4 ms·
I have recently been baffled to find that there’s a certain type of “smart person” who will become annoyed if you bring up dark matter, dark energy, or consciou
by mordymoop 3y ago
I have recently been baffled to find that there’s a certain type of “smart person” who will become annoyed if you bring up dark matter, dark energy, or consciousness as a philosophical question. The idea that there are things that we still don’t know, potentially important and paradigm shifting things, is a kind of affront to their sense of comfort. It’s like they think just by bringing these topics up you are somehow undermining Science.
- rbanffy 3y agoI understand the frustration. When you bring up a possibility one can't disprove, such as dark matter/energy, or life-after-death, we get stuck - there's no way to move forward without something that can give us a model with some predictive power. Intelligence and consciousness (in the context of AGI or LLMs) is one such thing. When someone starts saying that LLMs can't possibly be conscious, at first I tended to politely point out we don't have a good, testable, definition of what conscious is and, therefore, we can't claim an LLM can't be conscious. Nowadays I just avoid the discussion altogether. I'll let them bring me back from the dead when we have a usable definition for "intelligence" or "consciousness" we can test. I'm sure it'll be a machine waking me up.
- astrange 3y agoPresumably an LLM's evidence of consciousness is how it would complete a sentence starting with "I…". But I think the question is like asking if the Broca's area in a human brain is conscious.
- rbanffy 3y agoAn interesting question - how much of a brain needs to be operating for us to say a human is conscious. The legal implications would be very relevant.