Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

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>because I have a well developed theory of what consciousness

Then show me a link to your paper so I can formally rebut it.

>I don't want to discuss what consciousness is

But you sure want to tell us you know what it is with very strong convictions and we should listen to you because of course "You are right person that's very right".

The funny thing here is the vast majority of people that are deeply into philosophy or scientific study of the mind will not have any of the certainty you profess. The word "doubt" is used constantly. The saying "The harder we push the borders the more fuzzy the concepts become" is very commonly used. There may be nothing more complex than this.

Saying you have a well developed theory here just serves as a warning to others to discount your statements.

No, there is no reason for you to listen to me.

Go ahead believing rocks are conscious if you like.

Do you go out on weekends asking people to stop abusing rocks?

Rhetorical question - I don't care what you do on weekends.

Bye!

You'd hate Michael Levin's work then.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that right now the majority of people would agree with you. They would say that obviously ChatGPT isn’t conscious, based on their intuitions, but would struggle just like you are when pressed to explain their reasoning.

So I think it’s more than fine for you to have your views and share them, but I wouldn’t expect to have any influence or part in the conversations around whether AI is conscious if you can’t explain why (or simply refuse to). Which, again, is fine!

Side note: I also think that once we have AIs that are sufficiently advanced, the popular opinion will swing to “of course they’re conscious”, because again, most people are going almost entirely off their intuition rather than reasoning from first principles, just like you see to be.

Could go either way...

1) Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck - it's conscious!

2) Looks like a robot, built like a robot - it's not conscious!

I've always assumed that for the majority of the people it'll be 2).

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