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It‘s still not clear to me why any subjective experience would arise in a computing process. We know it happens for humans, we can presume that it happens for m

by quonn 4y ago

It‘s still not clear to me why any subjective experience would arise in a computing process. We know it happens for humans, we can presume that it happens for mammals due to the biological similarity and common history. Unfortunately we don‘t understand it so far, but until we do, the burden of proof is on those who claim without evidence that there is consciousness in machines.

jaggederest 4y ago
There's no "consciousness" there. There's consciousness in what it is emulating, though, and if you give it enough of that, it will be indistinguishable from an actual consciousness, and so it may very well be that we must treat it as conscious. There's a philosophical concept, "zimboes", which is useful here - philosophical zombies which believe that they are conscious, and believe that they experience subjective understanding. I don't follow all the arguments, but from what I understand, they're used to argue for "if it quacks like a duck" presentations of consciousness, rather than some more abstract criteria.
- ifdefdebug 4y ago
  > There's consciousness in what it is emulating This begs the question (if you made it to the footnotes of the article discussed here, you will know what I mean). More precisely, you start your argument by begging me to take for granted that it can emulate conscious beings - no, you will have to proof that, and not by making it into an axiom.
  - jaggederest 4y ago
    My argument is that there's no way of distinguishing "behaving like conscious beings" from "being conscious". It does not matter whether it is "genuinely emulating conscious beings" or not. It's a simple extension from "it mimics human text" to "what if it got so much better we can't tell the difference". If we can't tell the difference, definitionally it may as well be conscious. You can disagree with the axiom that it does mimic human text, but generating text with it looks like a pretty good mimicry to me. You may not agree that it will ever get that good - I would also agree with that. I don't think the proposed scenario is at all likely, certainly not in my lifetime, but if it was, I'd be there lobbying for the large language models to have rights.

by quonn 4y ago

jaggederest 4y ago

There's no "consciousness" there. There's consciousness in what it is emulating, though, and if you give it enough of that, it will be indistinguishable from an actual consciousness, and so it may very well be that we must treat it as conscious. There's a philosophical concept, "zimboes", which is useful here - philosophical zombies which believe that they are conscious, and believe that they experience subjective understanding. I don't follow all the arguments, but from what I understand, they're used to argue for "if it quacks like a duck" presentations of consciousness, rather than some more abstract criteria.

ifdefdebug 4y ago
> There's consciousness in what it is emulating This begs the question (if you made it to the footnotes of the article discussed here, you will know what I mean). More precisely, you start your argument by begging me to take for granted that it can emulate conscious beings - no, you will have to proof that, and not by making it into an axiom.
- jaggederest 4y ago
  My argument is that there's no way of distinguishing "behaving like conscious beings" from "being conscious". It does not matter whether it is "genuinely emulating conscious beings" or not. It's a simple extension from "it mimics human text" to "what if it got so much better we can't tell the difference". If we can't tell the difference, definitionally it may as well be conscious. You can disagree with the axiom that it does mimic human text, but generating text with it looks like a pretty good mimicry to me. You may not agree that it will ever get that good - I would also agree with that. I don't think the proposed scenario is at all likely, certainly not in my lifetime, but if it was, I'd be there lobbying for the large language models to have rights.