religious ones (i.e. so what changes if we determine that life is a simulation). Like they’re definitely fun questions, but I just don’t see how they’ll be answered with how much is unknown. We’re talking “how did we get here” type stuff
I’m not so much concerned with that aspect as I am about the fact that it’s a powerful technology that will be used to oppress
I think it would be far less confusing to call them algorithmic statistical models rather than AI
Absolutely, but AI is the marketing promise that they can hype and not deliever and milk until its dry
Actually, yeah, you're on it. These questions are epistemological. They're also phenomenological. Testing AI is all about seeing how it responds and reacts just as much as they are about being. It's silly. When it comes to AI right now, existing is measured by reaction to see if it's imitating a human intelligence. I'm pretty sure "I react therefore I am" was never coined by any great, old philosopher. So, what can we learn from your observation? Nobody knows anything. Or at least, the supposed geniuses who make AI and test it believe that reaction measures intelligence.
It's exactly the fact that we don't how sentience forms that makes the acting like fucking chatgpt is now on the brink of developing it so ludicrous. Neuroscientists don't even know how it works, so why are these AI hypemen so sure they got it figured out?
The only logical answer is that they don't and it's 100% marketing.
Hoping computer algorithms made in a way that's meant to superficially mimic neural connections will somehow become capable of thinking on its own if they just become powerful enough is a complete shot in the dark.
this is the popular sentiment with programmers and spectators right now, but even taking all those assumptions as true, it still doesn't mean we are close to anything.
Consider the complexity of sentient, multicellular organism. That's trillions of cells all interacting with each-other and the environment concurrently. Even if you reduce that down to just the processes with a brain, that's still more things happening in and between those neurons than anything we could realistically model in a programme. Programmers like to reduce that complexity down by only looking at the synaptic connections between neurons, and ignoring the everything else the cells are doing.
Any algorithm, by definition, has a finite number of specific steps and is made to solve some category of related problems. While humans certainly use algorithms to accomplish tasks sometimes, I don't think something as general as consciousness can be accurately called an algorithm.
That’s an unfalsifiable belief. “We don’t know how sentience works so they could be sentient” is easily reversed because it’s based entirely on the fact that we can’t technically disprove or prove it.
Well no, owls are smart. But yes, in terms of idiocy, very few go lower than “Silicon Valley techbro”
No you haven't. I feel the same way though, since the world has gone mad over it. Reporting on this is just another proof that journalism only exists ro make capitalists money. Anything approaching the lib idea of a "free and independent press" would start every article explaining that none of this is AI, it is not capable of achieving consciousness, and theyvare only saying this to create hype
Brainworms has been amplified and promoted by social media, I don't think you have lost it. This is just the shitty capitalist world we live in.