To be 85 and lack basic wisdom is quite an astonishing achievement.
It doesn’t seem obvious to me.
At least the zealots who knockon my door. I've had a few good conversations.
Ditto for LLM sentience. We have no evidence either way.
And the older I get, this does make sense to me. Belief in a soul doesn't really require proof for me. I understand that this may not be satisfying in an academic way for some, but "humans have souls and machines probably don't" strikes me as the wisest default position until we have some other very strong proof otherwise.
Wouldn't the wise position be that since there is no evidence of souls at all that the default should be that both humans and machines do not contain a soul until proven otherwise?
I get that this isn't as rigorous as one might like, but I think in the real world it's wise.
And if the theory of evolution is true, at what point did “humans” begin to possess souls?
So many questions when you put tiniest bit of thought in whole concept...
Can we measure souls?
Sort of like how the collection of particles you see as a tree doesn’t look like that without being passed through a bunch of brain hardware. If we want to be pedantic we can accurately say that trees don’t exist, but given that physical object and tree are constructs in the human brain it’s pretty convenient to just treat them as “real”, while at the same time understanding that at some granular level they aren’t truly “real” (and at some further granularity we actually have no clue what’s real).
I imagine people don't dig it because it can be woo and vibey, but the older I get the more I understand the value of the "imprecise" metaphysical/religious/etc whatever you want to call it.
Someone in this space who handles this very well, unlike Dawkins, is Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Maybe the lesson is that all those public intellectuals are not that wise and we should follow people more that stay in their lane.
( Also note the "Trump comes out against regime change in Iran: We can’t get totally involved…We can’t even run ourselves" thing in the first post, lol)
But also, there is some sadly common brand of stupid that Taleb fell victim to when it came to thinking about Harris v. Trump on matters in the Middle East.