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jcoc611 | 1 year ago

From an external perspective, is there a way to distinguish between simulation of consciousness and the real thing?

If the answer is no, could you make an argument that they are the same?

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jrflowers|1 year ago

You could make the argument that two things that we don’t understand are the same thing because we’re equally ignorant of both in the same way that you could make the argument that Jimmy Hoffa and Genghis Khan are probably buried in the same place, since we have equal knowledge of their locations.

gorjusborg|1 year ago

Like the original Mechanical Turk.

Clearly there is a difference between a small person hidden within playing chess and a fully mechanical chess automaton, but as the observer we might not be able to tell the difference. The observer's perception of the facts doesn't change the actual facts, and the implications of those facts.

aflukasz|1 year ago

I like this observation. And it fascinates me each time I see some self proclaimed conscious entity arguing that this just simply cannot be.

altruios|1 year ago

> self proclaimed conscious entity

Well, I do not proclaim consciousness: only the subjective feeling of consciousness. I really 'feel' conscious: but I can't prove or 'know' that in fact I am 'conscious' and making choices... to be conscious is to 'make choices'... Instead of just obeying the rules of chemistry and physics... which YOU HAVE TO BREAK in order to be conscious at all (how can you make a choice at all if you are fully obeying the rules of chemistry {which have no choice}).

A choice does not apply to chemistry or physics: from where does choice come from - I suspect from our fantasies and nothing from objective reality (for I do not see humans consistently breaking the way chemistry works in their brains) - it probably comes from nowhere.

If you can explain the lack of choice available in chemistry first (and how that doesn't interfere with us being able to make a choice): then I'll entertain the idea that we are conscious creatures. But if choice doesn't exist at the chemical level, it can't magically emerge from following deterministic rules. And chemistry is deterministic not probabilistic (h2 + o doesn't magically make neon ever, or 2 water molecules instead of one).

cscurmudgeon|1 year ago

Because you don’t see X is not a proof that X doesn’t exist. Here X may or not exist.

X = difference between simulated and real consciousness

Black holes were posited before they were detected empirically. We don't declare them to be non-existent when their theory came out just because we couldn't detect them.

layer8|1 year ago

Consciousness and reasoning are orthogonal to each other.

ben_w|1 year ago

I suspect that depends on which of the 200 definitions of "consciousness" you're using. And some other broad range of definitions of "reasoning".

mensetmanusman|1 year ago

There might not be an external perspective, just someone else’s internal perspective of the external.

__loam|1 year ago

Why are you bringing up metaphysics when the concern is that the student has seen the exam, so to speak.

chx|1 year ago

Throwing all the paintings made prior 1937 into an LLM would never get Guernica out of it. As long as it's an LLM this stands, not just today but all the way to the future.

This empty sophistry of presuming automated bullshit generators somehow can mimic a human brain is laughable.

Please please read https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...

altruios|1 year ago

The author fails to provide any argument other than one of incredulity and some bad reasoning with bad faith examples.

The dollar bill copying example is a faulty metaphor. His claim of humans not being information processors and he tries to demonstrate this by having a human process information (drawing from reference is processing an image and giving an output)...

His argument sounds like one from 'it's always sunny'. As if metaphors never improve or get more accurate over time, and that this latest metaphor isn't the most accurate metaphor we have. It is. When we have something better: we'll all start talking about the brain in that frame of reference.

This is an idiot that can write in a way that masks some deep bigotries (in favor of the mythical 'human spirit').

I do not take this person seriously. I'm glossing over all casual incorrectness of his statements - a good number of them just aren't true. the ones I just scrolled to statements like... 'the brain keeps functioning or we disappear' or 'This might sound complicated, but it is actually incredibly simple, and completely free of computations, representations and algorithms' in the description of the 'linear optical trajectory' ALGORTHIM (a set of simple steps to follow - in this case - visual pattern matching).

Where is the sense in what I just read?