I agree; Curious to see what hexbears think of my view:
Firstly there is no “theory of consciousness”. No proposed explanation has ever satisfied that burden of proof, even if they call themselves theories. “Brain = computer” is a retroactively applied analogy, just like everything was pneumatics 100 years ago and everything was wheels 2000 years ago and everything was fire…
I would think that assuming that if you process hard enough you get sentience is quite a religious belief. There is no basis for this assumption.
And materialism isn’t the same thing as physicalism. And just because a hypothesis is physical doesn’t mean it’s automatically correct. Not being a religious explanation is like the lowest bar that there’s ever been in history.
“Sentience is just algorithms” assumes a degree of understanding of the brain that we just don’t have, equates neurons firing to computer processing without reason, and assumes that processing must be the mechanism which leads to sentience without basis.
We don’t know anything about sentience, so going “well you can’t say it’s not computers” is like going “hypothetically there could be a unicorn that shits out solid gold bars that lives on Pluto.” Like, that’s not how the burden of proof works.
Not to mention the STEM “philosophy stoopid” dynamics going on here.
I think artificial intelligence is possible and has already been done if we’re talking about cloning animals. The cloned animal has intelligence and is created through entirely artificial means, so why doesn’t this count as artificial intelligence? This means even the phrasing “artificial intelligence” is incomplete because when people say artificial intelligence, they’re not talking about brains artificially grown in vats but extremely advanced non-biological circuitry. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about circuitry artificial intelligence or even non-biological artificial intelligence. It’s not like there has been any major advancement in the field that has alleviated those skepticism. I believe there’s an ideological reason to tunnel vision on circuitry, that solving the problem of artificial intelligence through brains artificially grown in vats would be “cheating” somehow.
I think it’s a huge reach to call cloning “AI”. We created a funny way to make a genetically identical copy of an organism that still has to be implanted into a womb. It’s entirely natural and you’re not creating something by copying it. It’s not even remotely close to building a sentient machine from scratch.
But semantics aside the question is whether a glorified chatbot is actually sentient, which is what the vast majority of people refer to as “AI”.
I agree; Curious to see what hexbears think of my view:
Firstly there is no “theory of consciousness”. No proposed explanation has ever satisfied that burden of proof, even if they call themselves theories. “Brain = computer” is a retroactively applied analogy, just like everything was pneumatics 100 years ago and everything was wheels 2000 years ago and everything was fire…
I would think that assuming that if you process hard enough you get sentience is quite a religious belief. There is no basis for this assumption.
And materialism isn’t the same thing as physicalism. And just because a hypothesis is physical doesn’t mean it’s automatically correct. Not being a religious explanation is like the lowest bar that there’s ever been in history.
“Sentience is just algorithms” assumes a degree of understanding of the brain that we just don’t have, equates neurons firing to computer processing without reason, and assumes that processing must be the mechanism which leads to sentience without basis.
We don’t know anything about sentience, so going “well you can’t say it’s not computers” is like going “hypothetically there could be a unicorn that shits out solid gold bars that lives on Pluto.” Like, that’s not how the burden of proof works.
Not to mention the STEM “philosophy stoopid” dynamics going on here.
I think artificial intelligence is possible and has already been done if we’re talking about cloning animals. The cloned animal has intelligence and is created through entirely artificial means, so why doesn’t this count as artificial intelligence? This means even the phrasing “artificial intelligence” is incomplete because when people say artificial intelligence, they’re not talking about brains artificially grown in vats but extremely advanced non-biological circuitry. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about circuitry artificial intelligence or even non-biological artificial intelligence. It’s not like there has been any major advancement in the field that has alleviated those skepticism. I believe there’s an ideological reason to tunnel vision on circuitry, that solving the problem of artificial intelligence through brains artificially grown in vats would be “cheating” somehow.
I think it’s a huge reach to call cloning “AI”. We created a funny way to make a genetically identical copy of an organism that still has to be implanted into a womb. It’s entirely natural and you’re not creating something by copying it. It’s not even remotely close to building a sentient machine from scratch.
But semantics aside the question is whether a glorified chatbot is actually sentient, which is what the vast majority of people refer to as “AI”.