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This is merely a debate about what it means to "think." We didn't really previously need to disambiguate thinking / intelligence / consciousness / sentience / e
by everdrive 1y ago
This is merely a debate about what it means to "think." We didn't really previously need to disambiguate thinking / intelligence / consciousness / sentience / ego / identity / etc.
Now, we do. Partly because of this we don't have really well defined ways to define these terms and think about. Can a handheld calculator think? Certainly, depending on how we define "think."
- richardatlarge 1y agoSomebody please get Wittgenstein on the phone
- Uehreka 1y agoHere you go: (holds up phone with a photo of of Wittgenstein on the screen) Ah shoot, that’s not what you meant is it? Just use more precise language next time and I’m sure you’ll be understood.
- utopiah 1y ago> We didn't really previously need to disambiguate thinking / intelligence / consciousness / sentience / ego / identity / etc. Eh... Plato would like a word with you. Philosophy has been specifically trying to disentangle all that for millennia. Is this a joke?
- everdrive 1y agoAnd Plato had no grounding in biology, and so his work here was quite interesting but also quite wrong. More precisely, I mean that the average person and the common culture has not really needed to disambiguate these terms. Can you define consciousness vs. sentience? And if you can, do you really think that the average person would share your definition? ie, your definition could be the _best_ definition, but my argument is that these are not widely agreed-upon terms.
- logicchains 1y ago>And Plato had no grounding in biology, and so his work here was quite interesting but also quite wrong. Defining what a word should mean doesn't require any understanding of biology unless you make the assumption that it's a biology-related word. Why should the definition of "thinking" have any reference to biology? If you assume it does, then you're basically baking in the assumption that machines can't think.
- everdrive 1y agoBecause until recently (I'm talking last 150-40 years here depending on how we want to define thinking) the only things that could think were various animals. And so 100% of their systems for thinking were rooted in biology. If an LLM can think (and I'm partial to thinking that it can) it's going to different in a number of ways from how a person would think. They may be some overlap, but there will be all these human / biology / evolutionary psychology things which are really person-specific. Even just basic stuff such as seeing faces in the clouds, or falling prey to appeals of emotion. (ie, because our thinking is wrapped up in other processes such as status / ego / survival / etc.) Thinking has only been biological for a long, long time. Non-biological thinking is pretty new, even if you extend it back to the early days of computing.
- qntmfred 1y agowe didn't really previously NEED to, but we still tried bc it was an interesting question. today the NEED seems more urgent
- podgorniy 1y agoPeople's failure to articulate the nature of "thinking" is a perfect demonstration of what "thinking" entails