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Pour one out for the decline of human exceptionalism! Once you get material-reductionist enough and accept yourself as a pure function of genetics, environment,

Pour one out for the decline of human exceptionalism! Once you get material-reductionist enough and accept yourself as a pure function of genetics, environment, past experience, and chance, this conclusion becomes inevitable. I also expect it to be the standard within a decade, with AI-human parity of capabilities as the key driver.

dekhn 3y ago
We'll see! I came to this conclusion a long time ago but at the same time I do subjectively experience consciousness, which in itself is something a mystery in the material-reductionist philosophy.
- idle_zealot 3y ago
  I hear this a lot, but is it really a mystery/incompatible with materialism? Is there a reason consciousness couldn't be what it feels like to be a certain type of computation? I don't see why we would need something immaterial or some undiscovered material component to explain it.
  - kaibee 3y ago
    Well the undiscovered part is why it should feel like anything at all. And this is definitely relevant because consciousness clearly exists enough that we exert physical force about it, so its gotta be somewhere in physics. But where?
    - idle_zealot 3y ago
      Why does it need to be in physics? What would that look like, a Qualia Boson? It could be an emergent property like life itself. Physics doesn't "explain" life, it explains the physical mechanisms behind the chemical interactions that ultimately produce life by virtue of self-replicating patterns spreading and mutating. There is no Life is physics, and yet we see it all around it because it emerges as a complex result of fundamental rules. My expectation is that experience is emergent from computation that controls an agent and models the world around that agent, and that experience isn't a binary. A tree is more aware than a rock, an ant more than a tree, a squirrel more than an ant, and so on until you reach humans, but there may not be any real change in kind as the conditions for experience become more developed. I guess my real point is that I don't view experience or consciousness as something special or exceptional. My guess is that over time we come to understand how the brain works better and better but never find anything that definitively explains consciousness because it's totally subjective and immeasurable. We eventually produce computers complex enough to behave totally convincingly human, and they will claim to be conscious, maybe even be granted personhood, but we'll never actually know for sure if they experience the world, just like we don't know that other humans do.
      - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
        If life is an emergent property of physics then it's replicable which means it's not spiritual.
    - robwwilliams 3y ago
      Toward the end of Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach there is a simple and plausible recursive attentional explanation, but without any serious neuroscience. The thalamo-cortico-thalamic system is a massively recursive CNS system. Ray Guillery’s biok The Brain As A Tool is a good introduction to the relevant neuroscience with a hat tip to consciousness written long after GEB.
  - dekhn 3y ago
    I mean, if you're a compatibilist, there's no mystery. In that model, we live in a causally deterministic universe but still have free will. I would say instead "the subjective experience of consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems with certain properties". I guess that's consistent with "the experience of consciousness is the feeling of a certain type of computation". Personally these sorts of things don't really matter to me- I don't really care if other people are conscious, and I don't think I could prove it either way- I just assume other people are conscious, and that we can make computers that are conscious. And that's exactly what I'm pushing for: ML that passes every Turing-style test that we can come up with. Because, as they say "if you can't tell, does it really matter?"
  - beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
    Why is consciousness computation? What does it even mean to say something feels like being "a type of computation"? The concept of consciousness is wildly more expansive and diverse than computation, rather than the other way around. A strict materialist account or "explanation" of consciousness seems to just end up a category error. I take it as no surprise that a website devoted to the computers and software often insists that this is the only way to look at it, but there are entire philosophical movements that have developed fascinating accounts of consciousness that are far from strict materialism, nor are they "spiritual" or religious which is a common rejoinder by materialists, an example is the implications of Ludwig Wittgenstein's work from Philosophical Investigations and his analysis of language. And even in neuroscience there is far from complete agreement on the topic at all.
    - ux-app 3y ago
      >Why is consciousness computation? if there is no duality, then what else can it be? > there are entire philosophical movements that have developed fascinating accounts of consciousness that are far from strict materialism philosophers can bloviate all day. meanwhile the computer nerds built a machine that can engage in creative conversation, pass physician and bar exams, create art, music and code. I'm not saying there's nothing to learn from philosophy, but gee you have to admit that philosophers come up a little short wrt practical applications of their "Philosophical Investigations"
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  It makes perfect sense if you can disprove your own existence
  - Vecr 3y ago
    You can't disprove your existence, I'm pretty sure that does not make any sense. "I think therefore I am." No need for free will of any type there, and a currently existing computer could probably do the same thing.
    - NoGravitas 3y ago
      You can prove that "thinking is happening", but when you go looking for the "I", you'll never find it — only more thoughts. Gautama, Hume.
      - Vecr 3y ago
        Sure, but how does that let you disprove your existence?
- corethree 3y ago
  We can't even define what that experience means. From all the information we have the experience is most likely just a physical manifestation of what the parent poster describes.
jancsika 3y ago
I'm not convinced that this material-reductionist view wouldn't just be functionally equivalent to the way a majority of citizens live their lives currently. Now: a chance encounter with someone of a different faith leads a citizen to respect the religious freedom of others in the realm of self-determination. Future: a young hacker's formative experience leads to the idea that citizens should have the basic right to change out their device's recommendation engine with a random number generator at will. Those future humans will still think of themselves as exceptional because the AI tools will have developed right alongside the current human-exceptionalist ideology. Kinda like those old conservative couples I see in the South where the man is ostensibly the story teller and head of household. But if you listen long enough you notice his wife is whispering nearly every detail of importance to help him maintain coherence.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  > Kinda like those old conservative couples I see in the South where the man is ostensibly the story teller and head of household. But if you listen long enough you notice his wife is whispering nearly every detail of importance to help him maintain coherence. You've never actually seen this happen because it doesn't happen. This is not how real people interact, it's how the caricatures in your head interact.
  - gotoeleven 3y ago
    No Jansicka's Tales of Things that Totally Happened in the South is a #1 New York Times best seller.
IshKebab 3y ago
The conclusion of the article is that the toddler is not a stochastic parrot. But only because it has a life in the real world. I think she's trying to say that the toddler is more than a stochastic parrot because of real life experiences. But then I have no idea how she goes on to conclude: > Human obsolescence is not here and never can be. There's no fundamental reason why you can't put ChatGPT in the real world and give it a real life. The only things that probably will never be replaced by machines are things where our physical technology is likely never going to match biology - i.e. sex.
hawski 3y ago
I do not share your view, but partly understand it. I would worry that the "decline of human exceptionalism" will be used by corporations to widen their stance even more. After all corporations are also people (wink).

dekhn 3y ago

We'll see! I came to this conclusion a long time ago but at the same time I do subjectively experience consciousness, which in itself is something a mystery in the material-reductionist philosophy.

idle_zealot 3y ago
I hear this a lot, but is it really a mystery/incompatible with materialism? Is there a reason consciousness couldn't be what it feels like to be a certain type of computation? I don't see why we would need something immaterial or some undiscovered material component to explain it.
- kaibee 3y ago
  Well the undiscovered part is why it should feel like anything at all. And this is definitely relevant because consciousness clearly exists enough that we exert physical force about it, so its gotta be somewhere in physics. But where?
  - idle_zealot 3y ago
    Why does it need to be in physics? What would that look like, a Qualia Boson? It could be an emergent property like life itself. Physics doesn't "explain" life, it explains the physical mechanisms behind the chemical interactions that ultimately produce life by virtue of self-replicating patterns spreading and mutating. There is no Life is physics, and yet we see it all around it because it emerges as a complex result of fundamental rules. My expectation is that experience is emergent from computation that controls an agent and models the world around that agent, and that experience isn't a binary. A tree is more aware than a rock, an ant more than a tree, a squirrel more than an ant, and so on until you reach humans, but there may not be any real change in kind as the conditions for experience become more developed. I guess my real point is that I don't view experience or consciousness as something special or exceptional. My guess is that over time we come to understand how the brain works better and better but never find anything that definitively explains consciousness because it's totally subjective and immeasurable. We eventually produce computers complex enough to behave totally convincingly human, and they will claim to be conscious, maybe even be granted personhood, but we'll never actually know for sure if they experience the world, just like we don't know that other humans do.
    - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      If life is an emergent property of physics then it's replicable which means it's not spiritual.
  - robwwilliams 3y ago
    Toward the end of Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach there is a simple and plausible recursive attentional explanation, but without any serious neuroscience. The thalamo-cortico-thalamic system is a massively recursive CNS system. Ray Guillery’s biok The Brain As A Tool is a good introduction to the relevant neuroscience with a hat tip to consciousness written long after GEB.
- dekhn 3y ago
  I mean, if you're a compatibilist, there's no mystery. In that model, we live in a causally deterministic universe but still have free will. I would say instead "the subjective experience of consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems with certain properties". I guess that's consistent with "the experience of consciousness is the feeling of a certain type of computation". Personally these sorts of things don't really matter to me- I don't really care if other people are conscious, and I don't think I could prove it either way- I just assume other people are conscious, and that we can make computers that are conscious. And that's exactly what I'm pushing for: ML that passes every Turing-style test that we can come up with. Because, as they say "if you can't tell, does it really matter?"
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
  Why is consciousness computation? What does it even mean to say something feels like being "a type of computation"? The concept of consciousness is wildly more expansive and diverse than computation, rather than the other way around. A strict materialist account or "explanation" of consciousness seems to just end up a category error. I take it as no surprise that a website devoted to the computers and software often insists that this is the only way to look at it, but there are entire philosophical movements that have developed fascinating accounts of consciousness that are far from strict materialism, nor are they "spiritual" or religious which is a common rejoinder by materialists, an example is the implications of Ludwig Wittgenstein's work from Philosophical Investigations and his analysis of language. And even in neuroscience there is far from complete agreement on the topic at all.
  - ux-app 3y ago
    >Why is consciousness computation? if there is no duality, then what else can it be? > there are entire philosophical movements that have developed fascinating accounts of consciousness that are far from strict materialism philosophers can bloviate all day. meanwhile the computer nerds built a machine that can engage in creative conversation, pass physician and bar exams, create art, music and code. I'm not saying there's nothing to learn from philosophy, but gee you have to admit that philosophers come up a little short wrt practical applications of their "Philosophical Investigations"
throwaway4aday 3y ago
It makes perfect sense if you can disprove your own existence
- Vecr 3y ago
  You can't disprove your existence, I'm pretty sure that does not make any sense. "I think therefore I am." No need for free will of any type there, and a currently existing computer could probably do the same thing.
  - NoGravitas 3y ago
    You can prove that "thinking is happening", but when you go looking for the "I", you'll never find it — only more thoughts. Gautama, Hume.
    - Vecr 3y ago
      Sure, but how does that let you disprove your existence?
corethree 3y ago
We can't even define what that experience means. From all the information we have the experience is most likely just a physical manifestation of what the parent poster describes.

jancsika 3y ago

I'm not convinced that this material-reductionist view wouldn't just be functionally equivalent to the way a majority of citizens live their lives currently. Now: a chance encounter with someone of a different faith leads a citizen to respect the religious freedom of others in the realm of self-determination. Future: a young hacker's formative experience leads to the idea that citizens should have the basic right to change out their device's recommendation engine with a random number generator at will. Those future humans will still think of themselves as exceptional because the AI tools will have developed right alongside the current human-exceptionalist ideology. Kinda like those old conservative couples I see in the South where the man is ostensibly the story teller and head of household. But if you listen long enough you notice his wife is whispering nearly every detail of importance to help him maintain coherence.

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
> Kinda like those old conservative couples I see in the South where the man is ostensibly the story teller and head of household. But if you listen long enough you notice his wife is whispering nearly every detail of importance to help him maintain coherence. You've never actually seen this happen because it doesn't happen. This is not how real people interact, it's how the caricatures in your head interact.
- gotoeleven 3y ago
  No Jansicka's Tales of Things that Totally Happened in the South is a #1 New York Times best seller.

IshKebab 3y ago

The conclusion of the article is that the toddler is not a stochastic parrot. But only because it has a life in the real world. I think she's trying to say that the toddler is more than a stochastic parrot because of real life experiences. But then I have no idea how she goes on to conclude: > Human obsolescence is not here and never can be. There's no fundamental reason why you can't put ChatGPT in the real world and give it a real life. The only things that probably will never be replaced by machines are things where our physical technology is likely never going to match biology - i.e. sex.

hawski 3y ago

I do not share your view, but partly understand it. I would worry that the "decline of human exceptionalism" will be used by corporations to widen their stance even more. After all corporations are also people (wink).