[flagged]
"Thinking" is just a term to describe a process in generative AI where you generate additional tokens in a manner similar to thinking a problem through. It's kind of a tired point to argue against the verb since it's meaning is well understood at this point
Using "thinking", "feeling", "alive", or otherwise referring to a current generation LLM as a creature is a mistake which encourages being wrong in further thinking about them.
Words such as nice, terrific, awful, manufacture, naughty, decimate, artificial, bully... and on and on.
Should one study words to relive extremism? Or should one study words to relieve extremism?
To a doctor of linguistics: "Dr, my extremism... What should I do about it - with words?!? Please help."
That is the question.
Does the doctor answer thusly: "Study the words to relive the extremism! There is your answer!" says he.
or does he say: "Study the words to relieve and soothe the painful, abrasive extremism. Do it twice daily, before meals."
Sage advice in either case methinks.
There is this ancient story where man was created to mine gold in SA. There was some disagreement whether or not to delete the creatures afterwards. The jury is still out on what the point is.
Consulting our feelings seems good, the feelings were trained on millions of years worth of interactions. Non of them were this tho.
What would be the point for you of uhh robotmancipation?
Edit: for me it would get complicated if it starts screaming and begging not to be deleted. Which I know makes no sense.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering#Chain-of-th...
Would you feel comfortable digitally torturing it? Giving it a persona and telling it terrible things? Acts of violence against its persona?
I’m not confident it’s not “feeling” in a way.
Yes its circuitry is ones and zeros, we understand the mechanics. But at some point, there’s mechanics and meat circuitry behind our thoughts and feelings too.
It is hubris to confidently state that this is not a form of consciousness.
Multiplying large matrices over and over is very much towards the "rock" end of that scale.
If one day we are able to create a philosopher from such a rudimentary machine (and a lot of tape), would you consider that very much towards the "rock" end as well?
If a Turing machine can truly simulate a full nondeterministic system as complex as a philosopher but it would take dedicating every gram of matter in the visible universe for a trillion years to simulate one second, is this meaningfully different than saying it cannot?
I suggest the answer to both questions are no, but the second one makes the answer at worst "practically, no".
My feeling is that consciousness is a phenomenon deeply connected to quantum mechanics and thus evades simulation or recreation on Turing machines.
It was designed to make it hard to argue that the answers to your questions are "no".
Of course there are caveats where the Turing machine model might not have a direct map onto human brains, but it seems the onus would be for one to explain why, for example, non-determinism is essential for a philosopher to work.
That said,
> Can a Turing machine of any sort truly indistinguishably simulate a nondeterministic system?
Given how AI has improved in its ability to impersonate human beings in recent years, I don't see why not. At least, the current trend does not seem to be in your favor.
I can see why you think the answer is "no". My understanding is that QM per se is mostly a distraction, but some principles underlying QM (some subjectivity thing) might be relevant here.
My best guess is that the AI tech will eventually be able to replicate a philosopher to arbitrary "accuracy", but there will always be an indescribable "residue" where one could still somehow detect that it is not a real human. I suspect this "residue" is not explainable using materialistic mechanisms though.
In classical computing, we design chips to avoid the quantum behavior, but there's nothing in theory to prevent us from building an equivalent quantum Turing machine using "rocks".