5 ms·

> That would be a silly argument because feelings involve qualia, which we do not currently know how to precisely define, recognize or measure. If we can't def

by ajross 11mo ago

> That would be a silly argument because feelings involve qualia, which we do not currently know how to precisely define, recognize or measure. If we can't define, recognize or measure them, how exactly do we know that AI doesn't have them? I remain amazed that a whole branch of philosophy (aimed, theoretically, at describing exactly this moment of technological change) is showing itself up as a complete fraud. It's completely unable to describe the old world, much less provide insight into the new one. I mean, come on. "We've got qualia!" is meaningless. Might as well respond with "Well, sure, but AI has furffle, which is isomporphic." Equally insightful, and easier to pronounce.

soulofmischief 11mo ago
Have you considered that you just don't fully understand the literature? It's quite arrogant to write off the entire philosophy of mind as "a complete fraud". > It's completely unable to describe the old world, much less provide insight into the new one. What exactly were you expecting? Philosophy is a science, the first in fact, and it follows a scientific method for asking and answering questions. Many of these problems are extremely hard and their questions are still yet unanswered, and many questions are still badly formed or predicated on unproven axioms. This is true for philosophy of mind. Many other scientific domains are similarly incomplete, and remain active areas of research and contemplation. What are you adding to this research? I only see you complaining and hurling negative accusations, instead of actually critically engaging with any specifics of the material. Do you have a well-formed theory to replace philosophy of mind? > I mean, come on. "We've got qualia!" is meaningless. Might as well respond with "Well, sure, but AI has furffle, which is isomporphic." Equally insightful, and easier to pronounce. Do you understand what qualia is? Most philosophers still don't, and many actively work on the problem. Admitting that something is incomplete is what a proper scientist does. An admission of incompleteness is in no way evidence towards "fraud". The most effective way to actually attack qualia would be to simply present it as unfalsifiable. And I'd agree with that. We might hopefully one day entirely replace the notion of qualia with something more precise and falsifiable. But whatever it is, I am currently experiencing a subjective, conscious experience. I'm experiencing it right now, even if I cannot prove it or even if you do not believe me. You don't even need to believe I'm real at all. This entire universe could all just be in your head. Meanwhile, I like to review previous literature/discussions on consciousness and explore the phenomenon in my own way. And I believe that subjective, conscious experience requires certain elements, including a sensory feedback loop. I never said "AI can't experience qualia", I made an educated statement about the lack of certain components in current-generation models which imply to me the lack of an ability to "experience" anything at all, much less subjective consciousness and qualia. Even "AI" is such a broadly defined term that such a statement is just ludicrous. Instead, I made precise observations and predictions based on my own knowledge and decade of experience as a machine learning practitioner and research engineer. The idea that machines of arbitrary complexity inherently can have the capability for subjective consciousness, and that specific baselines structures are not required, is on par with panpsychism, which is even more unfalsifiable and theoretical than the rest of philosophy of mind. Hopefully, we will continue to get answers to these deep, seemingly unanswerable questions. Humans are stubborn like that. But your negative, vague approach to discourse here doesn't add anything substantial to the conversation.
- ajross 11mo ago
  > Philosophy is a science Not according to Zombie Feynman it isn't[1] (someone else can dig up the link). Case in point: > Do you understand what qualia is? Most philosophers still don't It's a meaningless word. It's a word that gives some clean construction around closely-held opinions about how life/consciousness/intelligence/furffle/whatever works. So it's a valuable word within the jargon of the subculture that invented it. But it's not "science", which isn't about words at all except as shorthand for abstractions that are confirmed by testable results. "Qualia", basically, is best understood as ideology. It's a word that works like "woke" or "liberal" or "fascist" or "bourgeoisie" to flag priors about which you don't want to argue. In this case, you want people to be special, so you give them a special label and declare a priori that it's not subject to debate. But that label doesn't make them so. [1] Of course. You can recursively solve this problem by redefining "science" to mean something else. But that remains very solidly in the "not science" category of discourse.
  - pinnochio 11mo ago
    Have you considered the possibility that you're the one who's really committed to an outcome, and are desperately trying to discredit anything that contradicts it?
    - ajross 11mo ago
      I have! But the lack of a testable procedure tells me that's not a question worth asking. Look, if "qualia" can tell me something practical about the behavior of AI, I am here for it. Lay it on me, man. Let's see some of that "science" being promised. It can't, because it's a meaningless word. It's not "discrediting" an idea to point out that (by its own admission) it's unfalsifiable.
      - tim333 11mo ago
        "Qualia" is not totally meaningless - it means the inner experience of something, and can bring up the real question say of is my inner experience of the colour green the same as your experience of the colour red? Probably not but hard to tell with current tech. I asked Google if it has qualia and got "No, as an AI, Google Search does not have qualia." So Google search seemed to know what it means.
encyclopedism 11mo ago
> If we can't define, recognize or measure them, how exactly do we know that AI doesn't have them? In the same way my digital thermometer doesn't have quaila. LLM's do not either. I really tire of this handwaving 'magic' concepts into LLM's. Qualia being difficult to define and yet being such an immediate experience that we humans all know intimately and directly is quite literally the problem. Attempted definitions fall short and humans have tried and I mean really tried hard to solve this. Please see Hard problem of consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
- ajross 11mo ago
  > In the same way my digital thermometer doesn't have quaila And I repeat the question: how do you know your thermometer doesn't? You don't, you're just declaring a fact you have no basis for knowing. That's fine if you want a job in a philosophy faculty, but it's worthless to people trying to understand AI. Again, c.f. furffle. Thermometers have that, you agree, right? Because you can't prove they don't.
  - soulofmischief 11mo ago
    You're just describing panpsychism, which itself is the subject of much critique due to its nonfalsifiability and lack of predictive power. Not to mention it ignores every lesson we've learned in cognition thus far. A thermometer encoding "memory" of a temperature is completely different than a thermometer on a digital circuit, or a thermometer attached to a fully-developed mammalian brain. Only the latter of this set for sure has the required circuitry to produce qualia, at least as far as I can personally measure without invoking solipsism. It's also very silly to proclaim that philosophy of mind is not applicable to increasingly complex thinking machines. That sounds like a failure to consider the bodies of work behind both philosophy of mind and machine cognition. Again, "AI" is ill-defined and your consistent usage of that phrase instead of something more precises suggests you still have a long journey ahead of you for "understanding AI".
  - nathan_compton 11mo ago
    God, can we fucking quit with this "philosophy is bullshit" stuff. Like there are literally Faculty in Philosophy all over the world trying to understand AI. Philosophy faculty do stuff, they try to understand things, most of the ideas we are talking about here came from philosophers.

by ajross 11mo ago

soulofmischief 11mo ago

Have you considered that you just don't fully understand the literature? It's quite arrogant to write off the entire philosophy of mind as "a complete fraud". > It's completely unable to describe the old world, much less provide insight into the new one. What exactly were you expecting? Philosophy is a science, the first in fact, and it follows a scientific method for asking and answering questions. Many of these problems are extremely hard and their questions are still yet unanswered, and many questions are still badly formed or predicated on unproven axioms. This is true for philosophy of mind. Many other scientific domains are similarly incomplete, and remain active areas of research and contemplation. What are you adding to this research? I only see you complaining and hurling negative accusations, instead of actually critically engaging with any specifics of the material. Do you have a well-formed theory to replace philosophy of mind? > I mean, come on. "We've got qualia!" is meaningless. Might as well respond with "Well, sure, but AI has furffle, which is isomporphic." Equally insightful, and easier to pronounce. Do you understand what qualia is? Most philosophers still don't, and many actively work on the problem. Admitting that something is incomplete is what a proper scientist does. An admission of incompleteness is in no way evidence towards "fraud". The most effective way to actually attack qualia would be to simply present it as unfalsifiable. And I'd agree with that. We might hopefully one day entirely replace the notion of qualia with something more precise and falsifiable. But whatever it is, I am currently experiencing a subjective, conscious experience. I'm experiencing it right now, even if I cannot prove it or even if you do not believe me. You don't even need to believe I'm real at all. This entire universe could all just be in your head. Meanwhile, I like to review previous literature/discussions on consciousness and explore the phenomenon in my own way. And I believe that subjective, conscious experience requires certain elements, including a sensory feedback loop. I never said "AI can't experience qualia", I made an educated statement about the lack of certain components in current-generation models which imply to me the lack of an ability to "experience" anything at all, much less subjective consciousness and qualia. Even "AI" is such a broadly defined term that such a statement is just ludicrous. Instead, I made precise observations and predictions based on my own knowledge and decade of experience as a machine learning practitioner and research engineer. The idea that machines of arbitrary complexity inherently can have the capability for subjective consciousness, and that specific baselines structures are not required, is on par with panpsychism, which is even more unfalsifiable and theoretical than the rest of philosophy of mind. Hopefully, we will continue to get answers to these deep, seemingly unanswerable questions. Humans are stubborn like that. But your negative, vague approach to discourse here doesn't add anything substantial to the conversation.

ajross 11mo ago
> Philosophy is a science Not according to Zombie Feynman it isn't[1] (someone else can dig up the link). Case in point: > Do you understand what qualia is? Most philosophers still don't It's a meaningless word. It's a word that gives some clean construction around closely-held opinions about how life/consciousness/intelligence/furffle/whatever works. So it's a valuable word within the jargon of the subculture that invented it. But it's not "science", which isn't about words at all except as shorthand for abstractions that are confirmed by testable results. "Qualia", basically, is best understood as ideology. It's a word that works like "woke" or "liberal" or "fascist" or "bourgeoisie" to flag priors about which you don't want to argue. In this case, you want people to be special, so you give them a special label and declare a priori that it's not subject to debate. But that label doesn't make them so. [1] Of course. You can recursively solve this problem by redefining "science" to mean something else. But that remains very solidly in the "not science" category of discourse.
- pinnochio 11mo ago
  Have you considered the possibility that you're the one who's really committed to an outcome, and are desperately trying to discredit anything that contradicts it?
  - ajross 11mo ago
    I have! But the lack of a testable procedure tells me that's not a question worth asking. Look, if "qualia" can tell me something practical about the behavior of AI, I am here for it. Lay it on me, man. Let's see some of that "science" being promised. It can't, because it's a meaningless word. It's not "discrediting" an idea to point out that (by its own admission) it's unfalsifiable.
    - tim333 11mo ago
      "Qualia" is not totally meaningless - it means the inner experience of something, and can bring up the real question say of is my inner experience of the colour green the same as your experience of the colour red? Probably not but hard to tell with current tech. I asked Google if it has qualia and got "No, as an AI, Google Search does not have qualia." So Google search seemed to know what it means.

encyclopedism 11mo ago

> If we can't define, recognize or measure them, how exactly do we know that AI doesn't have them? In the same way my digital thermometer doesn't have quaila. LLM's do not either. I really tire of this handwaving 'magic' concepts into LLM's. Qualia being difficult to define and yet being such an immediate experience that we humans all know intimately and directly is quite literally the problem. Attempted definitions fall short and humans have tried and I mean really tried hard to solve this. Please see Hard problem of consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

ajross 11mo ago
> In the same way my digital thermometer doesn't have quaila And I repeat the question: how do you know your thermometer doesn't? You don't, you're just declaring a fact you have no basis for knowing. That's fine if you want a job in a philosophy faculty, but it's worthless to people trying to understand AI. Again, c.f. furffle. Thermometers have that, you agree, right? Because you can't prove they don't.
- soulofmischief 11mo ago
  You're just describing panpsychism, which itself is the subject of much critique due to its nonfalsifiability and lack of predictive power. Not to mention it ignores every lesson we've learned in cognition thus far. A thermometer encoding "memory" of a temperature is completely different than a thermometer on a digital circuit, or a thermometer attached to a fully-developed mammalian brain. Only the latter of this set for sure has the required circuitry to produce qualia, at least as far as I can personally measure without invoking solipsism. It's also very silly to proclaim that philosophy of mind is not applicable to increasingly complex thinking machines. That sounds like a failure to consider the bodies of work behind both philosophy of mind and machine cognition. Again, "AI" is ill-defined and your consistent usage of that phrase instead of something more precises suggests you still have a long journey ahead of you for "understanding AI".
- nathan_compton 11mo ago
  God, can we fucking quit with this "philosophy is bullshit" stuff. Like there are literally Faculty in Philosophy all over the world trying to understand AI. Philosophy faculty do stuff, they try to understand things, most of the ideas we are talking about here came from philosophers.