Recent comments in /f/philosophy

Galactus_Jones762 OP t1_jef6fps wrote

We mostly agree. It may be a wise default position to say it’s like clippy til proven otherwise. But my claims are actually this fwiw: at some as to yet be pinpointed, consciousness may emerge. It’s not arbitrary, it’s unknown but we know it’s there, at least in brains. We don’t know if it’s there in the most advanced AI systems. We also don’t know it’s not there, by it, I mean a level at which it could potentially emerge with some form of what we might usefully label “consciousness.”

I’m also saying that even if we can define consciousness, we can’t prove it’s in our own brains merely by looking at them. What we can plausibly say there is “likely” a basic infrastructure in our brains that yield subjectivity, qualia; all that good stuff, and that infrastructure has been more or less eluded to in my article, reductionist, sure, but I talked about the ion channels, firing rate, action potential, number of synaptic connections, networks, and brain regions.

You are telling me that in order to say it is “likely” there’s a basic infrastructure yielding something beyond mere automaton behavior in AI, something like consciousness, I need more evidence. I agree.

Which is why I’m not saying it’s likely. I am merely offering that it is possible. And that’s plenty to divorce the Chinese Room from this conversation.

Searle wrote his experiment when he had “eyes” on all the pieces of the model’s functionality. It’s a braindead obvious observation but also an important one.

His original conception of sequential token manipulation does not account for unexplained emergence in systems where we don’t have a model for how the data is structured at these massive scales.

Bottom line: one can’t argue that just because humans are made up of sub atomic particles we can extrapolate that they can never be conscious or are entirely mechanical automatons.

We are entirely mechanical. Yet we don’t know how consciousness arises in us or any creature. We know it’s mechanical and have tracked the culprit to the brain but still don’t know precisely how it creates this subjective experience we have.

What’s new and different about AI as opposed to older versions is we are starting to see edge case activity where we really and truly no longer know why or how these things do what they the do.

When emergence takes place in complex systems you have to put Searle’s experiment on notice—it’s in danger of being increasingly irrelevant as the behaviors become increasingly unexplainable by sequential token manipulation alone.

We should not blindly invoke history, blindly rely too heavily on these prosaic “rules” handed down by great thinkers. It’s important we understand their role but know when to come out of the rain.

If any scholar invokes Chinese room as a one and done answer to smart layman who are noticing something weird is happening in the AGI research field, that’s lazy.

It’s fine with a child who mistakes a chatbot for a true friend. It’s not adequate for those who are fully aware of Searle and what his dictum meant.

We have to be open to the possibility that AI is showing early signs of graduating from its Chinese room shackles. Maybe we need a new thought experiment.

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AndyDaBear t1_jef4l76 wrote

I am a believer in Free-Will, but do not think this argument proves Free-Will. My objections are as follows:

  1. If it is true that determinism is self defeating for the intuitive reasons suggested, this does not necessarily mean determinism is false. It just means that IF determinism is true then there is no valid argument for anything including determinism and everything else.
  2. I do not think it obvious if determinism and free will are a real dichotomy, and I do not think every one agrees with the particular meaning of either term but understand them somewhat differently. For example for my own working definition of Free-Will and Determinism they are not exclusive.
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GyantSpyder t1_jef3v86 wrote

Is there anything worthwhile or interesting to the theory of Ethics of Care in a philosophical sense? Or is more of a literary/cultural/political "hey this might be a good idea that sounds good to me" kind of "philosophical" thing?

I guess another way of asking the question would be - is there anything to Ethics of Care as theory that operates in a different way than other moral theories, or is it mostly casting itself as separate because the ends it advocates are separate ends than those generally associated with older society and culture, regardless of whether older society actually operated by the ethical theories associated with it? Sort of like how medieval and ancient virtue theory was often different because the virtues were different, but in the compelling sense of what a virtue is it was not as different.

As in, "we have new morals, so even though the old ethics still work, we're going to come up with new names for our ethics because the old ethics are so culturally associated with the old morals." Something like that? Or is there an idea in it different from other ideas worth familiarizing yourself with?

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AdditionFeisty4854 t1_jef2vlk wrote

TBH, I was waiting for your comment to appear in the notifications lol..
So by your explanations, I understood the following statement -

>A being (living or non living) in existence is determined as the information it carries (which shall be absolutely certain and shall not be 0) per time influenced withholding it's intention added

>
>Intention does not matter always

>
>Non living beings constitute pure information whereas living beings constitute information with intention (which develops due to acquired consciousness)
>
>
>
>Now if time is 0, there is nothingness, as (x/0 = can't be defined)
If that is the point then intentions are futile

>
>(you have added more words, but this are the fundamentals)

Now, this nothingness you described, in my terms, shall be called something less than 0 Dimension and obviously, above it.
0D is described as a singular point, having infinite information. Information is all it carries as a property, After it, new property comes which is Length (1D), then Breadth (2D), then Hight (3D), then Time (4D)
Note all property is but an infinite set of its predecessor property... Infinite group of lines (having length as property) form a plan (having breadth as property) Et cetera..
Now, as you judged (don't know if you judged), there should be some property whose infinite set constitute that property of 0D, having information

That's why I told nothing is everything

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Curious_Disaster5494 t1_jeerj7t wrote

Thanks a lot!! Your comment made my day !! I’m happy to see someone actually read all this lol. About the nothingness: I believe there must be a startpoint to existence. (Existence of being, not us humans or our solar system etc). My thought was, what was there before that particular starting point. Before existence existed at all. Therefore we have to specify what existence is in the first place. Like I said I believe existence is information, put in time + an intention. Nothing can exist without these 3 (at least how we perceive existence). it may be possible to exist without time, but I think it’s impossible to exist without being/having information and having an intention. Now, intention can come and go, but information is always there and always have been. I believe there was a point in „time“ where not even information was there and that would be the „nothingness“. Means, everything emerged from this „nothingness“ and it still surrounds and it’s still included in everything there is until now since the information (which is everything) was born out of it. I hope this specifies my thoughts a little bit more.

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Arstanishe t1_jeeeb2c wrote

Yeah, it did, because people smelted the natural copper ores that have tin or arsenic in them.That is not the same as deliberately producing bronze, and the scale of those early bronze artifact production was much smaller.so let's say one place which had those ores on the ground would produce the bronze instruments, whereas all the other places around could not.What would be the impact of that happening? Pretty much negligient.Otherwise, why would actual smelting of different ores start only at around 3000 BCE (when bronze-age civilizations were already there?)

As for downplaying - in my opinion it's you who downplay a drastic change in human civilization that happened with agriculture. Raising crops and cattle allowed for a completely different way of living, with smelting bronze from separate ingridients (so you could combine much more abundant copper with tin and arsenic, instead of looking for a very rare natural combination of both), trade, and food surplus that lead to people being more specialized.

All you hunter-gatherer society fans say is that somehow life in those times was better, because people were all equally living in precarious conditions.
Sure, maybe early settlers in agricultural societies were not that happy with their life, but they had way less problems every year with food shortages, had some kind of state to protect them, and were capable of creating city culture, which we are all part of now.
While hunter-gatherers could be wiped by a hostile tribe at every given moment, every winter-spring could lead to starvation, and the amount of resources to spend on anything except survival was miniscule

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1nfernals t1_jeecp7j wrote

??

You're playing down the extent of the number of groups that would participate, the distances they would travel and the cultural significance these annual festivals had.

You understand that bronze existed before the bronze age? Because in order to successfully complete a sufficient bronze tool you do not need an entire metal works or trade caravans. Hunter gatherer groups absolutely had the time, resources and knowledge to locally produce metal tools as they needed them.

You're falling into the trap of classifying human behaviours under specific periods, bronze wasn't discovered in one place, where the bronze age began, but in many places simultaneously and over time became more significant within human society. Furthermore the existence of bronze age bronze works does not disprove the existence or practice of metal working in an earlier period.

You can build a furnace out of river mud, light it with fuel, and now all you need is the metal, which you probably would have sourced before lighting the fire. The reason bronze was valuable was because it was more ideal than copper, which is primarily the most accessible ore for hunter gatherers, since similarly to gold it can sort of be "found" in the environment. Gathering a specific resource for alloying would be more difficult without centralised population centers or long distance trading, but not impossible as some people would have lived in regions where both resources were accessible, such as Cornwall for example.

Moving away from the idea that human civilisation started when we stopped to build cities is more reflective of the archaeological evidence we have

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PhysicalLobster3909 t1_jee7zyk wrote

Both of you are right. The concern about how it could modify our view of disability and illness in general is legitimate however.

The second problem is the level of defect that would be "acceptable" or "unacceptable" between severe disability and markers making depression, diabetes or any slight problem more likely.

The first is undoubtedly a progress, the second blurs the line between that and a more dubious "optimisation".

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PhysicalLobster3909 t1_jee7c3l wrote

The real question is the level of "defects" which would justify termination. Wanting to avoid debilitating diseases is a thing, doing the same for an increased probability of illness in life is another level of selection.

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gravitas_shortage t1_jedxxtx wrote

You're only arguing that at some arbitrary level of complexity, consciousness may emerge. Which, well, yes. But that's not enough to posit that we are there already, or might be soon, or even that we might conceivably get there by going in the GPT/transformer direction. You need to provide a plausible definition of consciousness and show that at the very minimum the basic infrastructure is there in GPT, otherwise there's no reason to think that it's any less of a Chinese room than Clippy.

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Galactus_Jones762 OP t1_jedd3n0 wrote

I'm tired of hearing the Chinese Room thing. The thought experiment is quickly losing its relevance. Just look around; GPT and LaMDA are doing much more than Chinese Rooming. Before you object, READ. Then go ahead, object. I live for that shit.

(I am Galan.)

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radiodigm t1_jeciz3d wrote

Can't we just say that there's no such thing as truth? Our epistemology, at least for model-dependent realists, assumes that there's no such baseline -- there's no static reality against which we must measure the success of our perceptions. Reality is instead just valued against a floating relationship between the knowledge and the observation's moment in space-time, a function of the relationship itself as well as the necessity and utility that motivated the acquisition of that particular knowledge. Empiricism could indeed answer that sort of question, anyway. Instead of what is our foundation for truth, it only has to tell us what is the best way to arrive at knowledge that ends up being most reliable to suit the motive for the observation.

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