interesting idea, could you say more?
541 karma · joined January 27, 2016
I also think it is tipping their hand a bit. I know companies can do multiple things at once, but what might this flirty assistant focus suggest about how AGI is coming along?
I do like that many people have learned to recognize the writing style and visual aesthetic, and are rejecting it.
> maybe people will do creative things with it
_Some_ people will do _some_ creative things with it, but most people will use it as a shortcut—as long as there's some kind of output, they couldn't care less about the quality. How much of correspondence is just an LLM summarizing what a different LLM wrote? If the internet wasn't dead before, this is surely killing it.
For every creative task I've given an LLM in the last 2 years, if I cared at all about the output, I ended up redoing it myself by hand. Even with the most granular of instructions, the output feels like a machine wrote it.
I have yet to meet anyone who felt any kind of emotion from generated art, except for "wow, it's cool that AI can make this". That's because (imo) art comes from experience, and experiencing is absolutely not what LLMs do.
Meanwhile, my dad, whose AI experience amounts to using MS Copilot "two or three times," is sending me articles about Devin, and how it's over for software engineers.
It was an extremely interesting moment of observing conscious awareness that I think about all the time.
LOL!!
Why?
It would just need to _look like_ it has an effect on the simulated brain, right? If you ask me a question and I pause, say "hmm", and put my hand to my chin, can you know that I am actually thinking and formulating a response? If the entirety of your observations are external, of course you can't. There is no way to tell if my response is a random choice from an array of preset answers, or a group of concepts activating each other.
That's because brain activity is part of what our inner, first-person experience looks like from a second-person perspective (ie, an external observer). Tears are not sadness, they are what sadness looks like, they are an external description of an internal state. Sadness can only be experienced by the person experiencing it. Tears are a description of sadness. But can't tears be faked?
So when we see the same neuronal activity in both brains, we have no way of knowing whether inner experience actually gave rise to the activity, or it just looks like it did.
> Just ask, in advance. If you're a valuable employee
That is a massive, massive if.
> From this it follows that I can create a computer model of a human brain, complete with all the cells, proteins, neurons, etc, and that human brain will be capable of any action (eg, the signals sent by neurons out of the brain) a real human brain is. There would be no way to discern between a real flesh and blood human brain and the simulated one by talking to it. Since a real human brain tells you that it's conscious and has internal experience, the simulated one must tell you the same.
> While the simulated human brain will tell you that it's conscious, it is of course not proof that it is.
I still agree with all of this. A simulated brain could give the appearance of consciousness while not being conscious. It would not have a private conscious inner life, but it could say things that make it look like it did.
> If thoughts and feelings are a thing that don't pass the computability test, but a simulated human brain doesn't have external behavior that differs from a flesh and blood human brain, then no, thoughts and feelings have no effect or even influence on your behavior. In such a case they are a mere passenger. Any effect they have would necessitate that the particles and fields within the brain suddenly behave in a way that violates our model of particles and fields.
I am struggling to follow your point here. Thoughts and feelings are internal experiences which correlate with phenomenal consciousness and are absent in a simulation. Could you give me an example of the effect you are describing and how that would violate our current models?
Well, I'm arguing it's the other way around. But to address what I think is the spirit of your question: if reality is only mind, if consciousness is truly fundamental, then why can't you read my thoughts? Why do we feel like individuals? Why do we have obviously separate private conscious inner lives?
When you are asleep and dreaming, your "alter" generally does not know they are dreaming. Your dream self has dissociated from your waking self, but it is only after you wake up that you realize you were dreaming (if you even remember). Another example of this phenomenon is Dissociative Identity Disorder, where one mind splits into many alters, each unaware the others exist. I'm glossing over a significant amount in order to get to my point, but here are a couple links that go into great detail:
- https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/JCdbmFCHYB0C?hl=en&gb... (chapter 5)
- https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/2/2/10/htm#sec4-philosophies-... (search for "Yet, we know empirically that living people have separate, private experiences (Fact 6)")
My point is, our private conscious inner lives are dissociations, alters, from a "mind-at-large" fundamental consciousness. And the boundaries of these dissociations, the "containers" of individual private conscious inner life, (again glossing over so much, like panpsychism's combination problem) are metabolizing organisms. Metabolizing organisms are what alters _look like_ from the outside. Kastrup:
"Since we only have intrinsic access to ourselves, we are the only structures known to have dissociated streams of inner experiences. We also have good empirical reasons to conclude that normal metabolism is essential for the maintenance of this dissociation, for when it slows down or stops the dissociation seems to reduce or end. These observations alone suggest strongly that metabolizing life is the structure corresponding to alters of [fundamental consciousness]
But there is more: insofar as it resembles our own, the extrinsic behavior of all metabolizing organisms is also suggestive of their having dissociated streams of inner experiences analogous to ours in some sense" (from the mdpi link)
>This would also mean that our internal conscious experience has no effect on what decisions we make, on whether we cry, smile, what memories we form, etc.
Don't your thoughts and feelings influence your behavior?