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The myth of machine consciousness makes Narcissus of us all
- dtagames 3y agoMeaning is a top-down hierarchy of dependent relations, unified at its apex by intentional mind. This is the sole ontological ground of all those mental operations that a computer’s functions can reflect, but never produce. Mind cannot arise from its own contingent consequences. This is the crux of the matter. Your mind (or mine) sits above the physical functioning of the brain. The mind is the master of the physical organism. The mind doesn't arise from the existence of the physical operations. All of this magic attributed to computers tells me two things. First, folks aren't programmers or chip designers because those people know that exactly the same assembler code is being run in an LLM that would be run for any other software and it's not intelligent. It was all written by people and burned into the chip years ago, Turing-style, like all other computers and software. Second, it reminds me of how our ancestors looked at geology or weather or cosmology without any real understanding of them, either, and came away with magical fairies and demons as the explanation for the natural world. Intention and consciousness were ascribed to all kinds of objects and phenomena. It was incorrect then and it's incorrect now.