Two strikes against the hypothesis:
- LLMs suggest that human-like "cognition" can be somewhat mimicked by purely mechanical means.
- Exposing the brain to an MRI would affect cognition if there was a quantum element to it.
- LLMs suggest that human-like "cognition" can be somewhat mimicked by purely mechanical means.
- Exposing the brain to an MRI would affect cognition if there was a quantum element to it.
This is not a strike against that hypothesis. Quantum systems can be simulated using non-quantum computers but that doesn't make non-quantum computers into quantum computers. Similarly, mimicking some aspects of human cognition doesn't mean you can replicate all of human cognition with the same method.
when mice were exposed to cosmic ray bursts (to test for effects on past and future astronauts traveling to moon and mars)
the mice learned much much more slowly and forgot things much much faster
how's that for "cognitive corruption" ?
(btw this is also why I laugh when Musk thinks he's going to Mars ever, it's not just a one-way trip, he wouldn't even survive the journey itself with current technology and unlike earth there's no magnetic field or enough atmosphere on Mars to deflect them)
These are solvable with known methods.
They make the whole thing rather less romantic.
If you're going to the trouble of e.g. burying your base under regolith or wrapping a planet in a big coil and lots of PV to make an artificial magnetic field, it very quickly becomes apparent that for essentially all possible disasters short of "oops we made a black hole and it caused a magnitude 15 earthquake and all the crust everywhere liquified and mixed with all the water so even ocean bases weren't safe", it's much, much easier to survive disasters on Earth without actually leaving Earth, than to go to Mars and have a normal day.
If someone made a robot factory that went mad and converted all the nitrogen in our atmosphere into ammonia (killing all the plants that no longer had access to the atmospheric nitrogen), while also producing enough smog to halve how much sunlight we got, and dumped a lot of endocrine disruptors into our water cycle, the top of Mount Everest and the Sahara desert would each still be much more hospitable than Mars is today.
Enough humans seem to be repelled by the idea of transhumanism that they may well insist on doing it the hard way.
I do like the theory of using a massive amount of water to surround a ship as a shield, it solves a lot of radiation problems and something humans desperately need for long travel (with super-recycling) but not a solution once you get there
and we'll definitely have super-advanced space-drones, eventually
It's hard to tell given your phrasing but it almost sounds like you're insinuating that traveling to the moon is technically impossible, which would be quite a bold claim given the success of the Apollo missions. Apologies if I misinterpret.
they founds hundreds of grooves from cosmic ray particles that cut through the transparent front shield
the astronauts were seeing bursts of light even with their eyes closed
so their organs and brains were being damaged by particles moving at 99.9999% (26x.9s) the speed of light
if they had stayed for days they would have had permanent eye and brain damage and possibly other organs
so unless they invent domes and spacesuits that are COMPLETELY immune to cosmic rays (no such technology yet) humans are not walking around on the moon or mars for more than a few days
even astronauts on the ISS get eye damage with extended stays
there's a story of one trying to hide behind the battery racks to stop the bursts of light in their eyes even when closed during an extreme burst
space wants to kill humans, it doesn't even have to try hard
the Earth is amazing in how it protects us and how life is literally everywhere
ps. even space telescopes have to have their images cleaned up from hundreds of cosmic ray burst that hit their sensors and damage them, the raw images are very "dirty"
LLM emulate cognition, there is a huge difference, it's a mimick process not genuine
if you read about psychopaths/sociopaths, they do not comprehend emotions but they can learn to emulate them by watching others and mimicking them
that's exactly what LLM is doing, it is taught to assemble words in a way that mimics all the humans in its huge datapool, so it comes off as "cognition" because that's what the humans it's emulating were doing
LLMs don't have conscious processes that perform that kind of reasoning.
If anything the fact that they are blackboxes to their own behavior and are able to non-verbally empathise, is the opposite of what you describe.
Your requirment for something supernatural/quantum to decide between emulation and real thing is self referential.
If only we could tell either way, we'd have made a huge breakthrough in the philosophy of consciousness.
If it's not in the inner COT it isn't there.
An inner monologue isn't something all humans have[0]. It is unclear to me how well (or poorly) Chain of Thought mimics intrapersonal communication. J-space probes (and other things) suggest there are, in fact, other aspects to LLM "thought" besides a CoT scratchpad[1].
However, regardless of how those questions pan out, qualia (of emotions in this case, but the problem is in general) is its own mystery, one for which we are still, so far as I can tell, unable to make progress with.
We kinda know what emotions are for, what function they serve in our genetic fitness, but why do they feel like anything? We do not know, they just do.
[0] https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrapersonal_communication