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It is wholly consistent to believe that your actual parrots are also statistical parrots. That's not the same thing as "can't be convinced".
by IIAOPSW 3y ago
It is wholly consistent to believe that your actual parrots are also statistical parrots. That's not the same thing as "can't be convinced".
- AlecSchueler 3y agoI've actually stopped believing in my own sentience.
- feanaro 3y agoWhat does that even mean?
- nwatson 3y agoWe live in Skinner boxes.
- lamp987 3y agoLLM-induced psychosis. The new health hazard in the town.
- postsantum 3y agoNot OP, but same here. I feel I am a sentient person only when fully concentrated. But when relaxed, it's stochastic autopilot, both in speech and actions I believe I've seen an article touching this topic here, long before GPT. Will link if I find it
- feanaro 3y agoWhat you're describing is a lack of volition ("free will"), not sentience. Even on autopilot, you still perceive things, meaning sensations and things constantly appear in your mindscape, right? That is sentience.
- flangola7 3y agoI think you're confusing sentience with thinking intelligence
- haswell 3y agoSentience is usually defined as the ability to perceive/feel things. One way to see this is that sentience and language processing are just two aspects available to us in consciousness. We are also not identical to our thoughts or feelings, but most people never pause to contemplate this. I suspect the autopilot you describe is really closer to our default state, but it’s easier to notice when in a calm state and the “me-ness” of actions/thoughts doesn’t feel so strong.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- taneq 3y agoWhat's really interesting is that most of us feel we're our "best selves" when we reach a state of flow. We're in the zone. We're totally non-self-conscious. The only description I've ever seen of consciousness that makes any sense is that it's a kind of condition monitoring system for our minds, a cross-check evolved to catch some of the cognitive mistakes that the main machinery of our minds tend to make from time to time. And because our whole brain is linked into this system, including itself, we get that infinite regress of omphaloskepsis that we call "consciousness."
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoPersonally, I feel I'm at my most "conscious" when I'm in a flow state. I'm laser focused on one thing, but I'm actively thinking about that thing very hard! I don't do a lot of metacognition (thinking about my thinking) while I'm in a flow state, which maybe was your point. But I can think about my prior flow state thinking after the fact, and I'm aware of how much my mind was working, and what that felt like.
- IIAOPSW 3y agoHows this for a definition. Its not a definition of consciousness per se, but its a definition of the specific consciousness "you" in the general case: you are whatever you get in return when you ask yourself who you are. Consciousness thus defined exists entirely within the communicative medium. In other words, consciousness is an emergent phenomena that happens in a system of sending messages when eventually an agent starts sending messages to itself. "you" are the voices in your head not attributed to anyone else.
- postsantum 3y agoedit: found it, it was about GPT actually https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4AHXDwcGab5PhKhHT/humans-who-are-not-concentrating-are-not-general https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4AHXDwcGab5PhKhHT/humans-who...
- kingkawn 3y agoself-explanatory that they aren't able to tell you
- idiotsecant 3y agoI don't think it's meaningful to say that something capable of stopping belief in it's own sentience does not possess sentience, at least not without some creature linguistic torture of the definition of sentience. I do, however, appreciate your point and agree with the spirit of your post, if not the exact content. I definitely feel like I am two 'selves' - one of which is capable of rational thought, foresight, rational modeling of the world around me, etc. That self is probably running things 25% of the time. The other self is emotional, understands the world intuitively for all of the benefits and drawbacks that carries, and seeks short term satisfaction of needs above all else. I don't mean this in a hand-wavey new age holistic way, I mean it in a very concrete sense. I can detect that change in myself when I switch from the 'monkey pilot' to the 'human pilot'. Mindfulness and concentration is required to bring the human back. I think I have below average executive functioning skills, and I spend a lot of my 'human pilot' time thinking about how I can stay in this mode longer but it's not trivial to make that happen. I think my 'human pilot' is definitely sentient. My 'monkey pilot' might not be depending on the definition.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoI applaud you for your honesty, introspection, and open mindedness. If anything, LLMs have exposed our inconsistency in how we ground sentience, consciousness, and subjective experience. At times we thought we were talking about the same things, but we've clearly have been tossing terms about. LLMs have, at least/last, given us the opportunity to reexamine important social ontologies. Better late than never.
- atlantic 3y agoIf you weren't sentient, you couldn't believe or disbelieve anything. Or perform any other mental action. Read Descartes.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoI've read Descartes. ChatGPT believes things and performs mental actions as well.
- randomcarbloke 3y agoI can't read Descartes as I am insentient.