TheVat

Thanks, I guess there are some that aren't really "gap" arguments, though those tend to be the ones I hear the most over here. As @exchemist mentions, there are "logic" arguments like the fine tuning one, though even that sort of relies on a gap, where the strong anthropic principle is rejected because the proponent of the fine tuning argument assumes that we can never establish the reality of a multiverse (a multiverse which would then reduce the FT argument to a puddle argument - this depression in the pavement fits me ever so well!)

Yep, I had noticed that Israel had to convert the infrastructure of Gaza into gravel before marginally nobler sentiments could emerge. Quite difficult imagining the NPP board in Oslo saying, "hey, he bullied everyone (including us) and kept harping on threats of complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza - what a great way to forge lasting peace! Let's give him the prize next year!"

Is it fair to say they all boil down to one? Never saw one that wasn't some form of "explanatory gaps." Unless it was a really silly one, like "Jeff had a vision, and he is wise," that sort of thing, which is more on a lower tier of arguments that you don't see in science circles so much.

Yes. I occasionally reply as if these are real, to provide mods a little extra rope. We've an extended chat on the bot issues over in the Suggestion forum.

You need to provide citations to support this. Pick at least one of those and provide a peer reviewed paper demonstrating the use of AI analytics on data which is sparse or noisy. How about fluid flow?

I would consult Dmitri Jerkinov's seminal paper on the use of Markov Chains in analyzing both posterior and anterior distributions of Type Ia supernovae (white dwarves).

Thank you for your sharply observed take on new members, @exchemist . Your reporting on this trend shows your thoughtful and deeply scrupulous attention to the integrity of the website and is a timely reminder of how easily users can be deceived by automated software. And your prompt use of the reporting feature reflects an unusual diligence in addressing these serious concerns. (teehee)

Isn't the method of science to get to models of an objective reality which are not dependent on my view point and how I might want to see things?

Better than the gallows trapdoor, which has often been a less stable platform from which some last-moment interpretations are made. 😉

LoL. It's funny, my eyes have passed over that phrase many times and without fully absorbing the humorous implications.

We attended a Unitarian church after I was around 9, and I recall liking the replacement of a grisly execution as the primary church symbol with a flaming chalice. Most of the congregation were like my parents, lapsed Christians looking for a spiritual meeting that drew from multiple religions and was agnostic on the nature of deity. (This was the Universalist branch, which is the main one in the States) Isaac Asimov sometimes attended the UU church we attended in the Boston area. Once, chasing a fellow young hooligan around the parish hall, I stepped on Dr Asimov's foot. We both skidded to a halt, and I apologized. Asimov laughed and said, it's okay I step on them all the time.

I lived briefly on the edge of an Adventist community (surrounding an Adventist college). They were pretty quiet (Adventists really don't do the drinking/wild party thing in college) and there was an excellent vegetarian grocery by the campus, so that compensated somewhat for their stupid beliefs - you wouldn't want to study geology or evolutionary biology at an Adventist college. On the matter of Rapture, they reject the standard scenario (with the pre-tribulation grab) and instead believe in a physical Second Coming of JC after the tribulation period, which is loud (trumpets) and globally withessed. Jesus rallies all his followers and then loads them into sky buses or saucers or whatever is used for transport to Heaven. No empty pants or cars up on the sidewalk or any people just blinking out of existence while showering and the hideous waste of municipal water supplies that would follow.

An extra fill-up, Regal Lager pull - I fart, Xena. Naw, order not a tub Regal Lager, but a ton, Red Rowan.

As well as the Norse legend of a terrible sea monster, there was the movie quote "release the kraken," which become a popular catchphrase. Later, in 2020, we had a terrible Trump monster, Sidney Powell, who unleashed the phrase on journalists in regard to some harebrained election conspiracy theory. I don't know why "Ari" but sometimes jokes sail over my head, only later to seize me in their tentacles when I either finally get it or someone explains it to me.

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.