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> The latter is what gives the symbols meaning and humans are not threatened by the former. For what it's worth, I think you're wildly wrong a) that the Chines
by davmre 11y ago
> The latter is what gives the symbols meaning and humans are not threatened by the former.
For what it's worth, I think you're wildly wrong a) that the Chinese room experiment has anything profound to say about conscious experience, and b) that most AI researchers haven't thought about this.
That said, MIRI is concerned exactly with threats from machines that are very very good at processing meaningless symbols. If someone writes a simple reinforcement learning algorithm, asks it to produce paperclips, and it destroys the human race (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer), we're really past the point of caring whether the algorithm has awareness of its own experience. There are interesting philosophical questions there, but it's not within the domain of solving the problem MIRI cares about.
- dmfdmf 11y ago> For what it's worth, I think you're wildly wrong a) that the Chinese room experiment has anything profound to say about conscious experience, and b) that most AI researchers haven't thought about this. We'll just have to disagree about a) but see my answer to the other reply about the implicit question behind the CRE. Regarding b), I never said they haven't thought about it. I said "few people truly understand" by which I meant they have failed to understand the implications and have drawn the wrong conclusions. You don't get gold stars for thinking hard. Regarding LessWrong, all I can say is that you can't know you are "less wrong" until you know what is true. In logic you can't assume an unknowable as your standard of the true. But to reiterate my point, these are questions of philosophy and epistemology, fields which absolutely essential to the "domain of solving the problem MIRI cares about".