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> What does all this mean? Watson may beat us at Jeopardy, but we are convinced we have something AI will always lack: We are agents in the world, whose decisi
by djokkataja 8y ago
> What does all this mean? Watson may beat us at Jeopardy, but we are convinced we have something AI will always lack: We are agents in the world, whose decisions, choices, actions are made meaningful by the content of the belief/desire pairings that bring them about. But what if the theory of mind that underwrites our distinctiveness is build on sand, is just another useful illusion foisted upon us by the Darwinian processes that got us here? Then it will turn out that neuroscience is a far greater threat to human distinctiveness than AI will ever be.
I'm not sure how someone could believe that AI would always lack these things without also believing in some form of essentialism, basically believing that major parts of the human experience are "magic" somehow rather than derived from physical processes.
Anyway the author's major concern seems to be that neuroscience has demonstrated that desires and beliefs are not directly real in the same way that, say, your brain is a particular collection of atoms restricted to the physical confines of your skull. I suppose this could be very disturbing if you have the sense that your life is significantly more meaningful if all of your desires and beliefs are as real as the ground you walk on rather than being some illusory projection of the brain.
The problem actually arises from the associations that we have with the word "illusion". As soon as we start to think of our beliefs and desires as "illusions", it's natural to leap to terms like "fake", "false", "worthless", "deceit", and so on. In other words, there are all kinds of negative connotations that we associate with the word "illusion", so when we use that to describe core parts of what we think of as the human experience, it makes us feel bad.
But this is simply a limit of our language: what are the illusions of "beliefs" and "desires" anyway? Desires correspond to our experiences; if we want food, that corresponds to a very real physical state of our physical bodies. Beliefs are a lot shakier because they tend to be be built on complex layers of ideas, but they correspond to physical reality as well, whether or not they're particularly accurate. So these things are very useful and important despite being "illusions". And there's a huge difference between these "illusions" and direct falsehoods. So I think the real limitation here is that we don't have language that's particularly well adapted to discussing and thinking about these things.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wallace_f 8y ago>they correspond to physical reality as well I wonder if what you are referring to as illusions could not just be realities of our emergent physical needs for individual, short-term survival, but also for collective, long-term survival. I guess it's possible that some human illusions such as some of our concepts of right and wrong, morality, or natural rights, would actually also be emergent for AI in the long-run if these illusions are necessary or consistent with survival ir exitence in our universe?
- evdev 8y agoI think it largely comes from uninterrogated/unrevised dualisms applied to the scientistic world. I think of Rosenberg's eliminativism as follows: a) Platonic realism is the only way our semantic categories/abstractions could be meaningful. b) The world is physical (platonism is not true). c) All our categories are meaningless! Our abstractions are unreal! You can see it all follows from a), and there are serious questions about whether this is actually a physicalist philosophy...
- joe_the_user 8y agoIf instead of requiring various concepts of philosophy to be real, one simply requires them to be irreducible - not explanable as an ensemble effect of a larger system - then one winds-up with nearly the same thing. And I don't know how this requirement of irreducibility isn't a part of many philosophical views of the mind - specifically, isn't that what's important about "qualia", that they are irreducible?
- evdev 8y agoWhy would you require this? Concepts can either be a part meaningfully differentiated from the whole (neocortex, hypothalamus -> the whole brain) or an aggregate that while reducible to more basic parts is meaningfully differentiated from other similarly reduced aggregates (neocortex vs. hypothalamus). What seems to define the demand for the "real" or "irreducible" is wanting the nature of reality to in some sense "do" this differentiation "for us". And yes I would say that "qualia" insists on dualism.
- Nevermark 8y agoI agree but would fine tune your last statement to: "Assuming the experience of "qualia" is irreducible is to insist on dualism." The Qualia does exist. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the The Qualia is. You have to see it for yourself.
- joe_the_user 8y ago"But what if the theory of mind that underwrites our distinctiveness is build on sand, is just another useful illusion foisted upon us by the Darwinian processes that got us here? Then it will turn out that neuroscience is a far greater threat to human distinctiveness than AI will ever be." Ah, I get it. It's that journalist twist. The threats supposedly presented by AI include some version of robot rebellion ("the singularity"), a crisis where jobs are still necessary to live but where few people have any sellable skills, and a blow to the human ego concerning human uniqueness. What are journalists concerned with? The blow to the human ego? It's like the hyperbole of, say, one boxer described as "destroying" another by insulting them when the actual match will say who will destroy who. I mean, I personally think it is good to put to sleep the concept of agency promulgated by certain views of philosophy. Neuroscience is useful here. But what a terrible way to start framing things.
- captaincrowbar 8y ago>What are journalists concerned with? The fear that AI might learn to write journalism, or at least clickbait, better than they do :)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]