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> Do you think it is a halfway reasonable justification for AI understanding? Personally, I think AI is revealing that consciousness is a social construction,

> Do you think it is a halfway reasonable justification for AI understanding? Personally, I think AI is revealing that consciousness is a social construction, and one that, as a social label, can have multiple groundings. That doesn't mean it's not necessarily real, just that it has to be operationalized in order to quantify it. Operationalization requires some assumptions and it's important to be transparent about what they are. You'll see people often invoke truth, reality, and fact, in order to justify their assumptions as "that's just the way it is." What a load of BS. Invoking reality to win an argument in a game about metaphysics displays a profound lack of understanding. "Consciousness" especially w.r.t AI is a contentious topic almost guaranteed to elicit emotions and trigger people to fall back on these assumptions. If nous has any utility, it's to de-escalate these discussions and avoid identity-laden emotional responses. It may even do that just because people don't have any idea what a nous is. Not too many people are well versed in (neo-)Platonism. If the nous was good enough to explain the mind to people back then, why shouldn't it be good enough to explain AI?

dr_dshiv 3y ago
Solid. What’s weird (and to your point) is that many scholars claim that wasn’t really a word for consciousness in Ancient Greek. I mean, maybe pathos or aesthesis or something, but it is oddly missing. And nous didn’t seem to include core aspects of experience like emotions. Psyche/soup was contested then and now, but I don’t think scholars would consider it to be a good mapping to consciousness/qualia.
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  I've had that discussion here too. The responses to the idea that our modern concept of consciousness is relatively[1] recent go like this: > So it seems like the argument is that consciousness didn’t exist because we didn’t have a word for it. I wish we as a community could actually have a conversation about this history of the idea of consciousness, but it's been so well-reified over the last 380+ years that it's a tough rock to loosen and is a load-bearing idea in the public's core belief structure - to our collective detriment. 1. post-enlightenment

dr_dshiv 3y ago

Solid. What’s weird (and to your point) is that many scholars claim that wasn’t really a word for consciousness in Ancient Greek. I mean, maybe pathos or aesthesis or something, but it is oddly missing. And nous didn’t seem to include core aspects of experience like emotions. Psyche/soup was contested then and now, but I don’t think scholars would consider it to be a good mapping to consciousness/qualia.

kelseyfrog 3y ago
I've had that discussion here too. The responses to the idea that our modern concept of consciousness is relatively[1] recent go like this: > So it seems like the argument is that consciousness didn’t exist because we didn’t have a word for it. I wish we as a community could actually have a conversation about this history of the idea of consciousness, but it's been so well-reified over the last 380+ years that it's a tough rock to loosen and is a load-bearing idea in the public's core belief structure - to our collective detriment. 1. post-enlightenment