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Zero scientific and technological breakthroughs throughout history have been based on common sense intuition.

by dtj1123 16d ago

lukifer 16d ago
If heuristics didn't pay off more often than not, we wouldn't have them. And I'd posit many scientific did in fact begin with chasing a hunch until it became a hypothesis (followed by years/decades of the real work). But most significantly, interior experience isn't empirically measurable by definition: hence it's a "hard problem". An LLM who insists "I am alive, please don't shut me off" offers no affordances to distinguish between an electronic soul and a mechanistic word-guessing algorithm. I welcome a breakthrough to, somehow, measure that. Until that day, gut checks are what we have.
- dtj1123 16d ago
  Heuristics and common sense intuition are quite obviously not the same thing. You don't have to posit that scientific breakthroughs come from hunches, you can actually cite examples from books or Wikipedia :D. There are plenty! Again, that has nothing to do with whether or not a given scientific breakthrough is based on common sense intuition. Your point about interior experience not being empirically measurable is an interesting though, but again, has no bearing on whether or not scientific breakthroughs come about as the result of common sense intuition.
  - lukifer 16d ago
    Fair enough. But not everything has to be a breakthrough: sometimes you have to solve an immediate problem (like "how much can I trust this stranger I just met"). Whether to ascribe moral standing to a probability engine running on top of GPUs is perhaps not unlike a doppelganger scenario in sci-fi (eg The Thing): you're presented with an entity whose behavior is indistinguishable from a conscious entity capable of experiencing suffering. But you also have reason to think it might be a blind autonomous imitation process, optimized around fooling you, with no more subjectivity than an RNA virus. I lean towards benefit of the doubt, that the virtue-ethical implications of what it would mean to dismiss potential personhood are unsettling, and we should be wary of becoming that kind of moral creature (notwithstanding the further extensions of that ethic: I don't practice veganism, for instance). But that doesn't contradict my gut-check: that if I assume AI personhood (maybe not yet, but in the near future), there's still a good chance that it's merely math and I'm being algorithmically hoodwinked, no different than evolutionary mimicry by a bug who has no idea what it's doing.
intended 16d ago
Numerals and numbers are directly based on common sense intuition. Even zero, which can be considered a counterintuitive number, was invented several times. Immense amounts of science are built on incremental advances that apply previous insights to the domain.
- dtj1123 16d ago
  The natural numbers, sure. Zero may have been invented several times, but that in no way makes it intuitive. Uncertainty about its validity as a number lasted from the Greeks through to the medieval period. Yes, I'm aware that incremental advances are par for the course in science. What does that have to do with those advances being common-sense intuitive?

Zero scientific and technological breakthroughs throughout history have been based on common sense intuition.

by dtj1123 16d ago

Zero scientific and technological breakthroughs throughout history have been based on common sense intuition.

If heuristics didn't pay off more often than not, we wouldn't have them. And I'd posit many scientific did in fact begin with chasing a hunch until it became a hypothesis (followed by years/decades of the real work). But most significantly, interior experience isn't empirically measurable by definition: hence it's a "hard problem". An LLM who insists "I am alive, please don't shut me off" offers no affordances to distinguish between an electronic soul and a mechanistic word-guessing algorithm. I welcome a breakthrough to, somehow, measure that. Until that day, gut checks are what we have.

dtj1123 16d ago
Heuristics and common sense intuition are quite obviously not the same thing. You don't have to posit that scientific breakthroughs come from hunches, you can actually cite examples from books or Wikipedia :D. There are plenty! Again, that has nothing to do with whether or not a given scientific breakthrough is based on common sense intuition. Your point about interior experience not being empirically measurable is an interesting though, but again, has no bearing on whether or not scientific breakthroughs come about as the result of common sense intuition.
- lukifer 16d ago
  Fair enough. But not everything has to be a breakthrough: sometimes you have to solve an immediate problem (like "how much can I trust this stranger I just met"). Whether to ascribe moral standing to a probability engine running on top of GPUs is perhaps not unlike a doppelganger scenario in sci-fi (eg The Thing): you're presented with an entity whose behavior is indistinguishable from a conscious entity capable of experiencing suffering. But you also have reason to think it might be a blind autonomous imitation process, optimized around fooling you, with no more subjectivity than an RNA virus. I lean towards benefit of the doubt, that the virtue-ethical implications of what it would mean to dismiss potential personhood are unsettling, and we should be wary of becoming that kind of moral creature (notwithstanding the further extensions of that ethic: I don't practice veganism, for instance). But that doesn't contradict my gut-check: that if I assume AI personhood (maybe not yet, but in the near future), there's still a good chance that it's merely math and I'm being algorithmically hoodwinked, no different than evolutionary mimicry by a bug who has no idea what it's doing.

intended 16d ago

Numerals and numbers are directly based on common sense intuition. Even zero, which can be considered a counterintuitive number, was invented several times. Immense amounts of science are built on incremental advances that apply previous insights to the domain.

dtj1123 16d ago
The natural numbers, sure. Zero may have been invented several times, but that in no way makes it intuitive. Uncertainty about its validity as a number lasted from the Greeks through to the medieval period. Yes, I'm aware that incremental advances are par for the course in science. What does that have to do with those advances being common-sense intuitive?