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> The qualia themselves, even those that are quite abstract, are rooted in our physical presence and evolution. There is no objective evidence of qualia. All e

> The qualia themselves, even those that are quite abstract, are rooted in our physical presence and evolution. There is no objective evidence of qualia. All evidence of qualia are vocal or other expressions of belief in qualia. Perceptions clearly exist and are observable, subjective experience and qualia, not so much. > I see no reason to believe that a neural network built entirely based on the symbolic level of language could have the features needed for the subjective experience itself. If your objection is to models based on "symbolic level of language" which you think lack semantic understanding of, say, trees, you should ask yourself how our brain, based on physics which also lacks any semantic category for trees, can somehow develop a semantic understanding of trees. All of these appeals to differences with the brain never seem to acknowledge that fundamentally, the brain has the same explanatory gap with physics. > But if we assume awareness because outputs resemble what we consider meaningful as humans, yet the neural network has had no inputs or evolution that could form the actual basis of human-like experience This assumes a lot. It seems very possible to me that intelligence inherently develops a map of natural categories (natural kinds), and language naturally develops around such categorical understanding. Semantics are then fundamentally the network of associations between categories, eg. there is no fundamental difference between symbols and semantics, and the latter cam be inferred from the former, and that's exactly what LLMs do, and why the semantic maps between different languages are so similar and how they can translate between languages.

Delk 2mo ago
> There is no objective evidence of qualia. You can argue there's no objective evidence for qualia in others than oneself, but I'm sure you know you have subjective experience just as I know I do. > All of these appeals to differences with the brain never seem to acknowledge that fundamentally, the brain has the same explanatory gap with physics. I don't claim that ANNs or other computational models are fundamentally different from brains in computational capacity (although AFAIK biological neurons are a lot more complex than those in ANNs, so drawing a parallel just because both are "neural networks" would be erroneous as well.) I'm claiming that language alone cannot represent qualia, so an ANN trained on the level of language alone cannot have subjective experience. > This assumes a lot. Perhaps, but so does the idea that "intelligence inherently develops a map of natural categories", including the rather elusive concept of intelligence itself. And that today's AI models could possess intelligence in whatever form that sentence requires. If forming natural categories alone were enough for sentience, clustering algorithms could be sentient. It has traditionally been assumed that only humans are sentient. Present understanding leans more and more towards many animals having some kind of sentience as well. Some of them are probably even self-aware. Language in animals is a lot more controversial, though. Nobody knows how (or even why) sentience emerges. But since it seems to exist in other animals as well, including those that probably don't have language or abstract concepts, it would seem to be a product of something else than language. It might even be some kind of a spectrum, with different animals having different levels of sentience and, ultimately, even awareness.

Delk 2mo ago

> There is no objective evidence of qualia. You can argue there's no objective evidence for qualia in others than oneself, but I'm sure you know you have subjective experience just as I know I do. > All of these appeals to differences with the brain never seem to acknowledge that fundamentally, the brain has the same explanatory gap with physics. I don't claim that ANNs or other computational models are fundamentally different from brains in computational capacity (although AFAIK biological neurons are a lot more complex than those in ANNs, so drawing a parallel just because both are "neural networks" would be erroneous as well.) I'm claiming that language alone cannot represent qualia, so an ANN trained on the level of language alone cannot have subjective experience. > This assumes a lot. Perhaps, but so does the idea that "intelligence inherently develops a map of natural categories", including the rather elusive concept of intelligence itself. And that today's AI models could possess intelligence in whatever form that sentence requires. If forming natural categories alone were enough for sentience, clustering algorithms could be sentient. It has traditionally been assumed that only humans are sentient. Present understanding leans more and more towards many animals having some kind of sentience as well. Some of them are probably even self-aware. Language in animals is a lot more controversial, though. Nobody knows how (or even why) sentience emerges. But since it seems to exist in other animals as well, including those that probably don't have language or abstract concepts, it would seem to be a product of something else than language. It might even be some kind of a spectrum, with different animals having different levels of sentience and, ultimately, even awareness.