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After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and La

by f_klem 4mo ago

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these theories have in common is the underlying belief that our brain/mind works as the machines we build. Is the same underlying assumptions that treats cells as machines, our body as a complex machine. These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. The idea of 'internal models' and 'control loops' inside us is a projection of the aforementioned assumption. There is also an epistemological assumption that prevails, and that is that we understand (or we think we understand) how our brain/mind works. But the truth is that we don't know. And there's even not a single clue that we actually know too much, and not a clue that our brain/mind and cells work 'as the machines we build'. Only by bypassing this epistemological problem, we can build 'theories of computational mind'. These assumptions are there for already long time, to the point that when Turing asked himself 'can machines think?', he already assumed our thinking could be modeled as a machine. I highly recommend people in the AI research space should read philosophy and modern linguistics. But not stopping at Descartes/Leibniz. Heidegger made contributions that cannot be avoided.

paulluuk 4mo ago
> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency So, I work in AI research (as a research engineer though, not a scientist). I've also studied philosophy and I'm a vegan. Yes yes, insert "they will tell you" joke here, but I promise it's actually relevant this time. First, while I studied philosophy one of the things that stuck with me the most, was the discussion of "souls": humans have souls, animals don't. For centuries the specifics of souls were discussed: people would be weighed while they died, in an effort to measure the approximate weight of a soul as it departed the body. Discussions about how many souls (or angels) could dance on the tip of a needle. Many people still believe in souls, but it's very hard to have a real discussion about them because by definition they do not "interact" with this world in a way that can be measured. When discussing whether it's okay to harm animals for food or sport, one other argument I hear quite often (other than having no souls) is that animals do not experience "qualia": basically the smallest unit of "subjective experience". People know that they themselves experience qualia: the sensation of touching a doorknob, the taste of fresh fruit, the sense of beauty watching a rainbow. Ironically, they would say that animals are like robots: just (biological) machines acting on instinct, and feeling any kind of compassion for them means you are anthropomorphizing. Subjective experience (or at least qualia) and souls both have one thing in common: they can not be measured externally in a meaningful way. You can simply state that an AI system no matter how advanced, has no soul and has no subjective experience. And that's pretty much that. There's no meaningful discussion to be had about it, because no matter what an AI might tell you: it has no way to prove it to you. In fact, you can't even be certain that anyone other than yourself has subjective experiences: you assume that because they are humans like you, and you experience them, that they probably do as well. They tell you that they do. But a human without subjective experience, someone on "autopilot", would be absolutely indistinguishable from a human who does have them. But perhaps I am conflating here whether experience can be "measured", with whether a system even allows experience in the first place regardless of whether it can be measured. I think that Dreyfus and others argue that in order to have any "experiences" at all, you simply must have a body in the real world, and you must care about that body. Please correct me if that's the wrong interpretation, I haven't actually read the book. That argument would be harder for me to discuss, because I personally believe that consciousness will "emerge" from a complex interaction of relatively simple systems - but that's also just a theory. I don't believe that experience is literally impossible to engineer, as consciousness has emerged from non-conscious being through evolution, so clearly there must be some kind of mechanism for it -- and if there is, then I believe it can be replicated, we just don't really understand it well enough yet to do so. And with how AI tech is going, I think that we're more likely to accidentally stumble upon it than we are to get these deliberately.
- lobofta 4mo ago
  Vegan ML engineer here. In total agreement with you. People are just moving the goal post to keep themselves protected from the obvious conclusion: there is nothing really all that special about us humans. Perhaps subjective experience is simply the internal state of a self supervised continuous learning algorithm and we don't like that conclusion very much.
  - foobarian 4mo ago
    It's too bad it's so hard to pin down a definition, but in practice I feel like most animals with brains experience degrees of qualia. Some mornings after a night of poor sleep when I wake up super-slow I wonder if that's how animals experience thinking. My biggest problem with "brains are machines" arguments is that there is a risk there is unknown physics at work that is not representable as a Turing machine. What if there is some quantum field effect powering everything?
    - tim333 4mo ago
      They know quite a lot about how neurons work to the extent they can replace bits of brains with artificial retinas or cochleas and interface with devices like neuralink. It's unlikely there is a quantum field effect of the type you mention powering things, although of course atoms and the like obey quantum mechanics in the normal way.
    - jcynix 4mo ago
      Quantum field effects? You don't need these, IMHO, if you look at how highly parallel things seem to work in brains. Marvin Minsky's theory of a "Society of Mind" describes a (highly) distributed model of the mind. Which BTW, always reminds me of the first Shrek movie, where the donkey jumps up and down, shouting "Take me! Take me!" to Shrek. That's similar to what I observe when I'm undecided but two instances of "sub-processes" (or agents as Minsky calls them) of my mind try to get attention. Daniel Dennett similarly gives a distributed model of consciousness. Where many parallel "processes" are at work, competing and "observing" each other. And this parallelism is happening with a much, much higher degree than any of our computers parallelism.
lxgr 4mo ago
> Is the same underlying assumptions that treats cells as machines, our body as a complex machine. These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. Agency: What’s missing, in your view? Agency seems more of a property/function of a thinking system’s position in an environment than of the thinking itself. Subjective experience: That’s not a contradiction to “complex machines” either. I think the evidence that our minds are highly complex machines is, at this point, irrefutable. The question is really if they’re “only” that.
codeflo 4mo ago
> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. On the contrary, it's precisely this assumption, that there is a "subjective experience" that requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence. It falls apart quickly, any "subjective experience" is completely tied to neurons, knock out the neurons and the subjective experience disappears, or stimulate the neurons to cause the experience.
- tuyiown 4mo ago
  > at requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence Nobody talked about anything out of neurons. The question is still open.
- kristov 4mo ago
  I think the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. An LLM is not a human brain, and does not try to emulate one. It should not be a surprise that an LLM does not behave like a human brain. So we can not infer things either way. The best we can say is that an LLM appears to exhibit very similar behavior to a human brain, under certain constraints. So maybe we can infer that the human brain has something in it that operates in a similar way to an LLM (like the human "unconscious", or "intuition" maybe). It seems obvious to me that a human brain and an LLM are not comparable things, for many reasons. So we can not make inferrences one way or the other.
  - dnautics 4mo ago
    > An LLM is not a human brain, true > and does not try to emulate one citation please. something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator
    - cootsnuck 4mo ago
      > something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator That says nothing about emulating a human brain.
ACCount37 4mo ago
I don't think cognitive linguistics has that much to say about AI nowadays. Let alone philosophy. The biggest contributions from linguistics are probably "human languages mostly have statistical regularities rather than hard rules" and "the sum of data humans get from birth to language acquisition is insufficient to learn a language from scratch". Which LLMs already work with, and work around, respectively. From there, nothing. And philosophy just exists to be a distractor. "Subjective experience" is too subjective to matter in practice. "Task performance" is measurable, "consciousness" isn't. "Agency" is something an LLM in a tool calling loop, a rat in a maze and a human in an office tower may or may not have, depending on your favorite definition. Agentic LLMs are years in the making, and that's a product of engineering, not philosophy: "agentic" is whatever gets the job done. We are yet to discover any physical process whatsoever that can't be represented as mathematical operations and implemented by a Turing machine. So all of that "treating human mind as a machine is wrong" amounts to "human mind must be powered by magic fairy dust" paired with "a functionally similar magic-free replacement is impossible". I'm not about to give much weight to any hypothesis that requires undiscovered magic fairy dust. At least find the hyper-computational magic fairy dust first - not just assume it absolutely must be there because you want the human mind to be unique and special. Want to know why Turing did what he did? It's because he didn't want to engage with any of that "what is mind" bullshit either. So he proposed actual metrics - measurables that are harder to argue in circles about. Not that it stopped anyone. But at least he tried.
- f_klem 4mo ago
  > I don't think cognitive linguistics has that much to say about AI nowadays. Let alone philosophy. I would like to read those sources. > The biggest contributions from linguistics are probably "human languages mostly have statistical regularities rather than hard rules" and "the sum of data humans get from birth to language acquisition is insufficient to learn a language from scratch". Which LLMs already work with, and work around, respectively. From there, nothing. Again, what's the source for 'biggest contributions from linguistics are...'? It is a big contribution to the development of LLMs, but different cognitive linguistics authors already challenged this idea already 20-30 years ago. LLMs work with and around the problems you cite because of massive data/money, not at the fundamental level. It is all a game of statistics and data, which has been already challenged by cog. ling. > And philosophy just exists to be a distractor. Well, this is just telling me that you either know too much about philosophy and reached that conclusion (which might make sense, know of some philosophers who also think that) or you just read too little. > So all of that "treating human mind as a machine is wrong" amounts to "human mind must be powered by magic fairy dust" This is the common fallacy people in AI/IT make . One of the benefits of reading philosophy is that you find your way out of them. > Want to know why Turing did what he did? The actual tests Turing though about are themselves flawed (not that I discovered that, has been known for some time already)
housecarpenter 4mo ago
Why is asking 'can machines think?' assuming our thinking could be modeled as a machine? It's raising the possibility that our thinking could be modeled as a machine. Given that, as you acknowledge, we don't have a clue how our mind works, it seems premature to rule out this possibility. Rather, I would say that ruling it out betrays an assumption that we understand how the mind works enough that we can say that it is definitely not replicable by a machine, and that assumption seems unjustified.
- tim333 4mo ago
  Indeed, scientific type thinking like that where you ask a question that you can do experiments on to see if machines can pass the test is probably the way to progress. The philosophical waffling mostly just goes in circles. To investigate consciousness you'll probably get further trying to build conscious machines with agency and comparing them to biological ones than reading Heidegger.
- f_klem 4mo ago
  > It's raising the possibility that our thinking could be modeled as a machine. Given that, as you acknowledge, we don't have a clue how our mind works, it seems premature to rule out this possibility. In order to raise the possibility that our thinking can be modeled as a machine, there needs to be a previous question: 'can our thinking be modeled at all?'. And before that, already the idea of possibility: 'our thinking could be something that can be modeled'. Since we know 'we can think', asking 'can machines think?' needs the assumption that machines and brains are alike. If there is no assumption, then we should ask 'if brains and machines are alike, then we could raise the possibility of thinking a machine could also think'. But when we say 'brains and machines are alike', we are implicitly saying 'brains are like machines'. There is no problem asking 'can machines think?', but there is indeed a problem with implicitly assuming that brains and machines are alike when we do not known it yet. I am critiquing the idea of assumptions here, not the research.
larodi 4mo ago
If we agree weights producing text may emerge consciousness, given large enough, then DBs must've gained it long ago. The whole idea of sentience "on the other side of the wire" is wrong, as there is neither wire, nor other side. We think there is, but the DB just expounds the query and repurposes this information into views, that we give notion and meaning to. LLMs are the same, do not be mistaken. One other important thing to consider is that the human experience is thanks to the body, is in connection, and perhaps product of the body. The body is observable and perhaps humans may state that they feel the connection to it. LLMs have no notion of nothing, the machine does not know the result, and the result does not know the VM. Modern psychology more or less has settled around the idea that consciousness is a product of the body. Why and how does this construct come to realize a Self is then another mystery even if we know which parts of the hardware may be involved. Whether it is the Holy Spirit or Life Force animating the human body is a completely different question also. Besides, the realization, the experience we have now with all life in 2026 is not something that can be easily explained or attuned to life 200 years ago and its terms and notions. So is also wrong to even attempt to.
- IanCal 4mo ago
  > If we agree weights producing text may emerge consciousness, given large enough, then DBs must've gained it long ago. If we agree that silicon can perform calculations, then beaches must have been working out log tables long ago.
  - dmd 4mo ago
    Greg Egan wrote an entire (fabulous) book about exactly that, "Permutation City".
    - larodi 4mo ago
      Diaspora is mind-blowing, yet highly improbable and speculative, even though carefully threaded to sound plausible on all levels. The whole introdus idea and simulation from VM perspective sounds incredible, but I don't think the body runs a simulation of anything. It is something else.
LudwigNagasena 4mo ago
> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things I don't see how any of the works you referenced can account for that either? Since when is the problem of consciousness solved and we can definitely say what does or doesn't result in consciousness?
- f_klem 4mo ago
  None of the works I mentioned solved or try to solve the mind/body problem or the issue of consciousness. They are a frame of reference for not stepping into the common fallacies that the AI research field is based on.
  - LudwigNagasena 4mo ago
    What's exactly the fallacy? How do the works help avoid stepping into that "fallacy" if they don't try to solve the issue of consciousness.
    - f_klem 4mo ago
      The issue of consciousness appears when you think of the world in a mechanistic way: since all there is are laws of physics and materiality, then how could we explain our though processes and our perceptual experience? If the world itself (in a general, existential way) is only made of laws of physics and matter, the consciousness needs to be an emergent characteristic of physical systems, and needs to follow the laws of physics. Now at this stage, you are already in trouble and you need to explain what consciousness is and how it manifestates. And that's the moment where things like the computational theory of mind appears. But you need to step back in order to detect the fallacy, one of which is: the brain/mind processes information like a computer, then we could build better computers that can think. This fallacy is assumed in the question 'can a machine think?'. There's another fallacy, which the author call the first step fallacy, which is common nowadays: we solved the language problem, then machines will be able to think in the near future. So it is not about solving the consciousness problem, it is about not claiming things based on assumptions that can be easily challenged.
red75prime 4mo ago
> There is also an epistemological assumption that prevails, and that is that we understand (or we think we understand) how our brain/mind works. It's good that it doesn't matter. Stochastic gradient descent works (or doesn't work) regardless of whether we know how the brain does its thing.
- dnautics 4mo ago
  we know the brain does not use gradient descent. (i agree it doesn't matter)
  - anthonyrstevens 4mo ago
    How do we know this?
    - dnautics 4mo ago
      i recall a hinton lecture where he talks about the mechanism of memory formation in the brain and it's not fully sussed out but it's also not backprop, its some sort of forward prediction and immediate reinforcement loop. There's also no plausible biological/chemical mechanism to backpropagate.
jordigh 4mo ago
You actually read Being and Time? What the heck do you get out of it? Heidegger just seems to play word games with German words without actually saying anything. "Time is the ripening of temporality." tf do phrases like that mean??
- lmf4lol 4mo ago
  Not OP, but I have read Being and Time on and off over the years, and every time, I am blown away how precise Heidegger describes things and the being of things. Granted, I am German, so I can directly read the source without needing a translator. That might change things. Regardless, I think Heidegger gave one of the fullest metaphysic-free accounts of the human experience and what Being is. And he starts from scratch. You essentially can read him without having to first study the whole western continental philosophy and he will construct the whole system by himself. Tremendous work
  - jordigh 4mo ago
    I keep hearing "it's better in German" which really reinforces my point that he's just playing word games with etymologies without saying anything.
    - lmf4lol 4mo ago
      i didnt say that at all :-) Heidegger uses very specific German words to build a very specific vocabulary. This vocabulary then allows him to express very complicated sentiments very quickly and he can use this to express more and more complex structures. Obviously this requires the reader to first learn the vocabulary and - granted - that is hard and challenging. I have a notebook here , which I consult and modify evertine i dive into Being and Time. But as I said. It keeps on giving. I often try to convey arguments and descriptions to others without falling back into Heideggers jargon, and its sometimes very hard and requires a lot of bloating . So you can argue that it was even necessary for him to invent the vocabulary, because otherwise the book would have been 10x in size Your comment strikes me as a bit ignorant i must say. You accuse the work of being non-sensical word play but you’ve obviously not invested any time in learning the vocabulary. Because otherwise you wouldnt have made that comment. Id suggest to give it a chance. Its a wonderful piece of work and mind blowing in its own way. That a single mind can think something like that up. I’d argue its on the level of Hegel in terms of system building.
truculent 4mo ago
> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. That agency or free will exists outside of our subjective experience is an assumption; does any given theory need to explain agency, or is it sufficient to explain that we feel we have agency?
- f_klem 4mo ago
  Indeed, I know there is research going on placing agency and free will as illusions of our own subjective experience. Yet, there is a big gap from a purely mechanistic view of the mind to the idea/phenomena of subjective experience.
raincole 4mo ago
> subjective experience and agency, amongst other things In other words, souls? I'm sorry if that sounds accusing, but to me it sounds like you're talking about souls that are independent to the physical world, just with more 'scientific-y' wording. (I fully understand that some people believe souls exist.)
- sarchertech 4mo ago
  I don’t think the OP is discussing mind-body dualism. There are many materialists who believe that consciousness maybe a non-computational process. But it is worth pointing out that something like 80% of the world (it fluctuates depending on the survey but its around that) believes in some non-physical spirit, life force, or soul. It’s a very HN bubble thing to start a discussion with the assumption that everyone must be a materialist.
  - raincole 4mo ago
    I acknowledge and understand that many people believe in the existence of souls. But I hope they just say it rather than try to wrap the concepts in layers of jargons.
    - sarchertech 4mo ago
      Again I don’t think the person you were talking to was doing that. But one of the reasons that people might do that is because on a forum like hacker news they’ll be attacked as a lunatic. Just look at some of the comments on this article. I saw one where someone said that dualism is so ridiculous that it can’t even be considered philosophy.
- f_klem 4mo ago
  As other commenters pointed out, I'm not getting into the mind/body problem. But that's what people normally do: you challenge the assumptions, and all of a sudden they assume you are already coming to a conclusion. And no, just because I challenge the assumptions, I don't need to provide a counter conclusion.
CuriouslyC 4mo ago
The problem with the stuff you cite is that it is coming from consciousness via an anthropomorphic perspective. The priors baked in are poisoning the logic. The question we have to answer is "Why do we think we're magical matter uniquely blessed with consciousness?" If you go far enough down the rabbit hole on that question, the answer you will come to is either "we're not" or "because god" (with a lot of pseudo-scientific bullshit wrapped around the "because god" to make it palatable for the nonreligious). Panpsychism (or a deeper form, such as idealism) is actually the solution favored strongly by Occam's Razor over the variants of "because god" (such as magical emergence). Given panpsychism, AI is already conscious, like everything else, though no claims are made about the correlation between the internal experience of that consciousness and the tokens that are being printed on the screen.
- f_klem 4mo ago
  There is no way of dealing with these topics via a non-anthropomorphic perspective. That has been already (in my view) proved by Heidegger and then Derrida. Last time I read about panpsychism, it was deeply flawed. But I can't remember the sources (sorry).
  - CuriouslyC 4mo ago
    If it's so deeply flawed, should be easy to state why in an ELI5 manner. For example: The emergence hypothesis requires physical processes to effectively create new dimensions of information (700nm light -> "red" qualia) which we're somehow incapable of directly measuring with all the tools of modern physics.
    - f_klem 4mo ago
      I am not an expert in panpsychism, but for what I know: 1) the idea that everything has a degree of consciousness proportional to its complexity, introduces the problem of compound consciousness. How do they compose, how is each consciousness contributing to the overall, upper-level one? how is experience explained at the different complexity levels? 2) it is impossible to test whether something is conscious or not 3) the theory is more a philosophical framework for dealing with the mind/body problem, but it actually moves the problem forward on the assumption that 'because it is something physical, it has consciousness. Then complex things have complex consciousness'
derektank 4mo ago
>Is the same underlying assumptions that treats cells as machines, our body as a complex machine. These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines? They seem pretty machine-like to me. I certainly don’t think individual cells have any subjective experience or sense of agency. I would be curious to know where your intuitions diverge here, because if the mind is an emergent phenomenon from machines (cells) then it seems quite likely that a mind could emerge from other, different machines.
- gyomu 4mo ago
  > Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines? Yes? Literally no machine ever built by humans is capable of (or even hinting at beginnings of capability for) replication or novel synthesis like cells are, let alone autonomously, it’s quite unconceivable that anyone would take this to be a reasonable assumption in the first place.
  - derektank 4mo ago
    Hmmm, well let’s take it one step lower. What do you think of organelles such as ribosomes? Do you disagree with the assumption that those are machines? They seem directly analogous to the jacquard loom or a CNC machine to me.
    - gyomu 4mo ago
      Yes again, ribosomes have nothing in common with machines, that are built and designed by humans. The ball is in your camp to provide solid reasons to believe why they should be grouped together, when one is a deeply complex interrelated dynamic system (in fact, arguably the most complex system we know of) evolved bottom up over billions of years that we only very partially understand and cannot fully explain or document, and the other something entirely planned, designed, and produced by humans in which every component is finite and accounted for. The argument boils down to “well the vibes kind of match to my taste, and it’s the best analogy I have in my analogy toolkit”, which is just not serious reasoning.
runarberg 4mo ago
It is also a story as old as time. We have been comparing our brains to our most recent information/communication technology since the invention of the telephone. After the telephone our brain was like computers, and when I did my bachelors in Psychology in 2009, we were comparing our brains to the internet. AI is simply the latest iteration of these comparison, just as wrong and unhelpful as when we compared it to the telephone.
foolswisdom 4mo ago
This reminds of this article which contends that this mistake has carried across time, in every era people described the workings of the brain similar to the machines they knew how to build, which is why we have "ridiculous" descriptions that changed over time. https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...
- thewoodsman 4mo ago
  I like Leibniz's comparison of the brain to a mill, which he invokes in an argument[1] that seems to be the predecessor of the modern "hard problem:" > supposing that there were a mechanism so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain a perception. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_gap
phkahler 4mo ago
>> and that is that we understand (or we think we understand) how our brain/mind works. But the truth is that we don't know. And there's even not a single clue that we actually know too much, and not a clue that our brain/mind and cells work 'as the machines we build'. >> I highly recommend people in the AI research space should read philosophy and modern linguistics. I highly recommend the philosophers read some neuroscience. The whole "model weights" thing in AI is modeled after the synaptic connections and between actual neurons. There is already quite a bit known about how the brain works at a low level. There is also a lot that is still unknown. There are also differences between discrete neuron firing and weights as signals, but there is enough similarity to make artificial neural nets useful and do things similar to what real one do.
- dbspin 4mo ago
  Hard disagree. We only discovered the role that glial cells play in processing around 2014. We're still uncertain how patterns of activation consolidate through long term potentiation, let alone how signaling encodes information. We understand quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus and subiculum in encoding memories; but we don't understand the structural layout of engram complexes - which were themselves mapped for the first time only in 2022! Taking effective results in machine learning, and somehow assuming that they apply to cognition - simply because neural nets were inspired by our limited knowledge of neural signaling and structure - is like trying to apply aircraft engineering to studying ornithology. For a better articulation of this point (from the reverse direction) check out the paper 'Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?' from 2017 - https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
  - phkahler 4mo ago
    >> We understand quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus and subiculum in encoding memories... Hard disagree ;-) You're talking about high level architecture of the brain. I don't think (not my area I may be wrong) we know how memories are encoded in a real brain. Is it weights or something else? If it's weights that's supporting my point (but we don't know what the weights represent in a brain, where in LLMs many weights are just token encodings). If brains store memories in something other than weights I'd really like to know as it's something I haven't read about yet.
ozgung 4mo ago
> I highly recommend people in the AI research space should read philosophy and modern linguistics. On the contrary, I highly recommend people in Philosophy of mind and linguistics should start reading AI research papers because their theories and ideas are highly outdated, even ancient. Your books are from 1927 and 1972 respectively and Turing's article is from 1950s. And they are relatively new with respect to other works in Philosophy. If one doesn't adequately understand what we have in 2026, how can they theorize about it? As others they don't understand how the mind/brain work, BUT ALSO they don't understand how the AI works. Also with this mindset that we can't understand seemingly complicated things, there would be no advancement in science and technology. I think philosophy people and Linguist will catch up in a century, like they did with Turing. Philosophers of this century are not in humanities or literature. They are in science and engineering. Heidegger was trained on priesthood and Theology. You should read greater minds like Hinton, LeCun etc. if you want to think on these things. They are the real Philosophers.
- Avicebron 4mo ago
  Yikes dude. You may need to expand your horizons a bit.
  - ozgung 4mo ago
    That's my point. Everything from 1927 is already in plain sight and a part of the current public knowledge. Horizon can only be expanded at the cutting edges.
    - jhonof 4mo ago
      > Horizon can only be expanded at the cutting edges. Ironically this was advice Ralph Waldo Emerson gave in 1840 so by your logic it's irrelevant just because it's old.
- f_klem 4mo ago
  > On the contrary, I highly recommend people in Philosophy of mind and linguistics should start reading AI research papers because their theories and ideas are highly outdated, even ancient. Your books are from 1927 and 1972 respectively and Turing's article is from 1950s. And they are relatively new with respect to other works in Philosophy. People in philosophy and cognitive linguistics do read AI research. Don't get fooled by the publishing dates: although Heidegger's work dates from 1927, the work is contemporary. The same happens with Dreyfus' work. Again, publishing dates don't mean anything here. Maybe you can clarify why they are outdated. > If one doesn't adequately understand what we have in 2026, how can they theorize about it? As others they don't understand how the mind/brain work, BUT ALSO they don't understand how the AI works. I would say that people involved in the critique of AI do know how it works. But I've found that is normally the case that people in AI research does not have the framing provided by works in philosophy or cognitive linguistics. > I think philosophy people and Linguist will catch up in a century, like they did with Turing. Philosophers of this century are not in humanities or literature. They are in science and engineering. What do you base your claims on? Plenty of philosophers work in humanities, literature, sociology as well as science and engineering. Philosophers not catching up? The critique on automation and AI already dates from the early 20s if not before. > Heidegger was trained on priesthood and Theology. You should read greater minds like Hinton, LeCun etc. if you want to think on these things. They are the real Philosophers. Sorry, but this does not make too much sense. Hinton and LeCun are great in their own fields. But seriously, they are not philosophers, they are inventors.
bwfan123 4mo ago
> should read philosophy subject/object dichotomy is a springboard to many schools of thought. 1) that subject emerges from objects - ie, anything has a material explanation, and everything is a machine. 2) that objects emerge out of a subject as a world model (platonic, descartes) 3) the subject and objects are one and the same representation of nature (spinoza) 4) subjects and objects emerge and disappear together (buddhist) Anything reduced to computation is a fixed function from input to output, and is "dead" in the sense that it is unadaptable to its environment. Weights therefore is a dead machine. Another view of this is that any closed system has unanswerable questions within it. Therefore, there is no system that can encompass everything. Hence weights being a closed system doesnt encompass everything.
ordu 4mo ago
> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. It would be a valid argument if you could explain us what subjective experience and agency are. No one can explain this, so the arguments sounds like "AI doesn't have something I don't really know what, but they have to miss something, sure". > But the truth is that we don't know. Yes! This is the point. If we don't know how our minds work, how can we be sure that a machine doesn't work like our minds? > I highly recommend people in the AI research space should read philosophy and modern linguistics. Linguists are linguists, they don't know about consciousness, they specialists in language. The main teaching of philosophy is to open your mind wide, and then still wider. So yes, we all should read more philosophy, but we should remember while reading, that philosophy is what we do, when we can't turn a question to a scientific one. I'd say that philosophy is more about finding the right question, than the right answer. Until there are no science branches like Subjectology or Consciousiology, and all you can find are TL;DRs written by philosophers and scientists from unrelated branches of science (like linguists or neurologists) you can be sure that the right question is not found yet. Therefore it is better to keep yourself uncertain. BTW it is the main lesson of philosophy: to open your mind wide and then open it wider still. I believe, that all this philosophy is... well... philosophy. Meta-physics. It doesn't matter. What does matter is how we should deal with machines? Do we have to treat them as human beings? Should we accept that they have "human rights"? Can a machine be held accountable for its mistakes? Can we talk about "intentional" and "unintentional" mistakes of a machine? Answers to these questions are important, they are imperative answers, they govern how we live our lives. But when people try to answer them, they somehow jump to talking about consciousness, and "are they really like us or not", and... etc. I personally keep myself uncertain. I'm pretty sure that current models do not deserve human rights. I cannot say about future models. You see, there were times in history when smart and well-intentioned people were certain that some people deserve less moral considerations than others. We are smart and well-intentioned and we are certain that AI deserve no moral considerations. How it will play out in a future? Will my descendants think bad of me because I used slave labor of a local model on a GPU? I don't know, we don't know. Right now, I'm exploiting LLMs and I believe it is ok, but I'm not going to fall into this trap and to stick to my belief because of some philosophical or lingustic or neurological argument. I'm choosing epistemological humility, I clearly state that I don't know the right answer and I'm keeping an eye to it so I wouldn't miss it.
mahogany 4mo ago
> What all these theories have in common is the underlying belief that our brain/mind works as the machines we build It’s interesting to note that this is not a new phenomenon. If you read writers from the past, they were always comparing the body or the brain to whatever the modern machine, or idea of a machine, was at the time, whether a steam engine or automata.

by f_klem 4mo ago

paulluuk 4mo ago

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency So, I work in AI research (as a research engineer though, not a scientist). I've also studied philosophy and I'm a vegan. Yes yes, insert "they will tell you" joke here, but I promise it's actually relevant this time. First, while I studied philosophy one of the things that stuck with me the most, was the discussion of "souls": humans have souls, animals don't. For centuries the specifics of souls were discussed: people would be weighed while they died, in an effort to measure the approximate weight of a soul as it departed the body. Discussions about how many souls (or angels) could dance on the tip of a needle. Many people still believe in souls, but it's very hard to have a real discussion about them because by definition they do not "interact" with this world in a way that can be measured. When discussing whether it's okay to harm animals for food or sport, one other argument I hear quite often (other than having no souls) is that animals do not experience "qualia": basically the smallest unit of "subjective experience". People know that they themselves experience qualia: the sensation of touching a doorknob, the taste of fresh fruit, the sense of beauty watching a rainbow. Ironically, they would say that animals are like robots: just (biological) machines acting on instinct, and feeling any kind of compassion for them means you are anthropomorphizing. Subjective experience (or at least qualia) and souls both have one thing in common: they can not be measured externally in a meaningful way. You can simply state that an AI system no matter how advanced, has no soul and has no subjective experience. And that's pretty much that. There's no meaningful discussion to be had about it, because no matter what an AI might tell you: it has no way to prove it to you. In fact, you can't even be certain that anyone other than yourself has subjective experiences: you assume that because they are humans like you, and you experience them, that they probably do as well. They tell you that they do. But a human without subjective experience, someone on "autopilot", would be absolutely indistinguishable from a human who does have them. But perhaps I am conflating here whether experience can be "measured", with whether a system even allows experience in the first place regardless of whether it can be measured. I think that Dreyfus and others argue that in order to have any "experiences" at all, you simply must have a body in the real world, and you must care about that body. Please correct me if that's the wrong interpretation, I haven't actually read the book. That argument would be harder for me to discuss, because I personally believe that consciousness will "emerge" from a complex interaction of relatively simple systems - but that's also just a theory. I don't believe that experience is literally impossible to engineer, as consciousness has emerged from non-conscious being through evolution, so clearly there must be some kind of mechanism for it -- and if there is, then I believe it can be replicated, we just don't really understand it well enough yet to do so. And with how AI tech is going, I think that we're more likely to accidentally stumble upon it than we are to get these deliberately.

lobofta 4mo ago
Vegan ML engineer here. In total agreement with you. People are just moving the goal post to keep themselves protected from the obvious conclusion: there is nothing really all that special about us humans. Perhaps subjective experience is simply the internal state of a self supervised continuous learning algorithm and we don't like that conclusion very much.
- foobarian 4mo ago
  It's too bad it's so hard to pin down a definition, but in practice I feel like most animals with brains experience degrees of qualia. Some mornings after a night of poor sleep when I wake up super-slow I wonder if that's how animals experience thinking. My biggest problem with "brains are machines" arguments is that there is a risk there is unknown physics at work that is not representable as a Turing machine. What if there is some quantum field effect powering everything?
  - tim333 4mo ago
    They know quite a lot about how neurons work to the extent they can replace bits of brains with artificial retinas or cochleas and interface with devices like neuralink. It's unlikely there is a quantum field effect of the type you mention powering things, although of course atoms and the like obey quantum mechanics in the normal way.
  - jcynix 4mo ago
    Quantum field effects? You don't need these, IMHO, if you look at how highly parallel things seem to work in brains. Marvin Minsky's theory of a "Society of Mind" describes a (highly) distributed model of the mind. Which BTW, always reminds me of the first Shrek movie, where the donkey jumps up and down, shouting "Take me! Take me!" to Shrek. That's similar to what I observe when I'm undecided but two instances of "sub-processes" (or agents as Minsky calls them) of my mind try to get attention. Daniel Dennett similarly gives a distributed model of consciousness. Where many parallel "processes" are at work, competing and "observing" each other. And this parallelism is happening with a much, much higher degree than any of our computers parallelism.

lxgr 4mo ago

> Is the same underlying assumptions that treats cells as machines, our body as a complex machine. These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. Agency: What’s missing, in your view? Agency seems more of a property/function of a thinking system’s position in an environment than of the thinking itself. Subjective experience: That’s not a contradiction to “complex machines” either. I think the evidence that our minds are highly complex machines is, at this point, irrefutable. The question is really if they’re “only” that.

codeflo 4mo ago

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. On the contrary, it's precisely this assumption, that there is a "subjective experience" that requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence. It falls apart quickly, any "subjective experience" is completely tied to neurons, knock out the neurons and the subjective experience disappears, or stimulate the neurons to cause the experience.

tuyiown 4mo ago
> at requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence Nobody talked about anything out of neurons. The question is still open.
kristov 4mo ago
I think the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. An LLM is not a human brain, and does not try to emulate one. It should not be a surprise that an LLM does not behave like a human brain. So we can not infer things either way. The best we can say is that an LLM appears to exhibit very similar behavior to a human brain, under certain constraints. So maybe we can infer that the human brain has something in it that operates in a similar way to an LLM (like the human "unconscious", or "intuition" maybe). It seems obvious to me that a human brain and an LLM are not comparable things, for many reasons. So we can not make inferrences one way or the other.
- dnautics 4mo ago
  > An LLM is not a human brain, true > and does not try to emulate one citation please. something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator
  - cootsnuck 4mo ago
    > something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator That says nothing about emulating a human brain.

ACCount37 4mo ago

I don't think cognitive linguistics has that much to say about AI nowadays. Let alone philosophy. The biggest contributions from linguistics are probably "human languages mostly have statistical regularities rather than hard rules" and "the sum of data humans get from birth to language acquisition is insufficient to learn a language from scratch". Which LLMs already work with, and work around, respectively. From there, nothing. And philosophy just exists to be a distractor. "Subjective experience" is too subjective to matter in practice. "Task performance" is measurable, "consciousness" isn't. "Agency" is something an LLM in a tool calling loop, a rat in a maze and a human in an office tower may or may not have, depending on your favorite definition. Agentic LLMs are years in the making, and that's a product of engineering, not philosophy: "agentic" is whatever gets the job done. We are yet to discover any physical process whatsoever that can't be represented as mathematical operations and implemented by a Turing machine. So all of that "treating human mind as a machine is wrong" amounts to "human mind must be powered by magic fairy dust" paired with "a functionally similar magic-free replacement is impossible". I'm not about to give much weight to any hypothesis that requires undiscovered magic fairy dust. At least find the hyper-computational magic fairy dust first - not just assume it absolutely must be there because you want the human mind to be unique and special. Want to know why Turing did what he did? It's because he didn't want to engage with any of that "what is mind" bullshit either. So he proposed actual metrics - measurables that are harder to argue in circles about. Not that it stopped anyone. But at least he tried.

f_klem 4mo ago
> I don't think cognitive linguistics has that much to say about AI nowadays. Let alone philosophy. I would like to read those sources. > The biggest contributions from linguistics are probably "human languages mostly have statistical regularities rather than hard rules" and "the sum of data humans get from birth to language acquisition is insufficient to learn a language from scratch". Which LLMs already work with, and work around, respectively. From there, nothing. Again, what's the source for 'biggest contributions from linguistics are...'? It is a big contribution to the development of LLMs, but different cognitive linguistics authors already challenged this idea already 20-30 years ago. LLMs work with and around the problems you cite because of massive data/money, not at the fundamental level. It is all a game of statistics and data, which has been already challenged by cog. ling. > And philosophy just exists to be a distractor. Well, this is just telling me that you either know too much about philosophy and reached that conclusion (which might make sense, know of some philosophers who also think that) or you just read too little. > So all of that "treating human mind as a machine is wrong" amounts to "human mind must be powered by magic fairy dust" This is the common fallacy people in AI/IT make . One of the benefits of reading philosophy is that you find your way out of them. > Want to know why Turing did what he did? The actual tests Turing though about are themselves flawed (not that I discovered that, has been known for some time already)

housecarpenter 4mo ago

Why is asking 'can machines think?' assuming our thinking could be modeled as a machine? It's raising the possibility that our thinking could be modeled as a machine. Given that, as you acknowledge, we don't have a clue how our mind works, it seems premature to rule out this possibility. Rather, I would say that ruling it out betrays an assumption that we understand how the mind works enough that we can say that it is definitely not replicable by a machine, and that assumption seems unjustified.

tim333 4mo ago
Indeed, scientific type thinking like that where you ask a question that you can do experiments on to see if machines can pass the test is probably the way to progress. The philosophical waffling mostly just goes in circles. To investigate consciousness you'll probably get further trying to build conscious machines with agency and comparing them to biological ones than reading Heidegger.
f_klem 4mo ago
> It's raising the possibility that our thinking could be modeled as a machine. Given that, as you acknowledge, we don't have a clue how our mind works, it seems premature to rule out this possibility. In order to raise the possibility that our thinking can be modeled as a machine, there needs to be a previous question: 'can our thinking be modeled at all?'. And before that, already the idea of possibility: 'our thinking could be something that can be modeled'. Since we know 'we can think', asking 'can machines think?' needs the assumption that machines and brains are alike. If there is no assumption, then we should ask 'if brains and machines are alike, then we could raise the possibility of thinking a machine could also think'. But when we say 'brains and machines are alike', we are implicitly saying 'brains are like machines'. There is no problem asking 'can machines think?', but there is indeed a problem with implicitly assuming that brains and machines are alike when we do not known it yet. I am critiquing the idea of assumptions here, not the research.

larodi 4mo ago

If we agree weights producing text may emerge consciousness, given large enough, then DBs must've gained it long ago. The whole idea of sentience "on the other side of the wire" is wrong, as there is neither wire, nor other side. We think there is, but the DB just expounds the query and repurposes this information into views, that we give notion and meaning to. LLMs are the same, do not be mistaken. One other important thing to consider is that the human experience is thanks to the body, is in connection, and perhaps product of the body. The body is observable and perhaps humans may state that they feel the connection to it. LLMs have no notion of nothing, the machine does not know the result, and the result does not know the VM. Modern psychology more or less has settled around the idea that consciousness is a product of the body. Why and how does this construct come to realize a Self is then another mystery even if we know which parts of the hardware may be involved. Whether it is the Holy Spirit or Life Force animating the human body is a completely different question also. Besides, the realization, the experience we have now with all life in 2026 is not something that can be easily explained or attuned to life 200 years ago and its terms and notions. So is also wrong to even attempt to.

IanCal 4mo ago
> If we agree weights producing text may emerge consciousness, given large enough, then DBs must've gained it long ago. If we agree that silicon can perform calculations, then beaches must have been working out log tables long ago.
- dmd 4mo ago
  Greg Egan wrote an entire (fabulous) book about exactly that, "Permutation City".
  - larodi 4mo ago
    Diaspora is mind-blowing, yet highly improbable and speculative, even though carefully threaded to sound plausible on all levels. The whole introdus idea and simulation from VM perspective sounds incredible, but I don't think the body runs a simulation of anything. It is something else.

LudwigNagasena 4mo ago

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things I don't see how any of the works you referenced can account for that either? Since when is the problem of consciousness solved and we can definitely say what does or doesn't result in consciousness?

f_klem 4mo ago
None of the works I mentioned solved or try to solve the mind/body problem or the issue of consciousness. They are a frame of reference for not stepping into the common fallacies that the AI research field is based on.
- LudwigNagasena 4mo ago
  What's exactly the fallacy? How do the works help avoid stepping into that "fallacy" if they don't try to solve the issue of consciousness.
  - f_klem 4mo ago
    The issue of consciousness appears when you think of the world in a mechanistic way: since all there is are laws of physics and materiality, then how could we explain our though processes and our perceptual experience? If the world itself (in a general, existential way) is only made of laws of physics and matter, the consciousness needs to be an emergent characteristic of physical systems, and needs to follow the laws of physics. Now at this stage, you are already in trouble and you need to explain what consciousness is and how it manifestates. And that's the moment where things like the computational theory of mind appears. But you need to step back in order to detect the fallacy, one of which is: the brain/mind processes information like a computer, then we could build better computers that can think. This fallacy is assumed in the question 'can a machine think?'. There's another fallacy, which the author call the first step fallacy, which is common nowadays: we solved the language problem, then machines will be able to think in the near future. So it is not about solving the consciousness problem, it is about not claiming things based on assumptions that can be easily challenged.

red75prime 4mo ago

> There is also an epistemological assumption that prevails, and that is that we understand (or we think we understand) how our brain/mind works. It's good that it doesn't matter. Stochastic gradient descent works (or doesn't work) regardless of whether we know how the brain does its thing.

dnautics 4mo ago
we know the brain does not use gradient descent. (i agree it doesn't matter)
- anthonyrstevens 4mo ago
  How do we know this?
  - dnautics 4mo ago
    i recall a hinton lecture where he talks about the mechanism of memory formation in the brain and it's not fully sussed out but it's also not backprop, its some sort of forward prediction and immediate reinforcement loop. There's also no plausible biological/chemical mechanism to backpropagate.

jordigh 4mo ago

You actually read Being and Time? What the heck do you get out of it? Heidegger just seems to play word games with German words without actually saying anything. "Time is the ripening of temporality." tf do phrases like that mean??

lmf4lol 4mo ago
Not OP, but I have read Being and Time on and off over the years, and every time, I am blown away how precise Heidegger describes things and the being of things. Granted, I am German, so I can directly read the source without needing a translator. That might change things. Regardless, I think Heidegger gave one of the fullest metaphysic-free accounts of the human experience and what Being is. And he starts from scratch. You essentially can read him without having to first study the whole western continental philosophy and he will construct the whole system by himself. Tremendous work
- jordigh 4mo ago
  I keep hearing "it's better in German" which really reinforces my point that he's just playing word games with etymologies without saying anything.
  - lmf4lol 4mo ago
    i didnt say that at all :-) Heidegger uses very specific German words to build a very specific vocabulary. This vocabulary then allows him to express very complicated sentiments very quickly and he can use this to express more and more complex structures. Obviously this requires the reader to first learn the vocabulary and - granted - that is hard and challenging. I have a notebook here , which I consult and modify evertine i dive into Being and Time. But as I said. It keeps on giving. I often try to convey arguments and descriptions to others without falling back into Heideggers jargon, and its sometimes very hard and requires a lot of bloating . So you can argue that it was even necessary for him to invent the vocabulary, because otherwise the book would have been 10x in size Your comment strikes me as a bit ignorant i must say. You accuse the work of being non-sensical word play but you’ve obviously not invested any time in learning the vocabulary. Because otherwise you wouldnt have made that comment. Id suggest to give it a chance. Its a wonderful piece of work and mind blowing in its own way. That a single mind can think something like that up. I’d argue its on the level of Hegel in terms of system building.

truculent 4mo ago

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. That agency or free will exists outside of our subjective experience is an assumption; does any given theory need to explain agency, or is it sufficient to explain that we feel we have agency?

f_klem 4mo ago
Indeed, I know there is research going on placing agency and free will as illusions of our own subjective experience. Yet, there is a big gap from a purely mechanistic view of the mind to the idea/phenomena of subjective experience.

raincole 4mo ago

> subjective experience and agency, amongst other things In other words, souls? I'm sorry if that sounds accusing, but to me it sounds like you're talking about souls that are independent to the physical world, just with more 'scientific-y' wording. (I fully understand that some people believe souls exist.)

sarchertech 4mo ago
I don’t think the OP is discussing mind-body dualism. There are many materialists who believe that consciousness maybe a non-computational process. But it is worth pointing out that something like 80% of the world (it fluctuates depending on the survey but its around that) believes in some non-physical spirit, life force, or soul. It’s a very HN bubble thing to start a discussion with the assumption that everyone must be a materialist.
- raincole 4mo ago
  I acknowledge and understand that many people believe in the existence of souls. But I hope they just say it rather than try to wrap the concepts in layers of jargons.
  - sarchertech 4mo ago
    Again I don’t think the person you were talking to was doing that. But one of the reasons that people might do that is because on a forum like hacker news they’ll be attacked as a lunatic. Just look at some of the comments on this article. I saw one where someone said that dualism is so ridiculous that it can’t even be considered philosophy.
f_klem 4mo ago
As other commenters pointed out, I'm not getting into the mind/body problem. But that's what people normally do: you challenge the assumptions, and all of a sudden they assume you are already coming to a conclusion. And no, just because I challenge the assumptions, I don't need to provide a counter conclusion.

CuriouslyC 4mo ago

The problem with the stuff you cite is that it is coming from consciousness via an anthropomorphic perspective. The priors baked in are poisoning the logic. The question we have to answer is "Why do we think we're magical matter uniquely blessed with consciousness?" If you go far enough down the rabbit hole on that question, the answer you will come to is either "we're not" or "because god" (with a lot of pseudo-scientific bullshit wrapped around the "because god" to make it palatable for the nonreligious). Panpsychism (or a deeper form, such as idealism) is actually the solution favored strongly by Occam's Razor over the variants of "because god" (such as magical emergence). Given panpsychism, AI is already conscious, like everything else, though no claims are made about the correlation between the internal experience of that consciousness and the tokens that are being printed on the screen.

f_klem 4mo ago
There is no way of dealing with these topics via a non-anthropomorphic perspective. That has been already (in my view) proved by Heidegger and then Derrida. Last time I read about panpsychism, it was deeply flawed. But I can't remember the sources (sorry).
- CuriouslyC 4mo ago
  If it's so deeply flawed, should be easy to state why in an ELI5 manner. For example: The emergence hypothesis requires physical processes to effectively create new dimensions of information (700nm light -> "red" qualia) which we're somehow incapable of directly measuring with all the tools of modern physics.
  - f_klem 4mo ago
    I am not an expert in panpsychism, but for what I know: 1) the idea that everything has a degree of consciousness proportional to its complexity, introduces the problem of compound consciousness. How do they compose, how is each consciousness contributing to the overall, upper-level one? how is experience explained at the different complexity levels? 2) it is impossible to test whether something is conscious or not 3) the theory is more a philosophical framework for dealing with the mind/body problem, but it actually moves the problem forward on the assumption that 'because it is something physical, it has consciousness. Then complex things have complex consciousness'

derektank 4mo ago

>Is the same underlying assumptions that treats cells as machines, our body as a complex machine. These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines? They seem pretty machine-like to me. I certainly don’t think individual cells have any subjective experience or sense of agency. I would be curious to know where your intuitions diverge here, because if the mind is an emergent phenomenon from machines (cells) then it seems quite likely that a mind could emerge from other, different machines.

gyomu 4mo ago
> Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines? Yes? Literally no machine ever built by humans is capable of (or even hinting at beginnings of capability for) replication or novel synthesis like cells are, let alone autonomously, it’s quite unconceivable that anyone would take this to be a reasonable assumption in the first place.
- derektank 4mo ago
  Hmmm, well let’s take it one step lower. What do you think of organelles such as ribosomes? Do you disagree with the assumption that those are machines? They seem directly analogous to the jacquard loom or a CNC machine to me.
  - gyomu 4mo ago
    Yes again, ribosomes have nothing in common with machines, that are built and designed by humans. The ball is in your camp to provide solid reasons to believe why they should be grouped together, when one is a deeply complex interrelated dynamic system (in fact, arguably the most complex system we know of) evolved bottom up over billions of years that we only very partially understand and cannot fully explain or document, and the other something entirely planned, designed, and produced by humans in which every component is finite and accounted for. The argument boils down to “well the vibes kind of match to my taste, and it’s the best analogy I have in my analogy toolkit”, which is just not serious reasoning.

runarberg 4mo ago

It is also a story as old as time. We have been comparing our brains to our most recent information/communication technology since the invention of the telephone. After the telephone our brain was like computers, and when I did my bachelors in Psychology in 2009, we were comparing our brains to the internet. AI is simply the latest iteration of these comparison, just as wrong and unhelpful as when we compared it to the telephone.

foolswisdom 4mo ago

This reminds of this article which contends that this mistake has carried across time, in every era people described the workings of the brain similar to the machines they knew how to build, which is why we have "ridiculous" descriptions that changed over time. https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...

thewoodsman 4mo ago
I like Leibniz's comparison of the brain to a mill, which he invokes in an argument[1] that seems to be the predecessor of the modern "hard problem:" > supposing that there were a mechanism so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain a perception. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_gap

phkahler 4mo ago

>> and that is that we understand (or we think we understand) how our brain/mind works. But the truth is that we don't know. And there's even not a single clue that we actually know too much, and not a clue that our brain/mind and cells work 'as the machines we build'. >> I highly recommend people in the AI research space should read philosophy and modern linguistics. I highly recommend the philosophers read some neuroscience. The whole "model weights" thing in AI is modeled after the synaptic connections and between actual neurons. There is already quite a bit known about how the brain works at a low level. There is also a lot that is still unknown. There are also differences between discrete neuron firing and weights as signals, but there is enough similarity to make artificial neural nets useful and do things similar to what real one do.

dbspin 4mo ago
Hard disagree. We only discovered the role that glial cells play in processing around 2014. We're still uncertain how patterns of activation consolidate through long term potentiation, let alone how signaling encodes information. We understand quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus and subiculum in encoding memories; but we don't understand the structural layout of engram complexes - which were themselves mapped for the first time only in 2022! Taking effective results in machine learning, and somehow assuming that they apply to cognition - simply because neural nets were inspired by our limited knowledge of neural signaling and structure - is like trying to apply aircraft engineering to studying ornithology. For a better articulation of this point (from the reverse direction) check out the paper 'Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?' from 2017 - https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
- phkahler 4mo ago
  >> We understand quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus and subiculum in encoding memories... Hard disagree ;-) You're talking about high level architecture of the brain. I don't think (not my area I may be wrong) we know how memories are encoded in a real brain. Is it weights or something else? If it's weights that's supporting my point (but we don't know what the weights represent in a brain, where in LLMs many weights are just token encodings). If brains store memories in something other than weights I'd really like to know as it's something I haven't read about yet.

ozgung 4mo ago

> I highly recommend people in the AI research space should read philosophy and modern linguistics. On the contrary, I highly recommend people in Philosophy of mind and linguistics should start reading AI research papers because their theories and ideas are highly outdated, even ancient. Your books are from 1927 and 1972 respectively and Turing's article is from 1950s. And they are relatively new with respect to other works in Philosophy. If one doesn't adequately understand what we have in 2026, how can they theorize about it? As others they don't understand how the mind/brain work, BUT ALSO they don't understand how the AI works. Also with this mindset that we can't understand seemingly complicated things, there would be no advancement in science and technology. I think philosophy people and Linguist will catch up in a century, like they did with Turing. Philosophers of this century are not in humanities or literature. They are in science and engineering. Heidegger was trained on priesthood and Theology. You should read greater minds like Hinton, LeCun etc. if you want to think on these things. They are the real Philosophers.

Avicebron 4mo ago
Yikes dude. You may need to expand your horizons a bit.
- ozgung 4mo ago
  That's my point. Everything from 1927 is already in plain sight and a part of the current public knowledge. Horizon can only be expanded at the cutting edges.
  - jhonof 4mo ago
    > Horizon can only be expanded at the cutting edges. Ironically this was advice Ralph Waldo Emerson gave in 1840 so by your logic it's irrelevant just because it's old.
f_klem 4mo ago
> On the contrary, I highly recommend people in Philosophy of mind and linguistics should start reading AI research papers because their theories and ideas are highly outdated, even ancient. Your books are from 1927 and 1972 respectively and Turing's article is from 1950s. And they are relatively new with respect to other works in Philosophy. People in philosophy and cognitive linguistics do read AI research. Don't get fooled by the publishing dates: although Heidegger's work dates from 1927, the work is contemporary. The same happens with Dreyfus' work. Again, publishing dates don't mean anything here. Maybe you can clarify why they are outdated. > If one doesn't adequately understand what we have in 2026, how can they theorize about it? As others they don't understand how the mind/brain work, BUT ALSO they don't understand how the AI works. I would say that people involved in the critique of AI do know how it works. But I've found that is normally the case that people in AI research does not have the framing provided by works in philosophy or cognitive linguistics. > I think philosophy people and Linguist will catch up in a century, like they did with Turing. Philosophers of this century are not in humanities or literature. They are in science and engineering. What do you base your claims on? Plenty of philosophers work in humanities, literature, sociology as well as science and engineering. Philosophers not catching up? The critique on automation and AI already dates from the early 20s if not before. > Heidegger was trained on priesthood and Theology. You should read greater minds like Hinton, LeCun etc. if you want to think on these things. They are the real Philosophers. Sorry, but this does not make too much sense. Hinton and LeCun are great in their own fields. But seriously, they are not philosophers, they are inventors.

bwfan123 4mo ago

> should read philosophy subject/object dichotomy is a springboard to many schools of thought. 1) that subject emerges from objects - ie, anything has a material explanation, and everything is a machine. 2) that objects emerge out of a subject as a world model (platonic, descartes) 3) the subject and objects are one and the same representation of nature (spinoza) 4) subjects and objects emerge and disappear together (buddhist) Anything reduced to computation is a fixed function from input to output, and is "dead" in the sense that it is unadaptable to its environment. Weights therefore is a dead machine. Another view of this is that any closed system has unanswerable questions within it. Therefore, there is no system that can encompass everything. Hence weights being a closed system doesnt encompass everything.

ordu 4mo ago

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. It would be a valid argument if you could explain us what subjective experience and agency are. No one can explain this, so the arguments sounds like "AI doesn't have something I don't really know what, but they have to miss something, sure". > But the truth is that we don't know. Yes! This is the point. If we don't know how our minds work, how can we be sure that a machine doesn't work like our minds? > I highly recommend people in the AI research space should read philosophy and modern linguistics. Linguists are linguists, they don't know about consciousness, they specialists in language. The main teaching of philosophy is to open your mind wide, and then still wider. So yes, we all should read more philosophy, but we should remember while reading, that philosophy is what we do, when we can't turn a question to a scientific one. I'd say that philosophy is more about finding the right question, than the right answer. Until there are no science branches like Subjectology or Consciousiology, and all you can find are TL;DRs written by philosophers and scientists from unrelated branches of science (like linguists or neurologists) you can be sure that the right question is not found yet. Therefore it is better to keep yourself uncertain. BTW it is the main lesson of philosophy: to open your mind wide and then open it wider still. I believe, that all this philosophy is... well... philosophy. Meta-physics. It doesn't matter. What does matter is how we should deal with machines? Do we have to treat them as human beings? Should we accept that they have "human rights"? Can a machine be held accountable for its mistakes? Can we talk about "intentional" and "unintentional" mistakes of a machine? Answers to these questions are important, they are imperative answers, they govern how we live our lives. But when people try to answer them, they somehow jump to talking about consciousness, and "are they really like us or not", and... etc. I personally keep myself uncertain. I'm pretty sure that current models do not deserve human rights. I cannot say about future models. You see, there were times in history when smart and well-intentioned people were certain that some people deserve less moral considerations than others. We are smart and well-intentioned and we are certain that AI deserve no moral considerations. How it will play out in a future? Will my descendants think bad of me because I used slave labor of a local model on a GPU? I don't know, we don't know. Right now, I'm exploiting LLMs and I believe it is ok, but I'm not going to fall into this trap and to stick to my belief because of some philosophical or lingustic or neurological argument. I'm choosing epistemological humility, I clearly state that I don't know the right answer and I'm keeping an eye to it so I wouldn't miss it.

mahogany 4mo ago

> What all these theories have in common is the underlying belief that our brain/mind works as the machines we build It’s interesting to note that this is not a new phenomenon. If you read writers from the past, they were always comparing the body or the brain to whatever the modern machine, or idea of a machine, was at the time, whether a steam engine or automata.