Literally just mainlining marketing material straight into whatever’s left of their rotting brains.
What assumptions? I was careful to almost universally take a negative stance not a positive one. The only exception I see is my stance against the existence of the soul. Otherwise there are no assumptions, let alone ones specific to the mind.
As if human thought is somehow qualitatively different than a sufficiently advanced algorithm.
is an incredible claim, loaded with more assumptions than I have space for here. Human thought is a lot more than an algorithm arriving at outputs for inputs. I don’t know about you, but I have an actual inner live, emotions, thoughts and dreams that are far removed from a rote, algorithmic processing of information.
I don’t feel like going into more detail now, but if you wanna look at the AI marketing with a bit more of a critical distance, I’d recommend two things here:
a short read: Language Is a Poor Heuristic For Intelligence
a listen: We Are Not Software: David Bentley Hart with Acid Horizon
Edit: also wanna share this piece about generative AI here. The part about trading the meaning of things for the mean of things resonates all throughout these artificial parrots, whether they parrot text or visuals or sound.
I agree; Curious to see what hexbears think of my view:
Firstly there is no “theory of consciousness”. No proposed explanation has ever satisfied that burden of proof, even if they call themselves theories. “Brain = computer” is a retroactively applied analogy, just like everything was pneumatics 100 years ago and everything was wheels 2000 years ago and everything was fire…
I would think that assuming that if you process hard enough you get sentience is quite a religious belief. There is no basis for this assumption.
And materialism isn’t the same thing as physicalism. And just because a hypothesis is physical doesn’t mean it’s automatically correct. Not being a religious explanation is like the lowest bar that there’s ever been in history.
“Sentience is just algorithms” assumes a degree of understanding of the brain that we just don’t have, equates neurons firing to computer processing without reason, and assumes that processing must be the mechanism which leads to sentience without basis.
We don’t know anything about sentience, so going “well you can’t say it’s not computers” is like going “hypothetically there could be a unicorn that shits out solid gold bars that lives on Pluto.” Like, that’s not how the burden of proof works.
Not to mention the STEM “philosophy stoopid” dynamics going on here.
I think artificial intelligence is possible and has already been done if we’re talking about cloning animals. The cloned animal has intelligence and is created through entirely artificial means, so why doesn’t this count as artificial intelligence? This means even the phrasing “artificial intelligence” is incomplete because when people say artificial intelligence, they’re not talking about brains artificially grown in vats but extremely advanced non-biological circuitry. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about circuitry artificial intelligence or even non-biological artificial intelligence. It’s not like there has been any major advancement in the field that has alleviated those skepticism. I believe there’s an ideological reason to tunnel vision on circuitry, that solving the problem of artificial intelligence through brains artificially grown in vats would be “cheating” somehow.
I don’t know about you, but I have an actual inner live, emotions, thoughts and dreams that are far removed from a rote, algorithmic processing of information.
How do you know?
How can you know that live emotions, thoughts and dreams cannot and do not arise from a system of algorithms?
because fundamentally subjective phenomena can never be explained entirely in terms of objective physical quantitites without losing important aspects of the phenomena.
Honestly, at the end of the day I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s on anyone claiming that it is, to provide any proof whatsoever for their assertions. I don’t know for sure, but for the time being, I’m operating under the assumption that fancy statistics is insufficient to describe reconstitute the entirety of human subjectivity.
Just to be clear, the claim is that human thought is qualitatively different than an algorithm, I just haven’t been convinced of the claim. I chose my words incredibly carefully here, this isn’t me being pedantic.
Anyway, I don’t know how you’ve come to the definitive conclusion that somehow emotions aren’t information. Or that thoughts and dreams are somehow not outputs of some process.
Nothing you’ve outlined is necessarily impossible to derive as an output of some process. It’s actually quite possible that they’re only derived as an output of some process, unless you think they’re spawned into existence without causes, which I think religious people do believe (this is the essence of a free soul). I’m not religious.
“some process”, sure, but not every process is an algorithm. My digestion is a complex process with outputs, I wouldn’t describe it as algorithmic though. You might want to do so, and you probably can, but I’d argue you’re just flattening an incredibly complex, species-spanning process into a mathematical representation for ideological reasons at that point.
An algorithm does not exist as a physical thing. When applied to computers, it’s an abstraction over the physical processes taking place as the computer crunches numbers. To me, it’s a massive assumption to decide that just because one type of process (neurons) can produce consciousness, so can another (CPUs and their various types of memories), even if they perform the same calculation.
