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“Counsciousness” is the ultimate moving goalpost, and historically, it’s been one of humanity’s most effective intellectual weapons. An indefinable black box we
by speak_plainly 4mo ago
“Counsciousness” is the ultimate moving goalpost, and historically, it’s been one of humanity’s most effective intellectual weapons. An indefinable black box we intentionally gatekeep to draw an arbitrary line between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
I don’t know if AI is conscious or not, and I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious. historically, by claiming a monopoly on it, we’ve successfully manufactured the philosophical cover to exploit animals, subjugate other cultures, and appoint ourselves the top spot of the cosmic hierarchy guilt-free.
- energy123 4mo agoThe only reason I care about animal welfare is because I think they're probably conscious, capable of feeling fear and pain.
- H8crilA 4mo agoYes, that is the definition of consciousness (you care about them).
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- layer8 4mo agoWhile I agree that this is the case for many animals, I would say that consciousness and emotions are two largely orthogonal things. Certainly consciousness is conceivable without emotions, and having emotions without consciousness also seems plausible. You can have fear and distressing pain without a reflective awareness of being a self with those feelings.
- drfloyd51 4mo agoIf we understand how a system “emulates” consciousness then we declare it an emulation. If we don’t quite understand how a system exhibits consciousness then we can say it might be conscious. Basically, we need to leave room for the universal answer (God) to fit into the definition. If we ever scientifically figure out how consciousness arises in our brains, I think we will have a bunch of very depressed people on our hands. If the truth isn’t met with flat out hostile denial. I fear any answer that doesn’t leave room for God will be rejected. Since we have the source code to AI, and thus a Godless understanding of how it works, AI will NEVER be deemed “conscious”.
- altcognito 4mo agoI think that Jimmy Carr has it right: AI is the fourth great humiliation. Regardless of whether something is concious, we're not going to be (by lay definition) the smartest entity on earth. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gRgoIVnjkVU https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gRgoIVnjkVU
- ux266478 4mo agoHuman beings sometimes get outsmarted by predators. It's certainly a strange thing to take pride in intelligence as an inviolable absolute.
- famouswaffles 4mo ago>and thus a Godless understanding of how it works We don't even have that much. Though, some people certainly think they do.
- horacemorace 4mo agoThis doesn’t make sense at all.
- hardbass 4mo agoI thought it was quite clear. Religious people will whine and revolt and oppose against anything that somehow isn't phrased as consciousness requiring a soul. Humans are physical systems, there is no reason other physical systems can't be consciousness. But we know the obvious reactions of religious people to someone actually showing a "godless" means of creating consciousness.
- drfloyd51 4mo agoBingo. That is a far more eloquent way to express my word salad.
- gobdovan 4mo ago> I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious > subjugate other cultures (assuming you mean they're not conscious in other's minds) Have you ever considered you might be a philosophical zombie? [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
- speak_plainly 4mo agoI can live with that.
- goatlover 4mo agoYou can live without any conscious sensations? Do you never dream, never visualize, never hear your inner dialog, never experience an emotion? Being in love is as foreign to you as feeling enraged? I'd ask what it's like, but of course you wouldn't be able to tell me.
- hardbass 4mo agoHe can live without the meaningless unfalsifiable concept of p zombies.
- hardbass 4mo agoIts unprovable and a meaningless concept. There is no observable evidence that can distinguish so called "p zombies" or so called "real persons". Might as well call it a "unicorn in space" or anything else meaningless.
- gobdovan 4mo agoNotice how you describe a perfectly intelligible concept like 'unicorn in space' as meaningless, even though there's a clear picture you can form in your mind about it and you can imagine the exact evidence that would convince you of their existence. We can meaningfully talk about 'unicorns in space' since it's analytically intelligible and merely syntetically unverified.
- suddenlybananas 4mo agoCan you give some historical examples of people moving the goalposts around consciousness? I agree, perhaps, for aspects of "intelligence" but I can't think of any examples of it with regard to consciousness proper.
- speak_plainly 4mo agoThere’s over 400 years of philosophical debate about consciousness starting with Locke, shifting with Kant, and continuing onward with real world implications throughout. By some more modern definitions an iPhone has consciousness while others explicitly exclude certain humans, and these definitions served as part of the justification of slavery and sexism, colonialism and more. I started writing an essay on this on my phone in response and I gave up there are so many examples. To name a few you may want to investigate: John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Giulio Tononi, René Descartes, Daniel Dennett, Julian Jaynes, Michael Graziano, T.H. Huxley, Otto Weininger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Searle, Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Max Velmans, Victor Lamme, Stanislas Dehaene, Antonio Damasio, Anil Seth, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, Colin McGinn, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Frank Jackson, Jerry Fodor, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Brentano, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault.
- dwd 4mo agoI would also add Iain McGilchrist, Donald Hoffman, Andy Clark, Jeff Hawkins and Jesse Prinz to that list.
- goatlover 4mo agoThere is a modern philosophical agreement that the hard problem depends on qualia by both proponents and critics. So when Daniel Dennett argues against David Chalmers, he attacks the definition of qualia. Or when Keith Frankish argues for illusionism, he attempts to show that consciousness is not actually qualia. And when Nagel says we don't know what it's like to be a bat, he means the bat qualia of echolocation (what it feels like when bats use echolocation to sense the world).