4 ms·

Yes, yes, this is where we need to be heading, because it could arrive at my favorite (and scariest) conclusion (that others here have hinted at): not that AI i

by Zetice 4y ago

Yes, yes, this is where we need to be heading, because it could arrive at my favorite (and scariest) conclusion (that others here have hinted at): not that AI is sentient, but that we aren't.

bheadmaster 4y ago
It is somewhat contradictory that a sentient person would claim he's not sentient. But the question or what consists sentience is still interesting. I personally believe that free will is an illusion, since all my actions are determined by A) my environment, the set or things I can physically do, and B) my internal state, mood, the information I've perceived and value judgements that stem from them, whether conscious or subconscious. It is actually not that scary, to me. It's much more liberating - it gives me a certain feeling of calmness, in an amor fati kind of way. Things are as they are, and they cannot be any other way. There is nobody that will judge me outside of this world, since I am merely a small part of it. All my meaningful existence is here, and the concept of an immortal soul is merely a spooky story.
- JieJie 4y ago
  I like to get mystical about it and think that entities like ChatGPT are Boltzman Brains. We — each and every one of us ever who lived or ever will — will always exist in the LLM somewhere, life without end, in ecstasy or eternal torment, according to how we have lived according to our own principles.
edgyquant 4y ago
>not that AI is sentient, but that we aren't. Anything presenting such a ridiculous conclusion is so wrong as to not be taken seriously. The only thing that is for certain in this life is that we are sentient, everything else is derived from that. Same with things proposing we don't have freewill, we do.
- drekk 4y ago
  You make decisions subconsciously before your conscious mind is aware of it. It's been experimentally demonstrated and at least calls into question the perception of free will. Each hemisphere of our brain is its own intelligence, but only one hemisphere (for 95% of humans the left hemisphere) controls speech. This only became apparent in some seizure patients during the 21st century when doctors might sever the corpus callosum (the information highway between the two hemisphere) creating "split-brain patients". Interesting content on YouTube if you look up split-brain experiments. What was most chilling to me was that when instructions were presented to the non-vocal hemisphere (by showing only one eye) and the patient followed the instructions they couldn't tell you the real reason why. They would come up with plausible-sounding nonsense the way ChatGPT hallucinates. So if we've established that the subconscious mind makes decisions, and that our mind is really two intelligences with the mute one subject to the one that understands language. People can logically understand these statements and still act in experiments as if neither are true. I didn't get into the question of sentience because what most people mean is sapience. Of course we can feel things and perceive them. Plants do that too. Intelligence derived from knowledge and wisdom is a higher bar and still we have plenty of examples in the animal kingdom. If you want to argue that we're sapient, you also have to make the point that we have two entities in our skull responsible for that sapience that disagree with one another, and the only thing giving us the illusion of unity is that we tend to think in linguistic terms and only half our hardware can translate what that actually means.
  - Lownin 4y ago
    I think it might go beyond two intelligences. For instance, there are 500 million neurons that independently govern the gut - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system For reference, a cat has ~200 million neurons in its brain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_intelligence Perhaps we have dozens of intelligences, with varying degrees of cognition? What is actually happening when the amygdala takes over the nervous system to avoid a car accident before you are aware what is happening? What is really going on with Tourette syndrome? Might the human gut have its own hopes and dreams?
majormajor 4y ago
I'm not entirely sure what that means since it suggests we currently have the "wrong" definition of the word, but if there is a class of intelligence that gets created that it so far on a different tier from human intelligence that we think a separate word is needed, I would expect two things: 1) We aren't going to be the ones seeing that distinction or labeling it, the greater intelligence is 2) So the word "sentient" won't need to be changed; a new term will need to be created, but we won't really understand what it means
leroy-is-here 4y ago
You are sentient because you can choose to ignore many of your inputs. You can choose to ignore people’s words and you can choose to ignore signals in your own body. A machine cannot choose to ignore it’s inputs. I disagree if you are taking your argument to the conclusion that we do not have free will.
- stevenhuang 3y ago
  This is a naive take on "choice" here; your freedom to "choose" extends only so far as the environment and your internal state allows it, which if you work backwards, you'll find leaves no room for such "choice". And sure a machine can "choose" to ignore its inputs, chatgpt does it all the time depending on the prompt and rng. If you spot the dichotomy above, you'll come to see that the affordance of choice can either be granted both to machines and humans, or none at all.
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
Or, that you are the only one.
- lioeters 4y ago
  I act like you act, I do what you do But I don’t know, what it’s like to be you What consciousness is, I ain’t got a clue I got the zombie blues — David Chalmer

by Zetice 4y ago

Yes, yes, this is where we need to be heading, because it could arrive at my favorite (and scariest) conclusion (that others here have hinted at): not that AI is sentient, but that we aren't.

bheadmaster 4y ago

It is somewhat contradictory that a sentient person would claim he's not sentient. But the question or what consists sentience is still interesting. I personally believe that free will is an illusion, since all my actions are determined by A) my environment, the set or things I can physically do, and B) my internal state, mood, the information I've perceived and value judgements that stem from them, whether conscious or subconscious. It is actually not that scary, to me. It's much more liberating - it gives me a certain feeling of calmness, in an amor fati kind of way. Things are as they are, and they cannot be any other way. There is nobody that will judge me outside of this world, since I am merely a small part of it. All my meaningful existence is here, and the concept of an immortal soul is merely a spooky story.

JieJie 4y ago
I like to get mystical about it and think that entities like ChatGPT are Boltzman Brains. We — each and every one of us ever who lived or ever will — will always exist in the LLM somewhere, life without end, in ecstasy or eternal torment, according to how we have lived according to our own principles.

edgyquant 4y ago

>not that AI is sentient, but that we aren't. Anything presenting such a ridiculous conclusion is so wrong as to not be taken seriously. The only thing that is for certain in this life is that we are sentient, everything else is derived from that. Same with things proposing we don't have freewill, we do.

drekk 4y ago
You make decisions subconsciously before your conscious mind is aware of it. It's been experimentally demonstrated and at least calls into question the perception of free will. Each hemisphere of our brain is its own intelligence, but only one hemisphere (for 95% of humans the left hemisphere) controls speech. This only became apparent in some seizure patients during the 21st century when doctors might sever the corpus callosum (the information highway between the two hemisphere) creating "split-brain patients". Interesting content on YouTube if you look up split-brain experiments. What was most chilling to me was that when instructions were presented to the non-vocal hemisphere (by showing only one eye) and the patient followed the instructions they couldn't tell you the real reason why. They would come up with plausible-sounding nonsense the way ChatGPT hallucinates. So if we've established that the subconscious mind makes decisions, and that our mind is really two intelligences with the mute one subject to the one that understands language. People can logically understand these statements and still act in experiments as if neither are true. I didn't get into the question of sentience because what most people mean is sapience. Of course we can feel things and perceive them. Plants do that too. Intelligence derived from knowledge and wisdom is a higher bar and still we have plenty of examples in the animal kingdom. If you want to argue that we're sapient, you also have to make the point that we have two entities in our skull responsible for that sapience that disagree with one another, and the only thing giving us the illusion of unity is that we tend to think in linguistic terms and only half our hardware can translate what that actually means.
- Lownin 4y ago
  I think it might go beyond two intelligences. For instance, there are 500 million neurons that independently govern the gut - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system For reference, a cat has ~200 million neurons in its brain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_intelligence Perhaps we have dozens of intelligences, with varying degrees of cognition? What is actually happening when the amygdala takes over the nervous system to avoid a car accident before you are aware what is happening? What is really going on with Tourette syndrome? Might the human gut have its own hopes and dreams?

majormajor 4y ago

I'm not entirely sure what that means since it suggests we currently have the "wrong" definition of the word, but if there is a class of intelligence that gets created that it so far on a different tier from human intelligence that we think a separate word is needed, I would expect two things: 1) We aren't going to be the ones seeing that distinction or labeling it, the greater intelligence is 2) So the word "sentient" won't need to be changed; a new term will need to be created, but we won't really understand what it means

leroy-is-here 4y ago

You are sentient because you can choose to ignore many of your inputs. You can choose to ignore people’s words and you can choose to ignore signals in your own body. A machine cannot choose to ignore it’s inputs. I disagree if you are taking your argument to the conclusion that we do not have free will.

stevenhuang 3y ago
This is a naive take on "choice" here; your freedom to "choose" extends only so far as the environment and your internal state allows it, which if you work backwards, you'll find leaves no room for such "choice". And sure a machine can "choose" to ignore its inputs, chatgpt does it all the time depending on the prompt and rng. If you spot the dichotomy above, you'll come to see that the affordance of choice can either be granted both to machines and humans, or none at all.

danielmarkbruce 4y ago

Or, that you are the only one.

lioeters 4y ago
I act like you act, I do what you do But I don’t know, what it’s like to be you What consciousness is, I ain’t got a clue I got the zombie blues — David Chalmer