siglesias

6 ms·

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by siglesias 9mo ago
https://siglesias.com
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by siglesias 1y ago
When I say "experience," I mean a sufficient grounding of certainty about what a word means, which includes how it's used, how it relates to the world that I'm experiencing, but also the mood or valence the word carries.
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by siglesias 1y ago
Can you expand on this? The thought experiment is just about showing that there is more to having a mind than having a program. It’s not an argument about the capabilities of LLMs or AGI. Though it’s worth noting that behavioral criteria co
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by siglesias 1y ago
"Actual understanding" means you have a grounding for the word down to conscious experience and you have a sense of certainty about its associations. I don't understand "sweetness" because I competently use the wo
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by siglesias 1y ago
I’m with you 98% of the way and then things take a sharp turn. In your world, the mere behavior determines the understanding. In Searle’s the CAUSES of the behavior determine the understanding. The causes are knowable. He stipulates a setup
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by siglesias 1y ago
@Kim_Bruning The point of the experiment is that there is some opaque boundary where the behavior is indistinguishable--that's the empirical stance of behaviorists, what goes on inside "doesn't matter." The empirical bou
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by siglesias 1y ago
lol. Imagine a husband arguing to his wife: if you can't tell that I'm cheating on you, what's the point of the distinction of faithful vs. not?
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by siglesias 1y ago
As I've argued elsewhere, we should care what the source of the behavior is. The reason expand ethical concern to dogs and birds even though they don't have the capability to use language and why we don't to LLMs, even though
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by siglesias 1y ago
Ok, things are getting a little heated and personal so I'll attempt to engage one more time in good faith. The premise of the argument is that the Chinese Room passes the Turing Test for Chinese. There are two possibilities for how thi
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by siglesias 1y ago
Your vocabulary presupposes the categories you’re asserting are equivalent. The process of evolution and AI training are vastly different. One confers a survival advantage and is suffused with values that are essential to humans, such as mo
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by siglesias 1y ago
Again, it’s not an epistemological test. In reality the material difference between a computing machine and a brain is trivial. It’s showing there’s a categorical difference between the two. BTW—ethically it matters a great deal. If one sys
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by siglesias 1y ago
That's not the entire point, but it is the a big part of the premise. The entire point, on the contrary, is that the system inside the room does not have anything with conscious understanding of Chinese DESPITE passing the Turing Test.
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by siglesias 1y ago
The argument doesn’t have to go that far. I think most people have the intuitive, ha, understanding that “understanding” is grounded in some kind of conscious certainty that words have meanings, associations, and even valences like pleasant
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by siglesias 1y ago
He’s not arguing that it’s not possible to devise such a test. He’s saying, lay out the features of consciousness as we understand them, look for what causes them in the brain, look for that causal mechanism in other systems. Although for w
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by siglesias 1y ago
First point: if you imagine that the brain is doing something like collapsing the quantum wavefunction, wouldn't you say that this is a functionally relevant difference in addition to an ontologically relevant difference? It's not
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by siglesias 1y ago
I would encourage deeply digging into the intuition that brain states and computer states are the same. Start with what you know, and then work backwards and see whether you still think they aren’t different. For example, we have an intuiti
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by siglesias 1y ago
Searle has written responses to dozens of replies to the Chinese Room. It's likely that you can find his rebuttals to your objection in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on the Chinese Room, or deeper in a source in
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Digital Doppelgängers and Lifespan Extension: What Matters?(tandfonline.com)
1 points by siglesias 2y ago|0 comments
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by siglesias 2y ago
I’m curious how finance teams actually work around these--surely many of them actually do use Stripe effectively?
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by siglesias 3y ago
A while back when I noticed that many upscale gyms were offering high-calorie workout smoothies, shakes and bars. When I did the math, it happened that most of them would completely obliterate whatever workout you had just done (assuming yo
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by siglesias 3y ago
I think as a culture we've gotten far too comfortable being complicit in casual corruption, rationalizing that "it's just the way things are." We should remind ourselves that it doesn't need to be this way.
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by siglesias 3y ago
I'd challenge this assumption. ChatGPT is supposed to convey information and answer questions in a manner that is intelligible to humans. It doesn't mean it should write indistinguishably from humans. It has a certain manner of pr
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by siglesias 4y ago
I appreciate the helpful links, and I do have training in physics so the sense in which information is described in physics is not lost on me (it's essential to even 19th century thermal physics). However, there is a discrepancy betwee
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by siglesias 4y ago
I just want to flag that assuming that humans and other animals are conscious because they have brains is not superstition in the same way that inferring consciousness from behavior is. I assume you concede these are two different leaps of
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by siglesias 4y ago
Your friends (and animals) have brains, which produce consciousness, which you take for granted when you interact with them. That’s not a superstition. Can you say more about “a collection of things”? What causes that collection of things?
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by siglesias 4y ago
I think one of our greatest risks is precisely the opposite--anthropomorphizing computer programs because they produce certain behaviors. They will very clearly exploit us by claiming they're conscious, scared, and in pain. Claiming so
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The Case Against Moral Status for AIs(blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk)
1 points by siglesias 4y ago|0 comments
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by siglesias 4y ago
I cannot recommend highly enough having a set of glass bottles[1] at home. Fill them at the tap (or wherever), refrigerate them, take them to the gym, in the car, serve to guests. Point is to have many, keep a rotation going. Has greatly re
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by siglesias 4y ago
>> Right now there is only one really extreme "side" in the U.S. I urge you to consider that this attitude is the very problem under discussion.
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by siglesias 4y ago
I discovered something like this recently when I tried the prompt "man throwing his smartphone into a river," and for the life of me I could not get DALL-E to render the phone separated from the hand (I tried "like a boomeran

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