TheVat

Emily recently got this disturbing message from a fertility clinic: Cleveland sire suggests egg user is DNA, Level C.

My feeling has been that the OP likes to trumpet their humility while accusing anyone who points out their incomplete understanding of science or the philosophy of mind as arrogant or psychopathic. For me, the real discussion never really started, as there was no attempt to distinguish between concepts like AGI and consciousness. The former has well-established scientific criteria, the latter does not, and there lies the rub. One fairly clear summary of the Hard Problem is to be found in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (sometimes a little more accessible for the neophyte than the SEP): The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious. It is the problem of explaining why there is “something it is like” for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states “light up” and directly appear to the subject. The usual methods of science involve explanation of functional, dynamical, and structural properties—explanation of what a thing does, how it changes over time, and how it is put together. But even after we have explained the functional, dynamical, and structural properties of the conscious mind, we can still meaningfully ask the question, Why is it conscious? This suggests that an explanation of consciousness will have to go beyond the usual methods of science. Consciousness therefore presents a hard problem for science, or perhaps it marks the limits of what science can explain. Explaining why consciousness occurs at all can be contrasted with so-called “easy problems” of consciousness: the problems of explaining the function, dynamics, and structure of consciousness. These features can be explained using the usual methods of science. But that leaves the question of why there is something it is like for the subject when these functions, dynamics, and structures are present. This is the hard problem. In more detail, the challenge arises because it does not seem that the qualitative and subjective aspects of conscious experience—how consciousness “feels” and the fact that it is directly “for me”—fit into a physicalist ontology, one consisting of just the basic elements of physics plus structural, dynamical, and functional combinations of those basic elements. It appears that even a complete specification of a creature in physical terms leaves unanswered the question of whether or not the creature is conscious. And it seems that we can easily conceive of creatures just like us physically and functionally that nonetheless lack consciousness. This indicates that a physical explanation of consciousness is fundamentally incomplete: it leaves out what it is like to be the subject, for the subject. There seems to be an unbridgeable explanatory gap between the physical world and consciousness. All these factors make the hard problem hard. The hard problem was so-named by David Chalmers in 1995. The problem is a major focus of research in contemporary philosophy of mind, and there is a considerable body of empirical research in psychology, neuroscience, and even quantum physics. The problem touches on issues in ontology, on the nature and limits of scientific explanation, and on the accuracy and scope of introspection and first-person knowledge, to name but a few. Reactions to the hard problem range from an outright denial of the issue to naturalistic reduction to panpsychism (the claim that everything is conscious to some degree) to full-blown mind-body dualism.

Boston. Figures. Now I'm recalling a series where there's sort of a Rapture like event, not normally my taste, but it was so well done as a familial drama with great performances by Justin Theroux and Carrie Coon, among others, that I was sucked in. Or up, whatever applies. Had a great theme song by Iris Dement, "Let the Mystery Be." IIRC the narrative gets in some pretty sharp digs at the religious interpretations and reactions to what has happened, and them goes off on some more sci-fi direction mixed with magical realism. Really peculiar show. It doesn't spoonfeed you anything - you have to sort out your bafflement. Possibly the best familial drama that HBO ever did. The show addresses the question of numbers which @toucana mentioned in the OP. About 2% of humanity disappears, but there are no clear-cut moral attributes about them. And the title finally came to me: The Leftovers.

Well maybe. I don't think we can guarantee where intelligent discussion will go or if it will connect all this LLM chatting with Martin Buber. Buber, it is worth noting, was looking at human-human interactions in his famous I/Thou paradigm, and was wanting humans to acknowledge each other's full humanity rather than be transactional or objectifying each other. Buber wanted to diminish egoism in human interactions and have people be authentic with each other. I'm not sure how Bubers humanistic approach really can bridge over to a human/LLM interaction. I don't post in cases where I'm not interested. And I suspect you will find no shortages of intellectual curiosity - but it may be tempered with skepticism about any particular assumptions that are made about subjective awareness in current AI. This would I hope only serve to sharpen our understanding of both scientific and philosophical issues that swirl around machine intelligence and behavior.

Not surprised I'm not the only person to think of this - 20 year old me, had the opportunity arisen, couldn't have resisted. When I googled "rapture trolling" however all my search results led this direction: http://rapturetrollingflies.org/

This thread seems to be going down a similar road as the Summoning the Genie of Consciousness from the AI Bottle thread in early August - which was closed. A review of that thread shows considerable discussion on how automated pattern recognition and stochastic token prediction is not sufficient for either AGI or consciousness. I would hope a new thread could go somewhere else.

As one AI expert described it, "glorified autocomplete."

I would think deleting spam, of the overt kind we're seeing, would make sense just on the basis of managing database storage space. Maybe just keep a log of IP numbers, to get an idea of where all this garbage is coming from. Hopefully not from a predatory giant Norwegian squid.

It would be fun, on an upcoming rapture day, to buy up a big pile of clothes, shoes, cheap wigs, etc. from a thrift store's bargain bins, and then arrange them in little piles all over town. Have wildlife camera traps to record people's reactions.

I think you are talking of phenomenology. The Stanford Encyclopedia defines it as: The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy... I have no "paradigm" that forbids a phenomenological inquiry in which we all examine and compare our subjective experiences, and how they structure reality. There are important areas of cognitive science which do just that, and which acquire data of some kind. I recommend looking at Edmund Husserl who did pioneering work in this field, notably on the value of phenomenological analysis to science. And examining all our assumptions in order to remove bias. I think you'd like Husserl, if you are not already familiar with him. He offers a way for Eastern and Western ideas to have a dialogue. How would a wager be an illusion? I have a thought on what is most probable - I don't think there's any basis to doubt I had such a thought and that one element of that thought is a wager on the ontological position called physicalism. My wager is real as a phenomenal entity, even if what I posit about reality is delusional.

I'm reposting this, now that we're in Phil, edited down to the questions I wanted @Prajna to hear. I think others also addressed particularly the effectiveness of science and the consistency of empirical data on things we aren't looking at. The Pure Mental Universe posited doesn't seem to require (AFAICT) such a plethora of nitpicky physical effects, laws, particles, etc. It conjures some sort of deceitful Imp who is constantly throwing illusions at us to waste our time. And on what are the illusions based? If I simulated a land of castles and dire wolves, it would be derived from having seen castles and large wolves.

Our reluctance to step in front of a speeding bus suggests we all carry some belief in an exterior world that exists outside our consciousness. A society of beings which consisted entirely of minds occupying a realm itself composed entirely of mental phenomena would seem to lack an evolutionary push towards fear of onrushing buses - where would be the consequences of physical destruction which drive natural selection? Wouldn't we, perhaps for easing our minds in the presence of illusory buses, rather develop skills like making buses bounce off of us or flying over them or having them pass through us like ghost objects? For that matter, why wouldn't we just scrap buses and rely on flying carpets or teleportation? It seems like a poor wager to bet that this is all illusion and that the great effectiveness of science is merely a taxonomy of shared hallucinations. It also blithely passes by the question of how brains really work. If all we need is an amorphous blob of "mindstuff" in our mental universe to be conscious, then AI researchers could close their labs, go find an attractive rock, and declare it to be sentient. Wigs and makeup optional. BTW, a good name for a sentient rock is Opal.

Some Little Willie poems, anyone? Into the family drinking well Willie pushed his sister Nell. She's there yet, because it kilt her Now we'll have to buy a filter. Little Willie, mean as hell, Threw his sister in the well. Said his mother when drawing water, "Sure is hard to raise a daughter." Willie saw some dynamite, Couldn't understand it quite. Curiosity never pays; It rained Willie seven days.

Seems like the topic has diverged into doughnut holes. Semantics can be a bog that traps us when we get lost in descriptions and confuse them with whatever is being described. Sometimes semantic analysis can get us out of the bog - what do we mean when we say unicorn? Are we referring to an existing thing in the world...or are we referring to a cluster of representations of human acts of imagination? When the morning star and evening star were given two names by the Greeks, did they actually refer to two distinct things or just to Venus at different parts of its orbit? Send in the linguistic philosophers! (Pre-Hellenistic Greeks apparently believed they were referring to two different celestial objects) (so they referred to a state of affairs that did not actually exist in the external world outside their heads)(but we refer to one existing planet when we say either Phosphoros or Hesperos)(so reference matters to meaning) If the topic is consciousness in AI, then we are in a scientific enterprise where precision of language is needed and not poetry. We need to define specifically what is meant by consciousness and what is known about the neural correlates of consciousness and what can be verified regarding any subjective reports of a conscious experience. OT aside: Little Willie from the mirror Licked the mercury all off Thinking in his childish error It would cure his whooping cough. At the funeral, Willie's mother Smartly said to Mrs. Brown, "Twas a chilly day for Willie When the mercury went down!"

After reading this, I was wondering how much of a threat could arise from the recent work in AI engineered viruses. https://wapo.st/4myUS35 (Free gift link) We’re nowhere near ready for a world in which artificial intelligence can create a working virus, but we need to be — because that’s the world we’re now living in. In a remarkable paper released this month, scientists at Stanford University showed that computers can design new viruses that can then be created in the lab. How is that possible? Think of ChatGPT, which learned to write by studying patterns in English. The Stanford team used the same idea on the fundamental building block of life, training “genomic language models” on the DNA of bacteriophages — viruses that infect bacteria but not humans — to see whether a computer could learn their genetic grammar well enough to write something new. Turns out it could. The AI created novel viral genomes, which the researchers then built and tested on a harmless strain of E. coli. Many of them worked. Some were even stronger than their natural counterparts, and several succeeded in killing bacteria that had evolved resistance to natural bacteriophages. The scientists proceeded with appropriate caution. They limited their work to viruses that can’t infect humans and ran experiments under strict safety rules. But the essential fact is hard to ignore: Computers can now invent viable — even potent — viruses....

Am familiar with SNN. In short, they more emulate human neuronal communication, and continue the trend towards more bio mimicry in AI architectures. Natural selection in difficult environments has made biological NNs remarkably efficient and powerful - no surprise that AI research is heading in the biological direction. They're incorporating other bio-inspired neuron dynamics like SFA, spike frequency adaptation (if you want to wade deeper into this stuff). Given the horrific power usage of conventional ANNs, I would think SNNs are going to be inevitable with their considerable energy savings. I recall when all the talk started up about computers would need to become more analog in their neural dynamics to get all those bio inspired goodies. The SNN is taking the field more in that direction. For instance the "leaky integrate-and-fire" model, which is a common SNN neuron model, describes a continuous, time-dependent membrane potential. This potential builds up from incoming spikes and decays over time i.e. it leaks...that is analog behavior.

@MigL it doesn't seem Trumpian if everyone registering has the same hurdles to join and the hurdles pose no serious obstacle to a legitimate person. As I said earlier, maybe the registration form could be bolstered: have a couple questions which require reading comprehension one would need for actual participation on such a website and would require changing information on a daily basis so that spammers couldn't share prepackaged answers. Or, as you said, require review by a moderator before account activation. Also, and I don't know how workable any of this is, but require all answers to be done by keystrokes and not pasting. In fact - brain fart! - maybe require the first five newbie posts be typed in, nothing pasted.

Hehe. Looks like a giant clog of spams in Science News, all around 7-9 hours ago. If that's helpful. Hard to imagine these airlines, which most of the spams are, would really want to be associated with ad campaigns that border on DDOS attacks.

Spam ban thank you, man. Could there be a slightly more challenging registration test? Questions that weed out more bots and still let people from various cultures and education levels in? It's 753 MDT and there's a really thick cluster of spams from three hours ago. I can't scroll past them to find more legit overnight posts from all those nutty Limeys who get up so early.

Lozenge surplus transom comestible minstrel poodle.

Our basement has cats but no catacomb. Sometimes they make noises down there that will raise the dead - there is a constant struggle where I try to figure out how to secure all materials in the workbench area and storage area and they figure out how to dislodge them and knock them around, then hide them. Cats have 50% more cortical neurons than a dog, and they are all devoted to mischief. (And none to obedience, which is why I like them) Impressive. In this area, our house built in 1906 is considered quite old. The foundation is heavy fieldstone walls, two foot thick in some places, which is atypical of US basements.

I wasn't espousing the metaphysical conjecture of nonphysical reality, but showing how it conflicts with technological ambitions like interstellar travel. To use an analogy to clarify, if I could make rugs fly with my mind why invent airplanes?

Oh yes, I agree Europe is generally ahead on multiple aspects of infrastructure. Many places here grew quite rapidly, and there was a pressure to slap up developments quickly, and not build sturdy or storm/fire-proof. And now we have places where insurance companies just abandon a whole region because homes were not built to withstand hurricanes or flooding. Back in New York's rough years in the 70's, landlords would burn their properties in the Bronx for quick money because they were impossible to sell to anyone. Then the insurance companies pulled out, obviously. So no new projects could be built there. The whole country has major problems with zoning and insurance and other things that need to resolved if new better housing and infrastructure is wanted.

@Prajna - your philosophy seems in conflict with itself. If there is only consciousness, and there is no physical world, then what would be the point of science in studying what are only illusions or false appearance? Why should any species bother with interstellar travel when such travel is only an illusion? Would not we do better to develop a way for our consciousness to skip space/time and meet other sentient species directly?

Well I assume you would...dice them up first.