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The idea that AI can't be dangerous if it can't refer to itself is transparently idiotic. Machines can always be dangerous. And even in this specific sense of a danger of anthropomophizing tools (which exists), the danger is still there even if the tool doesn't refer to itself. Humans anthropomorphize literally everything, up and including the world itself.
And yet the idea that there is nothing special about human consciousness is even more viscerally wrong.
I know that I have qualia. No materialist reduction has ever explained neither why nor how. All that's happened is people making metaphysical guesses that are about as actionable as the religious idea of the soul or the spirit.
Consciousness is a mystery. And anyone who refuses to recognizes this is either a p-zombie or not honest with themselves. Claims that it can fully be explained by the mechanisms of the brain or by language are EXACTLY as rigorous as the quantum woo bullshit of Deepak Chopra.
Humans are humans. Machines are machines. Humans are not machines. Machines aren't human.
The only reason to grant personhood to machines is to assume that there is no such boundary. That we are no different to machines. There is no reason to believe this of course, since in the real world, humans and machines are wildly different both in the way that they are constituted and in their abilities. Notice the constant need to use hypotheticals.
All that such a belief stems from, is a religious belief in materialism.
If qualia and consciousness are a thing that the brain does, which all available evidence suggests, then there is no reason they shouldn't happen in large language models.
We may not necessarily understand why or how, but clearly that doesn't stop them.
That statement makes no logical sense. You might as well say there’s no reason why qualia and consciousness are a thing the brain does there’s no reason they shouldn’t happen in a calculator.
Sure, if you design a calculator to convincingly imitate human outputs, I'll say the same thing about it.
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And pray tell, what evidence would that be?
Then you don't know if it's happening or not. You're just guessing.
Well, if I hit somebody on the head it tends to impact their conscious processing. Similarly, if I jam an electrode in somebody's visual nerve it tends to have a pretty direct effect on their qualia. And the various other kinds of brain damage to specific regions with repeatable effects on particular kinds of mental operations.
Even before we understood gravity we saw that objects fell. Knowing that something is happening is generally easier than knowing how, and usually predates it.
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The strongest evidence is probably the way in which various forms of brain damage change aspects of personality, in a manner that would be very odd under a soul-radio model of the brain.
Evidence that it happens in the brain doesn't really make it much less mysterious though.
No, there's nothing odd about brain damage changing aspects of personality in the soul-radio model.
If I mess around with a radio, add in an extra subwoofer, change the EQ settings etc to make it sound completely different when it gets played, I haven't actually changed anything about the signal. If you've read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (great read, not so sure it is correct), Jaynes actually gives a really good explanation for what consciousness actually does - and what it does is substantially less than most people actually believe... but that explanation is an entire chapter so I won't post it here.
If messing around with the radio makes it output an entirely different program, one would suspect that it was actually generating, not receiving a signal. (Or changed which signal it receives. Brain damage tunes your body to a different soul/consciousness is an option.)
As far the popular view of consciousness as mostly providing a narrative/excuses for subconscious processes (of which Jaynes' feels like a variation, where the narrative historically wasn't conceptualized as "I" and didn't have to have a single narrator), I feel like that would only more strongly suggest that it is inherently embodied.
What? I cannot understand the point you're making here. If I turn the volume up or down on a set of speakers, I do not in any way begin to suspect that the speakers are the source of the audio signal rather than receiving it. Similarly, I've had psychedelic trips that caused me to behave in extremely odd ways compared to normal - but there was still a solid continuity of consciousness the entire way through. The signal remained constant despite the radio acting in bizarre ways, and when that temporary shift was over the signal returned to normal so to speak.
That is most definitely not how I interpreted Jaynes' work on consciousness. Could you please provide a bit more elaboration on what you think his model of it actually is?
Yes, psychedelics are consistent with the soul-radio model. Dissociatives and deliriants seem a lot more like the sort of brain damage that's evidence against it. The different consciousness part was mostly a joke.
I was going off what I remembered of Scott's review. Rereading it now, my memory of it was wrong, but it seems not very relevant to this conversation. Quoting the review,
But this thread is entirely about the hard problem.
I didn't permanently damage myself with them but I have consumed those substances and never experienced anything that would be inconsistent with that model.
Yes, but there was a specific reason I brought up specific parts of Jaynes' work and if you haven't actually read the book then you won't understand the relevance to it - I said that I was talking about his work in the earlier chapters establishing exactly what consciousness is, rather than the central thesis of his work. I don't think we're allowed to just post entire chapters of copyrighted books in here, so I'll post a quick excerpt that sums up some of the points I was trying to make.
As for the hard problem of consciousness, I think the correct answer is that it falls on the other side of the line dividing science and religion/spirituality. My tradition has an actual answer to the hard problem that I find satisfying and consistent with my experience of reality, but I don't expect that to be convincing to anyone else (though if I had to categorise it as one of the existing responses it would fall under panpsychism).
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I was expecting this to be the obvious answer and I pondered pre-addressing it because it's such a common claim, but the problem with the "altering the brain alters experience therefore the brain is the seat of experience" is that it's not the only thing that does that. Queue the weird syndromes that go with losing limbs or all the new stuff that we've recently learned about the gastrointestinal system heavily influencing mood, or even merely all that goes with the rest of the nervous system.
I think there is a much better argument for the body as a whole being the seat of experience.
Now clearly some pretty important stuff happens in the brain, but like you say, it's mysterious and we don't really know what the deal is.
I think the soul-radio model can actually explain all this in ways that are about as parsimonious overall as the meat-computer model (they both have different massive problems really). But since the particular phenomenon of consciousness that we're talking about here is very much unexplained, there's really no way to tell which one is right, and it's likely neither are in the final analysis.
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Qualia and consciousness (the other sense, not the awake or asleep sense) are made up and can be done away with.
If I say 'oh everyone has a soul and it's a marvellous important spiritual distinction that separates us from animals and rocks we tricked into thinking' people look askance. They ask where the soul is, what properties it might have, what would happen if we removed it from someone. I have to give evasive answers like 'we can't find the soul, it might not be material like literally every other property and object' and 'properties of the soul - uhhh... it lets you feel things'.
For all intents and purposes we might as well not have souls - the concept isn't useful. You can't do anything with the knowledge of souls.
But if you call it qualia, everyone just accepts it as valid! Qualia and souls are effectively the same idea. The whole notion of 'philosophical zombies' is a joke. If there's no way to objectively determine the difference between a philosophical zombie and a 'normal' person with a soul - sorry with qualia... then what's the point of the idea? They are both the same. Just remove the distinction, remove qualia and let's get on with our business. People can feel things like pleasure or pain, we can isolate how those things work and use them to get results. Heroin, anesthetics and so on all hit at those discrete, real concepts. There's no doubt about them. As you say, the capabilities of humans and machines are wildly different in the physical, actual world. But there's no need to make up further separating distinctions in some non-material world.
Qualia is totally unnecessary. How can anyone expect materialism grapple with a concept that isn't even real? And how can a soul appear when the human brain is basically a scaled up monkey brain with some bells and whistles?
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Qualia isn’t soul. It’s something experienced in the brain. It’s very real because every human experiences it.
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I can observe my own qualia right now, thereby refuting this. And it doesn't require the existence of a soul or any strictly dualist framework (I'm a realist myself). I know that I'm experiencing this interaction. And you can't really explain why or how I feel like I am.
This is enough of a mystery that I don't feel you're equipped to make any of the inferences you're making given you can't explain it.
Of course I can't offer any evidence of this observation by construction. But I know I'm right insofar as it's not the sort of observation that can be falsified (c.f. Descartes).
You think that thinking is an example of qualia. So you think that if you are thinking then you have qualia.
Say I thought that qualia and thinking were themselves included in remsajev. That doesn't make remsajev real. Things don't become real just by defining it such that it includes other things. Qualia isn't real either. There's no mystery at all, not of remsajev or qualia.
Who is the „you” here.
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Call this experience of reality "thinking" if you will. Insofar as you can't explain it it's really no different.
Refuge in semantics won't save you from making claims about things you don't understand being epistemologically indigent.
Explain it? It just is.
Why do positive and negative charges attract? They just do. There's nothing to understand or explain, it just is. I don't need to explain qualia because it's nonsense with zero value, except to philosophers who need some make-work.
Quite. But I'm not the one extrapolating that onto objects that share no relation to humans when we have no knowledge of how it works.
Somehow I feel like "we don't know anything about this" is not the position that requires substantiation.
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The idea that qualia is "made up" or "not real" seems difficult to defend. You can verify for yourself right now as you're reading this that you are directly experiencing qualia at this very moment. It is not a speculative thing like a soul that may or may not exist. Qualia is the one thing you can be quite sure exists. "I think therefore I am."
Maybe qualia is not important or is not a useful distinction, but that's different from saying it's not real. And in practice most people seem to think that qualia is very important indeed, so you would need to do some serious heavy lifting to prove otherwise. For example, the moral difference between killing someone in a video game and killing someone in real life primarily comes down to the differences in the qualitative experiences the two acts produce; the video game death produces no negative qualia, the real death produces large amounts of negative qualia in the victim and their friends and relatives.
Where is the qualia? I am reading, my eyes are moving, information is being processed. All of those are real things. Existence is real. But where does qualia come in? If you use qualia to mean the 'experience of reading and thinking' then it has zero value. The experience of reading is inherent when you read. If you define qualia as having experiences, then why can't I define a soul as that which is necessary to have experiences? It's nonsense.
People in real life are not simulations running on a few hundred lines of code and some textures! There's a huge actual difference between a bandit in Skyrim and a bandit in the real world.
This seems like an admission that qualia in fact exist, which would refute your claim that it's "not real." Whether it has value is a different question.
What is your evidence for this claim? If I ask a human to read and summarize some text, the human will have the experience of reading. If I ask Chat GPT to read and summarize some text, it's unclear whether it will have any experience at all, and I think most people assume it does not. A cleaner example: a human has the experience of adding numbers whereas a simple digital calculator does not.
If the video game NPC had the subjective experience of being shot and dying, it would be immoral to kill the NPC. The moral weight of killing the NPC does not depend on how many lines of code are involved, but rather whether qualia are involved. This refutes your claim that qualia has "zero value."
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Maybe your interlocutor is a philosophical zombie.
Every time this subject comes up I wonder if zombies are the main life form in existence or if modernity has somehow created them. Who the hell comes up with the thought experiment of a “philosophical zombie” who is identical in every way but lacks consciousness and forgets to consider the possibility of p-zombie 2.0, one that seems identical until you ask them about consciousness?
And who but a zombie hears their interlocutor denying the existence of qualia and then tells them, “you lie!” without imagining that they might be accurately reporting on their own inner experience?
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They are not the same thing at all. Start here.
That link doesn't have meaning. They're just inventing nonsense based upon assumptions of ideas that don't exist. It has no relation to the real world, no potential uses and no falsification. This is just make-work for philosophers.
Would a brain made up of Chinese people acting as molecules have emotions? Providing they mapped out all the hormones and so on, of course. Emotions are real things that can be observed. They then take a step further into the feeling of emotions, as though that's separate from emotions themselves. That sense of the word 'experience' from their philosophical zombie idea doesn't work, it's not a real thing.
Would that woman who's read about red but not seen it truly understand what red is? They assume there is an 'experience' of seeing red inherent in the question. She simply hasn't seen red, she's read a lot of documents and knows a lot about red. There's no confusion here other than what confusion the philosophers bring with them.
Do you know what it feels like to feel pain?
Do you agree that when you touch a hot stove, you experience a feeling of pain which accompanies your other behavioral indicators of pain (saying “ow”, pulling your hand away, etc)?
If the answer is yes, then you understand what qualia are.
Your desire to dunk on philosophers is distracting you from the fact that this is a very simple concept that every person is intimately familiar with.
The vast majority of contemporary philosophers are materialists about qualia anyway, so I don’t know what you’re getting so worked up over.
I feel pain and irritation with this whole debate.
This is a very simple (and wrong) concept. When you feel pain, you are feeling pain. Not qualia! The feeling of pain is just pain. You can't have pain without a feeling of pain, they're one and the same.
(Probably!) not true. Fish act as if they feel pain, but study of their neurology indicates they probably don't. Call them "p-fish-zombies".
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I will offer myself as an example of someone who believes that humans are special and have value in a way that a machine can never have, but who also believes that there are other reasons to grant personhood to machines (or other entities such as alien life). I've already given one: we're basically forced, in a Molochian sense, to grant personhood to anyone or anything whose allyship is important enough. This is analogous to how one can be a nationalist, yet treat foreigners as persons for pragmatic reasons.
I would not conflate having a theory for how personhood is granted in practice, with a "religious" belief. I'm open to being wrong about this theory; it's falsifiable.
Of course here we're straying from the idea of personhood as some innate quality and into some arbitrary social category. As someone who likes natural law it irks me. But alright.
I'm ready to debate the pragmatic argument for giving machines personhood, that one is indeed not a religious debate. But I still come on the side of the Butlerian Djihad here. I think extending moral consituency to objects is a terrible thing to do and strictly bad for humans.
Consider how someone could be executed for destroying a machine that isn't alive, as that would be murder. Unless you can make a compelling argument that this is a required compromise for humanity to even survive (which I'm not convinced we have enough data to even speculate on), how could you allow such a thing to happen? It seems as abominable to me as doing so for killing a pet.
I am convinced not even the smartest dog is worth one human life. Am wholly ready to extend this reasoning to aliens. And I would like to see the argument you can even make for machines.
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