4 ms·

If one considers oneself entirely unsure about what properties consciousness has, maybe one shouldn't be trying to refute twitter posts that hypothesis certain

If one considers oneself entirely unsure about what properties consciousness has, maybe one shouldn't be trying to refute twitter posts that hypothesis certain things might be conscious. Maybe one should do the more principled Bayesian thing and just allow oneself to be uncertain proportional to the amount you don't know. If the article stuck to “we don't have any good reasons to believe that neural nets are conscious,” I wouldn't have had this objection. Either you get to say you know some properties about consciousness that allow you to coherently argue that some things are or are not, or you don't claim that and then you don't get to make that argument. The article wants to have its cake and eat it too, making a strong stance about what their model says while also claiming to neither have nor hope to have a model. I do actually think there are useful things you can say about what is and isn't conscious, but my comments here aren't really about that, they are about this annoying argument style where you attack things from whether they conform to social norms, rather than the merits of the position.

Retric 5y ago
It’s up to the person proposing a new term like “slightly conscious” to define what that means. Without that I can say no neural nets aren’t blubbery muffins and it’s just as valid as any other argument. Quite simply I don’t agree or disagree because the guy failed to clearly communicate.
- hitekker 5y ago
  Agreed. The backlash to the OP's article reeks of religion. A few AI zealots pushing the burden of proof upon their naysayers under the pretense of science. Meanwhile, actual science is far closer to basic concepts like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
- dalbasal 5y ago
  This is nonsense. The statement isn't meaningless. It's a tweet, not a formal conjecture. Sure, no one knows what exactly consciousness is... or what slightly conscious is. The idea of protoconsiousness isn't that much of a stretch. If a biologist had suggested some plants have protoconsiousness, no one would have whined. So what if someone working on NLP has an opinion about consciousness. Why is their opinion less valid than someone else's. It's not less informed.
  - Retric 5y ago
    I didn’t say meaningless, I said he didn’t communicate clearly. He can always add more tweets on the subject to remove ambiguity. Suppose you walked past a billboard that just said “Jump.” That’s grammatically correct and would be meaningful with context, but sitting alone you simply have no idea what idea was supposed to be communicated. Perhaps you missed a different sign, perhaps it’s art or an in joke, but sitting alone it’s simply ambiguous.
abeppu 5y ago
> Maybe one should do the more principled Bayesian thing and just allow oneself to be uncertain proportional to the amount you don't know. I think this still fails in the sense that the distribution representing one's beliefs is only defined with respect to a set of hypotheses. By invoking Bayes, presumably you acknowledge that different parties will come to the conversation with different priors. But critically, one can only update one's beliefs given both evidence and a likelihood function related that evidence back to hypotheses in the domain of one's beliefs. The "our take" summary near the end of the article explicitly says that they would regard the claim as reasonable given the right explicitly definition of consciousness. > The reality is that we don’t have a widely accepted definition, let alone understanding, of consciousness. Claiming that we have already replicated such a nebulous concept with computers seems improbable at best. Our take is that the claim could also be reasonable, but only if a particular definition of consciousness was specified as well.

Retric 5y ago

It’s up to the person proposing a new term like “slightly conscious” to define what that means. Without that I can say no neural nets aren’t blubbery muffins and it’s just as valid as any other argument. Quite simply I don’t agree or disagree because the guy failed to clearly communicate.

hitekker 5y ago
Agreed. The backlash to the OP's article reeks of religion. A few AI zealots pushing the burden of proof upon their naysayers under the pretense of science. Meanwhile, actual science is far closer to basic concepts like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
dalbasal 5y ago
This is nonsense. The statement isn't meaningless. It's a tweet, not a formal conjecture. Sure, no one knows what exactly consciousness is... or what slightly conscious is. The idea of protoconsiousness isn't that much of a stretch. If a biologist had suggested some plants have protoconsiousness, no one would have whined. So what if someone working on NLP has an opinion about consciousness. Why is their opinion less valid than someone else's. It's not less informed.
- Retric 5y ago
  I didn’t say meaningless, I said he didn’t communicate clearly. He can always add more tweets on the subject to remove ambiguity. Suppose you walked past a billboard that just said “Jump.” That’s grammatically correct and would be meaningful with context, but sitting alone you simply have no idea what idea was supposed to be communicated. Perhaps you missed a different sign, perhaps it’s art or an in joke, but sitting alone it’s simply ambiguous.

abeppu 5y ago

> Maybe one should do the more principled Bayesian thing and just allow oneself to be uncertain proportional to the amount you don't know. I think this still fails in the sense that the distribution representing one's beliefs is only defined with respect to a set of hypotheses. By invoking Bayes, presumably you acknowledge that different parties will come to the conversation with different priors. But critically, one can only update one's beliefs given both evidence and a likelihood function related that evidence back to hypotheses in the domain of one's beliefs. The "our take" summary near the end of the article explicitly says that they would regard the claim as reasonable given the right explicitly definition of consciousness. > The reality is that we don’t have a widely accepted definition, let alone understanding, of consciousness. Claiming that we have already replicated such a nebulous concept with computers seems improbable at best. Our take is that the claim could also be reasonable, but only if a particular definition of consciousness was specified as well.