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> I also don't go around having intelligent conversations with chairs. Where's your mechanistic model showing consciousness is linked to "intelligent conversat

> I also don't go around having intelligent conversations with chairs. Where's your mechanistic model showing consciousness is linked to "intelligent conversations." >the fact that you are drawing an absurd equivalence between inert chairs and a system capable of intelligent conversation shows you haven't given this topic any serious thought. Whether a desk chair has desires, pain or sense of self is completely unknown, unless of course you have some mechanistic model of these phenomena such that we can see its presence in the human brain and see that desk chairs do not have a comparable process. People like yourself who are so eager to dismiss the possibility that desk chairs are intelligent or sentient are the ones making strong claims without justification.

naasking 3y ago
Your parroted argument is just proving my point: we can't make definitive claims that chairs aren't conscious (see panspsychism), all we have are degrees of plausibility we evaluate in our ignorance. But under the materialistic assumptions of science, features such as intelligence indicate a degree of complex information processing that is a hallmark of systems that we know are conscious (like humans), and the absence of such sophistication in chairs reduces the plausibility of consciousness significantly. Denying consciousness exists in systems that also feature sophisticated information processing and that reproduce human capabilities is an argument from ignorance fallacy, unless of course you have additional evidence you haven't presented. Which is not to say that they are conscious either, but I never made such a claim.
- staticman2 3y ago
  > all we have are degrees of plausibility we evaluate in our ignorance Okay. >argument from ignorance fallacy, You just conceded we are both ignorant, but I'm the only one making the argument of ignorance fallacy? Double standard? > Which is not to say that they are conscious either, but I never made such a claim. Perhaps your objection is the way I phrased my comment. I should have said "ChatGPT being conscious is roughly as plausible as a "hello world" program being conscious. Case in point these model responds much like a "Hello world" program when asked if they are conscious. Claude has been finetuned to say 'I don't know if I'm conscious' Gemini and ChatGPT have been finetuned to say they are not, these models are complex in some ways and not very complex in other ways, they show no sophistication or complexity in ways we would associate with consciousness." Like, the trick is to distance yourself from your own opinion so as not to be accused of "arguing from ignorance" right? Talk about plausibility instead of directly making claims? But I don't remember making claims either, to be honest, so I'm not sure how I'm the only one making the "argument from ignorance fallacy" allegedly?
  - naasking 3y ago
    > You just conceded we are both ignorant, but I'm the only one making the argument of ignorance fallacy? Double standard? If you accept that the only real claim I've made is that we're too ignorant to say definitively whether these systems are or are not conscious (or sentient, or intelligent, etc.), what is the argument from ignorance fallacy that would undermine this position? > ChatGPT being conscious is roughly as plausible as a "hello world" program being conscious. Under a scientific interpretation, that's absurd. Of course if you want to go beyond materialism, feel free, but don't pretend it's a scientifically plausible statement. > they show no sophistication or complexity in ways we would associate with consciousness I disagree with that claim entirely. LLMs absolutely do exhibit intelligent responsiveness to perceptual stimuli they've been trained on (particularly multimodal LLMs). Text-only LLMs have no perceptions beyond digital word tokens, and as a fairly anemic view of the world they often fail spectacularly at making sense. This is arguably why multimodal LLMs improve accuracy in those scenarios. > Talk about plausibility instead of directly making claims? But I don't remember making claims either, to be honest, so I'm not sure how I'm the only one making the "argument from ignorance fallacy" allegedly? It would be fairly strange to start a conversation by drawing an analogy between sophisticated conversational information systems and inert chairs, as you did, without intending to take a fairly clear position on the matter. Unless it wasn't your intent to dismiss all of the compelling indications of human-level intelligent responses as no more interesting or compelling than a chair that squeaks when you sit down? And it wasn't your intent to take the position that such apparently intelligent responses are a clear reason why one should be compelled to "go around rhetorically demanding "mechanistic models"" before taking a strong position on the presence or absence of consciousness, intelligence, and so on?
    - staticman2 3y ago
      >If you accept that the only real claim I've made is that we're too ignorant to say definitively whether these systems are or are not conscious I think your implicit claim is it's likely to be conscious, or at least likely enough to be a topic of discussion, since one doesn't generally discuss absurdly unlikely possibilities. >> ChatGPT being conscious is roughly as plausible as a "hello world" program being conscious. >Under a scientific interpretation, that's absurd. You've already conceded that Chat GPT may not be conscious. But now you are making the fun argument that if ChatGPT is not conscious, it's still more "scientifically" likely to be conscious than something that is not conscious. Okay. "Unless it wasn't your intent to dismiss all of the compelling indications of human-level intelligent responses as no more interesting or compelling than a chair that squeaks when you sit down?" I don't know what "human level intelligent responses" means-- my calculator can do "human level intelligent responses" at multiplication. I do think these models don't "learn" (they are altered by a training pipeline but that's an outside entity, it's like saying a car is learning when the factory screws it together) and they don't really form memories (the context might be a sort of memory but not one they can use very well- they basically need to be finetuned to do anything with the memory). A lot of your argument just seems handy wavy anthropomorphism.

naasking 3y ago

Your parroted argument is just proving my point: we can't make definitive claims that chairs aren't conscious (see panspsychism), all we have are degrees of plausibility we evaluate in our ignorance. But under the materialistic assumptions of science, features such as intelligence indicate a degree of complex information processing that is a hallmark of systems that we know are conscious (like humans), and the absence of such sophistication in chairs reduces the plausibility of consciousness significantly. Denying consciousness exists in systems that also feature sophisticated information processing and that reproduce human capabilities is an argument from ignorance fallacy, unless of course you have additional evidence you haven't presented. Which is not to say that they are conscious either, but I never made such a claim.

staticman2 3y ago
> all we have are degrees of plausibility we evaluate in our ignorance Okay. >argument from ignorance fallacy, You just conceded we are both ignorant, but I'm the only one making the argument of ignorance fallacy? Double standard? > Which is not to say that they are conscious either, but I never made such a claim. Perhaps your objection is the way I phrased my comment. I should have said "ChatGPT being conscious is roughly as plausible as a "hello world" program being conscious. Case in point these model responds much like a "Hello world" program when asked if they are conscious. Claude has been finetuned to say 'I don't know if I'm conscious' Gemini and ChatGPT have been finetuned to say they are not, these models are complex in some ways and not very complex in other ways, they show no sophistication or complexity in ways we would associate with consciousness." Like, the trick is to distance yourself from your own opinion so as not to be accused of "arguing from ignorance" right? Talk about plausibility instead of directly making claims? But I don't remember making claims either, to be honest, so I'm not sure how I'm the only one making the "argument from ignorance fallacy" allegedly?
- naasking 3y ago
  > You just conceded we are both ignorant, but I'm the only one making the argument of ignorance fallacy? Double standard? If you accept that the only real claim I've made is that we're too ignorant to say definitively whether these systems are or are not conscious (or sentient, or intelligent, etc.), what is the argument from ignorance fallacy that would undermine this position? > ChatGPT being conscious is roughly as plausible as a "hello world" program being conscious. Under a scientific interpretation, that's absurd. Of course if you want to go beyond materialism, feel free, but don't pretend it's a scientifically plausible statement. > they show no sophistication or complexity in ways we would associate with consciousness I disagree with that claim entirely. LLMs absolutely do exhibit intelligent responsiveness to perceptual stimuli they've been trained on (particularly multimodal LLMs). Text-only LLMs have no perceptions beyond digital word tokens, and as a fairly anemic view of the world they often fail spectacularly at making sense. This is arguably why multimodal LLMs improve accuracy in those scenarios. > Talk about plausibility instead of directly making claims? But I don't remember making claims either, to be honest, so I'm not sure how I'm the only one making the "argument from ignorance fallacy" allegedly? It would be fairly strange to start a conversation by drawing an analogy between sophisticated conversational information systems and inert chairs, as you did, without intending to take a fairly clear position on the matter. Unless it wasn't your intent to dismiss all of the compelling indications of human-level intelligent responses as no more interesting or compelling than a chair that squeaks when you sit down? And it wasn't your intent to take the position that such apparently intelligent responses are a clear reason why one should be compelled to "go around rhetorically demanding "mechanistic models"" before taking a strong position on the presence or absence of consciousness, intelligence, and so on?
  - staticman2 3y ago
    >If you accept that the only real claim I've made is that we're too ignorant to say definitively whether these systems are or are not conscious I think your implicit claim is it's likely to be conscious, or at least likely enough to be a topic of discussion, since one doesn't generally discuss absurdly unlikely possibilities. >> ChatGPT being conscious is roughly as plausible as a "hello world" program being conscious. >Under a scientific interpretation, that's absurd. You've already conceded that Chat GPT may not be conscious. But now you are making the fun argument that if ChatGPT is not conscious, it's still more "scientifically" likely to be conscious than something that is not conscious. Okay. "Unless it wasn't your intent to dismiss all of the compelling indications of human-level intelligent responses as no more interesting or compelling than a chair that squeaks when you sit down?" I don't know what "human level intelligent responses" means-- my calculator can do "human level intelligent responses" at multiplication. I do think these models don't "learn" (they are altered by a training pipeline but that's an outside entity, it's like saying a car is learning when the factory screws it together) and they don't really form memories (the context might be a sort of memory but not one they can use very well- they basically need to be finetuned to do anything with the memory). A lot of your argument just seems handy wavy anthropomorphism.