Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive

• arendjr@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  This definition of consciousness essentially says that humans have souls and machines don’t.

  It does, yes. Fwiw, I don’t think it’s necessarily exclusive to humans though, animals and nature may play a role too.

  It’s unsatisfying because it just kicks the definition question down the road.

  Sure, but I have an entire philosophy set up to answer the other questions further down the road too 😂 That may still sound unsatisfying, but feel free to follow along: philosophyofbalance.com

  It claims that none of our normal analysis and measurement tools apply to it.

  I believe that to be true, yes.

  That may be true, but if it is, how can anyone defend the claim that an AI does or does not have it?

  In my view, machines and AI can never create consciousness, although it’s not ruled out they can become vessels for it. But the consciousness comes from outside.

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  • nednobbins@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I think this is likely an unsurmountable point of difference.

    The problem is that once we eliminate measurability we can’t differentiate between reality and fantasy. We can imagine anything we want and believe in it.

    The Philosophy of Balance has “believe in the universal God” as its first core tenant. That makes it more like a religion than a philosophy.

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    • arendjr@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yeah, I think I see where you’re coming from. It’s a fair point, and we need to be very careful not to loose sight of reality indeed.

      The idea of the Universal God is very tolerant towards “fantasy” so far as it exists in the minds of people, yet it also prescribes to align such belief with a scientific understanding. So the thing I’m trying to say is: believe what you want to believe, and so long as it’s a rational and tolerant belief, it’s fine. But it does explicitly recognise there are limits to what science can do for us, so it provides the idea of Universal God as kind of a North Star for those in search, but then it doesn’t really prescribe what this Universal God must look like. I don’t see it as a religious god, but more a path towards a believe in something beyond ourselves.

      In the book I also take effort to describe how this relates to Buddhism, Taoism, and Abrahamic religions, and attempt to show how they are all efforts to describe similar concepts, and whether we call this Nature, Tao, or God, doesn’t really matter in the end. So long as we don’t fall into nihilism and believe in something, I believe we can find common ground as a people.

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      • nednobbins@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I can understand a desire to find something beyond ourselves but I’m not driven by it.

        That’s exactly where Descartes lost me. I was with him on the whole “cogito ergo sum” thing but his insistence that his feelings of a higher being meant that it must exist in real form somewhere made no sense to me.

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