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Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

Alchemy was a crucial stepping stone towards science. The scientific understanding of matter didn't develop as a parallel story in opposition to it but as an organic outgrowth or continuation from it. Newton himself was deep into weird alchemy stuff.

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After a quick skim the issue isn't really whether its alchemic, but overclaiming. Especially the last sentence of the abstract seems to give the impression that more is known than is the case.

> Our analysis suggests that no current AI systems are conscious, but also shows that there are no obvious barriers to building conscious AI systems.

A lot hinges here on "suggest" and "obvious", which the authors can hide behind if put on the spot, and it's vague enough that most readers (especially journalists and hype influencers) will glance over those terms and think science can now detect the presence of consciousness in AI systems.

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Consciousness is a bad metric I think. Experiments show that some insects possess self awareness, can learn by observation, and have language (and culture, as an extension of memetic evolution)

Here is a thought provoking question:

Of a feral human being raised without language or culture of any kind (perhaps survived from infancy on an island with no mammals)

And a dog, fully wired into a GPT4 level LLM including connections to emotional response

What is more “conscious”? More “human” (in the social sense)?

The dog could clearly participate in society, while the other demonstrably (based of the history of feral humans) probably cannot.

Is it our culture then that makes us “human”?

Is self awareness == consciousness?

Is the moral value of a life form defined by the depth and richness of inner experience of existence? Or by the ability / need / desire to use tools?

It’s entirely possible that the inner experience of being of some animals (elephants, dolphins, whales, ???) might be actually richer and more complex than our own. Animals in aquatic environments especially have little need of tools, shelter, etc so we cannot judge their inner sophistication by external evidence of technology.

Aside from their practical utility, LLMs have highlighted a peculiar state of being in philosophical conversation, the thinking, reasoning daemon.

"No obvious barriers" is very different from "obviously no barriers".

I mean, when you start driving west from New York, there are no obvious barriers to keep you from going clear to China. You haven't gone far enough that you can even see the barrier yet. (Yeah, I know, nobody actually starts driving west from New York without knowing that the Pacific Ocean is out there...)

We can't see any obvious barriers because we don't know what consciousness is. We don't know enough to know whether there are barriers, let alone what they are.

I have yet to read it, but it looks and feels like more of a review article than anything claiming to be progressing the field.

The thing I find interesting about the idea of the paper (again, haven’t read it, so this is an assumption) is that there are philosophy academics who don’t put consciousness on a hand-wavy metaphysical pedestal. More of that please.

> Newton himself was deep into weird alchemy stuff.

Did Newton get anything resembling an accurate idea of chemistry from studying it? Or was alchemy a horrible distraction for a mind that was entirely capable of making huge advances in chemistry if the well hadn't been poisoned by mysticism?

> A lot hinges here on "suggest" and "obvious"

No, everything hinges on their analysis, which is what they were explicitly referring to. If I tell you that my analysis of my finances suggests that there are no obvious ways for me to buy a new house, I'm not using weasel words.

The distinction between mysticism and sane rational stuff is only clear in hindsight. There was no obvious intrinsic difference and indeed many contemporaries of Newton disliked the postulation of a seemingly mysterious universal force (gravity) that can influence objects across astronomical scales. While popular conception often equates Newton's ideas with the mechanistic "clockwork" view of the universe, gravity was in fact considered the opposite at the time. The more grounded and "sane" people wanted a "billiard ball" physicics where things interact more straightforwardly than gravity looked like.

It's very hard to put ourselves in the shoes of those living in previous eras. If you think you can easily do it you most likely are missing something. Most scientists did stuff that is now considered a bit wacky. Mathematicians were deeply concerned about the theological implications of their work and indeed a lot of the motivation to do it came from a similar place in the first place.

This is not an endorsement to believe any old nonsense. It is just that it's naive to think you could have prevented those detours. If you really think you could have just told Newton which parts are same and which parts are woo, based on some obvious first principles, you probably overestimate yourself. The reason we know that science works is by knowing what didn't work. If the scientific method and empiricism, model building etc was so straightforward, you bet that many smart people would have come up with it earlier. Whenever you actually look at real history, you will see that it's not some stupid superstitious people holding back the enlightened sane and rational scientists. It's humanity grappling with figuring things out, without answers handed down to them from anywhere. It's very easy to look down on quackery today that we have Wikipedia, textbooks, pop science, etc. But when you need to figure stuff out from nowhere it's much murkier.

By your logic I can say that:

Liquid is a crucial stepping stone towards solid. So liquid is just half solid.

My point is that you have to start somehow. The whole reason to explore is that you don't yet know the answer. If you have no idea what matter is, then some magical ideas of the philosopher's stone can get you going.

This kind of paper is very different from ones about already well understood concepts most of us are familiar with as course materials for example. A syllabus on relativity or on information theory will be much more solid and crisp, but that's not a reason to not explore as yet poorly understood phenomena.

No you don't start non-science and get science. You must start from science.

People applied the scientific method in trying to discover/create alchemy. Including Isaac Newton. In fact his investigations of alchemy is what lead him to discover the prismatic nature of light and invent color theory.

Science is a process, not a result.

> applied the scientific method in trying to discover/create

You just described Chemistry with another name.

> Isaac Newton discover the prismatic nature of light and invent color theory

And this is science. Do experiment, conclude regarding the result, never say shit like "white is pure".

You only recognize a sharp distinction in hindsight.

I think one big problem (among many) with science education is that we only learn the end results and take too many things for granted as a result. I find that science can be immensely more fascinating when understood through a historical lens, trying to understand the goals and assumptions and mental frameworks, open questions at the times of important breakthroughs.

What are you talking about? Experimental physics started before Newton, that guy called Galileo Galilei.

Well, there's the Pitch Drop Experiment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment

Sure you do not read "liquids which appear solid".

It is liquid.

By your logic I can:

Make a terrible analogy and then pretend it undermines your argument by way of false equivalence.

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