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Comment by bulatb | Hacker News Reader

You can't interrogate your qualia. A lot of people think (or really, feel) that makes them magic.

It doesn't.

But if you feel they're magic, you'll never believe that a "random" mechanical process, which you think you can interrogate, could ever really have that spark.

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Welcome on hackernews, where thousands years old philosophical problems are solved through plain assertions!

Qualia might still be magic. Maybe we have souls or something, I don't know.

I'm comfortable with saying that this way of answering the question doesn't work, because the argument is simply, "How can it be false if I believe it's true?"

Turns out we have technologies and experiences with technology which weren't possible until very recently. Some things just look very different in hindsight.

Nothing changed in regard to so called hard problem of consciousness. All thought experiments and arguments like Chinese Room and p-zombies are still applicable.

Philosophy of mind hasn't started nor ended with Dennett, and definitely not with AI hype manufacturers.

I subscribe to the ‘qualia is atoms in a trenchcoat’ school of philosophy personally, but I understand that it might be hard to accept and even harder to not be depressed about it.

Well sure. As best we can tell the whole universe is a mechanical cause and effect chain, and the illusion of free will is just that, an illusion.

Or possibly... There is something else going on, and we just haven't figured it what it is yet. I'm not betting either way at this point.

Well, it doesn't matter whether the AI has qualia, as long as it produces the right output.

Define 'magic'.

LMAO really? Who said anything about qualia?

LLMs lack the capacity for invention and metacognition. We're a long way from needing to talk about qualia; these things are NOT conscious and there is no question.

This website is absurd. "I don't think LLMs are all they're cracked up to be" "YOU'RE JUST MAD BECAUSE QUALIA AND YOU WANT TO BE MAGIC"

no the "magic" text generator just writes bad code, my dude

Only the people on r/singularity care about qualia in this context and let us remember this is a mechanism without even a memory

Nobody is thinking about qualia. That's only how I framed it. They just know the machine will never replace them. They're a person, doing person things, and it's a machine.

So every time it proves it can, they move the goalposts and invent a truer Scotsman who can never be replaced by a machine. Because they know it can't do person things. It's a machine.

Hang on a sec... the qualia research institute might take umbrage at that first bit.

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