In the same way that you not understanding how lightning is formed does not prove the existence of Zeus.
Objectively, Zeus does not exist, can we convince everyone of that? Probably not. Does that matter? No.
Speaking as a theoretical physicist: we don't know that. What we do know is we have a better explanation for lightning within a conceptually simple framework (starting from a few simple principles) with predictive power, compared to an explanation that involves some mysterious old dude doing mysterious things with no evidence whatsoever. Could Zeus or Thor or whatever exist? Sure; there's no way to prove their non-existence. Do we need them to explain things? No.
It's similar here. We certainly don't need some elusive concept of "sentience" to explain chat bots. Not yet.
I think most physicists think that if you started with a description of the positions and velocities etc of all the particles in a human, and put them into a supercomputer the size of the moon, and had the computer run a simulation using the standard model, then the simulated human would act identically to a real human.
But there’s a number of open questions when it comes to consciousness – would the simulated human have a simulated consciousness, or would it have a consciousness that’s just as real as yours or mine despite coming from a simulation?
If the consciousness is just as real as yours or mine, that obviously means it would be very unethical to simulate a human being tortured, since you’d be creating the exact same consciousness experience you would get if you tortured a non-simulated person. isn’t it kind of a surprising implication that there’d be programs that are unethical to run? A bunch of logic gates computing pi presumably have no conscious experience, but if you make them fire in a different order they do?
Meanwhile, if the simulation doesn’t have a conscious experience, then that means you don’t need consciousness at all to explain human behavior, same as you don’t need it to explain ELIZA.
Anyway, since you’re a physicist I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts
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Just created a throwaway to reply to this. As a trained therapist (currently working in another field), with a degree in psychology, this seems... Seriously ill informed. Do physicists really think this?
Imagine you create your perfect simulated human, that responds according to the exact phenotype of the person you're simulating. Lets remember you'll have to either duplicate an existing person, or simulate both the genotype and the in-vitro environment (especially the mix of uterine hormones) present for the developing foetus. Now you have to simulate the bio, psycho, social environment of the developing person. Or again, replicate an existing person at a specific moment of their development - which depending on which model of brain function is correct may require star trek transporter level of functional neuroimaging and real time imagining of the body, endrocrhine system etc.
So lets assume you can't magically scan an existing person, you have to create a believable facsimile of embodiment - all the afferent and efferent signals entering the network of neurons that run through the body (since cognition doesn't terminate in the cortex). You have to simulate the physical environment your digital moon child will experience. Now comes the hard part. You have to simulate their social environment too - unless you want to create the equivalent of a non-verbal, intellectually disabled feral child. And you have to continually keep up this simulated social and physical environment in perpetuity, unless you want your simulated human to experience solitary psychosis.
This isn't any kind of argument against AGI, or AGI sentience by the way. It's just a clarification that simulating a human being explicitly and unavoidably requires simulating their biological, physical and social environment too. Or allowing them to interface with such an environment - for example in some kind of biological robotic avatar that would simulate ordinary development, in a normative social / physical space.
It doesn't? It only mentioned "a supercomputer the size of the moon" to simulate that one person. It says nothing about simulating the extra-person part of the universe.
Prior to quantum mechanics, they did indeed. But that's because classical mechanics was 100% deterministic. With quantum mechanics, only the probability distribution is deterministic. I don't think any physicist today believes it's possible, but merely "theoretically" possible if there was a separate universe with more energy available (hence outlandish conjectures like the universe is actually a simulation).
The philosophical point you're making is also interesting in a "devil's advocate" sort of way. For instance, let's say the AI in question is "sentient." What right do humans have to preside over its life or death?
Those kind of questions might engender some enlightenment for humanity regarding our treatment of living creatures.
What does “real” mean? Isn’t it too anthropic to real-ify you and me and not some other being which acts similarly? What prevents “realness” to emerge in any complex enough system? We’re going to have a big trouble when non-biological aliens show up. Imagine going to the other planet full of smart entities and finding out their best minds are still sort of racist for what’s “real” or “just simulated”, because come on, a conscious meat sack is still an open question.
(Not defending Lemoine, he’s clearly confused)
How do you even know that anyone else exists and this is all not a figment of your imagination?
From the perspective of the philosophy of science, it’s 100% impossible to disprove non-falsifiable statements. So scientifically speaking OP is 100% correct. Science has no opinion on Zeus. All it says is “here’s an alternate theory that only depends on falsifiable statements and the body of evidence has failed to falsify it”. Science can only ever say “here’s something we can disprove and we have tried really hard and failed”. Whether that lines up with how the universe works is an open question. Epistemologically it’s seemed a far better knowledge model for humanity to rely on in terms of progress in bending the natural world to our whims and desires.
So if you’re testing the statement “Zues was a historical being that physically exists on the same physical plane as us on Mt Olympus” then sure. That’s a pretty falsifiable statement. If the statement is “Does Zeus, a mythical god that can choose how he appears to humans if they can even see him and can travel between planes of existence, exist and live on Mt Olympus” is not something falsifiable because a god like that by definition could blind you to their existence. Heck, how do you even know that the top of Mt Olympus is empty and Zeus not that he just goes ahead and wipes the memory of anyone he lets return alive? Heck, what if he does exist but the only reason it was Olympus at the time because that’s what made sense to human brains encountering him in Greece. What if he actually exists in the core of the Sun?
B) Valhalla was a dimension he travelled to regularly to celebrate the finest warriors in the after life. Why do we think his Olympian throne was on the same dimensional plane as us?
C) Why would we trust a human recording from so long ago to actually capture the happenings of celestial beings?
D) Ragnorak ended with massive floods. How do we know that didn’t erase all evidence on Mt Olympus? Geological records certainly support evidence for massive flooding explaining the reason it shows up repeatedly across religious texts.
Like seriously? You’re seriously arguing that this particular god’s historical existence is falsifiable? What’s next? The tooth fairy is falsifiable because all known instances are parent’s hiding money under your pillow?
Mythological beings have a degree of specificity and some degree of power. The more specific and the less capable a mythological being is of erasing those specificities the easier it is to falsify.
Simply put, sentience is just a combination of thousands attributes such that if something has all those attributes it is "sentient."
The attributes are so many that it's hard to write down all the attributes, additionally nobody fully agrees what those attributes are. So it is actually the definition of a word that is very complex here. But that's all it is. There isn't really a profound concept going on here.
All these arguments are going in circles because the debate focuses around vocabulary. What is the one true definition of "sentience." Sort of like what is the definition of the color green? Where exactly does green turn to blue on the color gradient? The argument is about vocabulary and the definition of green, that's it... nothing profound here at all.
How would you define sentience in an objective way given our current understanding of the universe?
Don't get tricked into thinking it's profound. You simply have a loaded word that's ambiguously defined.
You have a collection of a million attributes such that if something has all those attributes it is sentient, if it doesn't have those attributes it is not sentient. We don't agree on what those attributes are, and it's sort of hard to write down all the attributes.
The above description indicates that it's a vocabulary problem. The vocabulary induces an illusion of profoundness when in actuality by itself sentience is just a collection of ARBITRARY attributes. You can debate the definition of the word, but in the end you're just debating vocabulary.
It's not worth debating sentience anymore then it is to debate at what point in a gradient does white become black.
At what point is something sentient or not sentient? "Sentience" is definitely a gradient but the point of conversion from not sentient to sentience is artificially created by language. The debate is pointless.
Here's a better example. For all numbers between 0 and 100,... at what point does a number transition from a small number to a big number? Numbers are numbers, but I use language here to create the concept of big and small. But the concepts are pointless. You may personally think everything above 50 is big, I may think everything above 90 is big. We have different opinions. But what's big and what's small is not meaningful or interesting at all. I don't care about how you or I define the words big or small, and I'm sure you don't care either. These are just arbitrary points of demarcation.
When you ask the question at what point does an AI become sentient... that question has as much meaning as asking the number question.
When seeing the world with the ego dissolved it is very hard to grasp what sentient really means.
I don’t know anything about AI but I understood that some symbolic AI systems had a symbol referring to themselves (correct me if wrong).