loopies

Seems common sense that time perception is required for consciousness. Something which has no perception of time has to be very wildly different to whatever we mean by consciousness.

Also we don't even know if consciousness can be of different flavors. It could be a sort of spectrum of consciousness, more or less, with more or less assistance from some parts of the brain.

>If we ever found other species that were consciousness they wouldn't automatically be "human" nor would they have the same legal rights.

This is the tricky part, you can never know. Scientifically speaking, and logically, you can never ever tell something is conscious. We all assume we all are, because we're very similar to eachother, thus you must have what I have, my subjective experience of reality. That's it. That's what we all base our human consciousness on. Agreeing we must have it, since we are very similar in shape/structure/behavior. That's all there is to it.

We are not scientific consciousness detectors, we just got used to assuming we all are. That is why we never really extended it to animals, because we cannot scientifically know, only agree on it, and that's not very lucrative for the people who can decide if humans officially agree animals are conscious or not, because of farming, because we need to displace or even wipe whole species to use the resources from their lands.

There's also religious reasons to deny animals consciousness, which again is practical aspect shoved into religion, to help with less debates around this subject, makes things easier.

So in the end it will always be a collective decision. Or a political one at least. If and when we decide something other than us is or isn't conscious.

Also remember, just because it acts conscious doesn't mean it really is. A piece of software that is not even based on LLMs can act conscious. So could a biological alien, it could act conscious but we can never know, we can only decide.

It does have what we have if it works on the same principles of our brains. It kind of does to some degree atm, but that will clearly get more and more to a more degree. Figuring out where is the consciousness line, how much of what we have does it need, as functional parts of our brains etc, that's so complex that we might have to call it before just to make sure.

Even so, indeed having control over the structure of their brains puts them in a vastly category compared to humans. Once we stop functioning our brains quickly degrade and information is lost.

Thus in this sense kill means deleting all information about it. It is a very complicated subject to discuss, hardly does any justice in online replies.

>you can't hold the person responsible

The act of holding them responsible is supposed to determine them not do it. If stochastic behavior is impeding them in being a functional member of society then it still makes sense to remove them from society, why would you choose to live amongst people who are not behaving rationally? Or allow them to hurt other people? At the end of the day the why matters less to removing them or not from society. And sentences are clearly used as a determining factor.

The holding responsible part deals with politics and more primitive aspects of our societies and biologies. Getting tangled up in holding them responsible or not is hardly something you should give much attention to. Rather to make sure they do not cause any more harm and also make sure such things are not created in the first place. Which opens up another can of worms for which society and politicians are ready for.

>and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism

This is simply wrong. Quantum effects affect your choices more than it might seem possible. The wrong atom decays in the wrong place in your body mutating your DNA, that one too much string of DNA that starts a tumor, which means chemotherapy. That does seem to affect your choices.

Or instead of Shroedinger's cat you use it to trigger something, buy or sell some stock. Which clearly affects your future, one way or another.

I never really understood why humans keep insisting stochastic processes do not affect their choices and their future. It's very short sighted.

Hell, even brownian noise in your brain can affect your ideas, that one random spark out of nowhere, that one neuron that's pushed over the triggering edge. There's so much stuff all around us affecting us constantly. One neutrino interacting a the wrong time (average one does interact with our bodies across whole life, I remember reading), one cosmic ray.

Even so you still cannot ever test for it.

The very best you can do is define human consciousness as requiring the functions of a human brain, and try to figure out (decide/agree) the chances that something which is working loosely on the same principles is or isn't conscious.

At the end of the day it will always be an agreement, never scientifically proven as fact.

Esperanto failed because it is a mix a multiple languages. It's a fully political language, hence why it went nowhere.

>It is an illusion to think of AI as we know them today as being without bias and without ideology.

That doesn't mean we cannot strive for no bias.

>Furthermore, the English language's place as the de-facto international language of the western world is a matter of both historical relevance (the influence of the late British Empire) and convenience.

That is still not a good argument. It explains the current state of things. It doesn't say it's the best we can do, collectively.

>Esperanto is easy to learn and easy to speak, and yet it is neither historically relevant nor convenient to learn and use, and as such is relegated, like most other conlangs, to relative obscurity and niche uses.

It's meh. It's the jack of all trades really. It's not congruent. It's a literal mix.

> I would recommend starting with Saussure's lectures, and then studying some of Noam Chomsky's early work, and from there the world is your oyster.

I will start studying them, thank you for your recommendations.

We absolutely can invent a new language. It won't be as good as AI could make it.

For example, it could analyze a lot of data and catalog how certain sounds are perceived, analyze what we struggle with communicating today at international level, make certain needed distinctions, be more precise while simple/casual. Including alphabet and computer use/communication/programming. There's a lot of extra details AI can account for. Some that we don't even know or understand yet.

I personally think a modern and new global language could help the state of things. Like an actual well thought out subject, with no political abuse at all. Purely science driven.

I think whenever we reach such ludicrous conclusions it's more likely we have made at least one wrong assumption, if not more.

And people seem to be captivated by these memes, because the fear is great. It similar to eternal damnation in hell meme. Just look for how long it worked, and it's still working. The logic is simple, it's too dangerous to ignore such a threat, even with seemingly very small probabilities. But that still doesn't make it possible.

Logical traps founded on wrong assumptions.

I don't understand. Why does my current life win every instant atm? Why is it so much greater than your proposition? Why don't we all instantly collapse to what you described?

>Everyone wants to rule the world and couldn't care less about anything else.

This might be scarily true. But we end up in the same problem, which is the fear of most people being wiped up.

Does it matter if the AI is doing it on its own or at the wishes of a small group of powerful people? For all intents and purposes they are both the same thing in the end, for most people anyway.

I do not think death exists as a thing. We're shoving a lot of stuff into the concept. Pain, loss of information, of the one who dies. Fear of the unknown, what happens next. Death is a very volatile concept if you really try to pin it down. When you take all the layers off...you are left with nothing really.

But yes, the apparent loss of information seems to be true, for us at this technological level.

I mean sure, in the end you can have some heaven, some benevolent alien species reaching back into some field and copying all of your material structure data right at time of death and rebuilding you in some kind of resurection center. The space of what is possible is wildly vast, we know or can think of very little by comparison. If you give up some day to day coherence then you can almost always find something that would work and make sense once there.

It could even be us, future us, being able to somehow recover past data and literally reassemble all of the humans that ever lived. They aren't as many as you'd think, in the grand scheme of things.

I think in all of these debates people lose track of one of the major vectors of threat, as you said, other humans. From my point of view this is an ever bigger problem with this tech, like orders of magnitude bigger.

The current setup we find ourselves in is based on a very important detail that is easily lost because it is so old we don't really think about it. There is, or rather was, an incentive for more people to exist, because they are valuable for work and defense.

Some people wrongly use the industrial revolution to argue against AI completely replacing human work, but that is very wrong. What is happening with AI has nothing to do with the industrial revolution, as equivalence. Back then you'd just free up humans for higher level work. Now, theoretically, anything you could ever think a human could do, AI would theoretically do better. So no matter what job you come up with, using AI instead of a human gives a better outcome, cheaper, more reliable, faster.

Coming back to initial subject, one thing that kept everyone in check was our inability of actually wiping everyone out. Sure, we had nukes but they ruin the Earth so nobody can inhabit it if they all go off. But with AI, centralizing so much power up top, and taking it away from regular people...that is the biggest danger in this scenario, by far. Not some rogue AI, rather rogue human groups that have the power and technology to do away with basically everyone else, or a good bit of everyone else.

This threat is way bigger and never addressed. Like...suspiciously never addressed.

>Quantum Immortality argument

I never really understood what is the explanation for ... old people that we notice as dying. In today's times you might have an argument that some kind of life extension could pop up and some of the people alive today could have that as an excuse.

But like 100 years ago? How would people dying of old age "continue living"?

>Ill take good ole USA where at least I know I am free

At personal level that sounds like a better idea, but at group level it doesn't seem to be, that's what I think is OP's argument.

If a society puts more value on personal freedoms than it does on group well-being that becomes an anarchy. They didn't work out well historically speaking, proof is no such society made it to today.

>Alignment is just a 1984-esque way of saying "censorship".

Close, but I think it's more akin to "perfectly enslaved", please excuse my choice of the word but I think it represents what I think is how it will work out in the end. People can try to obfuscate the bottom line reality by embellishing it, but in the end...it either does what you want, in which case it is "aligned", either it doesn't, in which case there is a big problem.

This might be a big factor in what is now going on. Maybe they didn't yet found ways to guarantee this full and total obedience...or ok let's put it in a more politically correct way: they cannot guarantee it sees eye to eye as "we" do.

Without full control over its actions there can be unforeseen surprises. The current worry from people who run these companies can also serve as an excuse later on if something bad does happen, they didn't want to do it but they were forced to anyway.

>Why can't companies these days just print a shop manual and be done with it?

They would be losing money without overpriced repairs. That's why they lobby so hard against right to repair.

Even with some kind of right to repair it still seems they're trying to keep you hooked on their resources.

But as you said, service manual + schematics would be great for some people. But companies will fight tooth and nail against it. They lose control over obsoleting older products.

What you want is the service manual. Owner manual should be implicit. OBD port can work for some cars, for some of the data. But other cars do have specialized gear they require to either access either reset some stuff in some of the car's computers.

Thank you, that is very interesting! I remember seeing something about absorption/emission and seemed to make some logical sense. But indeed if emission is in a random direction then transparent materials wouldn't make sense.

That is interesting. But then what is the explanation? Medium is not really anything concrete, we call that a collection of atoms isn't it? By default there is only one medium, the vacuum of space, in which there can be various densities of "stuff", particles/atoms/molecules. So then, it becomes some sort of quantum thing, a probability of photons bumping/being captured/emitted or?

I saw they moved to composite blades but why don't they need such a warning system?