Source: facebook.com

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You can’t prove or disprove consciousness but it’s probably a continuum. Is an amoeba conscious? Is a spider? A dog? A 2 year old?

Where on this spectrum does AI fall, if at all?

What we’re doing with chatGPT is very similar to how a child learns.

But wth is consciousness man? It’s much weirder than just being self aware, like in the big picture. For instance, you feel self aware, like you are experiencing this moment and every moment from a subjective position within your body, but how do you prove that? How do you prove the person next to you on the bus is conscious and not just an automaton perfectly performing the functions of being human? Or that any animal is conscious or not? Or, since we’re here, a machine? The fun thing about consciousness is that the only evidence any of us have for its existence is our own subjective experience for it, which is a pretty small pool. You’re only talking about your biophysical makeup specifically without any real, hard evidence of anything else. You can make assumptions, like everything like me, at least, has consciousness. Or perhaps all mammals do, or perhaps you need a brain of a certain complexity, or you need external senses and a realization of environment to be conscious. Or perhaps conscious isn’t all that important in-and-of itself and is just a biological function that arises from self-preservation, improvement, reflection, objectively seeing yourself as an individual in an environment, etc., but for you and any individual entity meeting a certain qualifying list of criteria, those functions just happen to arise as “experience” within an individual. Perhaps consciousness is just an emergent property of the universe, in which case there is definite potential for AI to experience. Perhaps you must be bless with free will and an understanding of good and bad from a higher plane in order to be conscious. Or maybe it’s all just performative, and anything that acts conscious is conscious. At the end of the day, and probably until long after we have fully mapped the brain and built machines that can act just like us, this will still be a debate because we really just don’t know what this is.

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Rather than Nihilistic I think this thought process more approaches a sort of selfish dogmatism, doesn't it?

Both immediate satisfaction and marginal lifelong satisfaction based decision making for individuals seems very much uncharacteristic of a civilised individual displaying empathy in any broad sense.

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Kind if a looping argument there, one of the indications of consciousness is being self aware and vice versa.

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Yeah, and Galileo, Newton, and Darwin were bad scientists.

 One thing that irks me in the philosophical debate about consciousness is that it's always considered as some magical otherworldly thing. Not being able to solve the "hard problem of consciousness", one guy turns to panspsychism where everything has a consciousness (so nothing is explained really), or it is some emergent attribute that arises from mere living matter, as if living matter itself isn't special.

  To me, consciousness seems to be a biological fact among, pretty verifiably, many animals. So there is likely evolutionary benefits in being conscious to various degrees. And it makes sense: when there's a complicated life form, it's easier for it to make quick decicisions with a central hub that controls most of the functions instantaneously. If it just reacted with other systems unaware what others are doing, it could lead to contradictionary courses of action.

 Anyway, what the philosophical accounts of the ontological nature of consciousness rarely seem to address, is that it is something that has developed over time, concurrently with others, and in an environment that is partly social, partly hostile, and requires sometimes quick decicisions to be made in order to ensure survival. It is not a magical metaphysical quirk in the universe.

  So at last, regarding artificial consciousness: I can't escape the feeling that the framework for it to happen needs to have some of the same elements present that natural evolution of consciousness had:

1. need for self-preservation,

2. need to react to outside stimuli

3. others

List isn't probably exhaustive, but these are my thoughts and just wanted to put them somewhere.

You can advocate the pursuit of a meaningful life without having to reframe the concept of happiness as a strawman. Happiness is low-hanging fruit for derision because it can be so silly and trivial but it is the antonym of suffering and the goal of much early philosophy, all of which is as compatible with the pursuit of higher ideals as much as it with the reduction of psychological despair. Imho this article uses "happiness" when it is really just talking about "hedonism."

Elon Musk as the example of a meaningful life. Uh-huh.

If we include narcissism as a meaningful pursuit, we might as well include happiness. Being an oligarch of a deeply unequal society is not meaningful. If the meaning of your life is to build a better society, then we actually have to ask: What kind of a society?

I am deeply skeptical of this doe-eyed “multi-planet, beyond-the-stars society” poetic waxing. These billionaires are adopting the language of democracy (“We” are going to the stars, “we” are gonna live in the future) but you aren’t invited on the arc. And even if you were, you would be the janitor. Because “more stuff” solves nothing when you replicate the same social problems that got us in this crisis in the first place.

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While I think the point you make overall is nice, you fall into the same trap I see a lot of jungians fall into, as looking at Myths as just psychics phenomenons. You for example cite a hindu myth, which you understand right, in the sense that it points out the importance of devotion to GOD. But later you say that we have to find our own Krishna as religious belief, is not possible in a secular world, not understanding that God in this story is not meant as an "Archetype" or something interchangeable, but simply as the highest transcendence. Ironically trying to defeat nihilism, you presuppose that the world ("as it is") is meaningless, as we are the ones to give it meaning.

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It's nonsense I'm sorry. Consciousness and complex behaviour have no relationship whatsoever, and designing machines to do sequences of simple things with complex purposes has zero relationship to the evolved nature of consciousness in humans.

Thank you for writing this. I wrote a big long rambly comment tearing into the article, and this feels like the perfect (and better written) complement to all the points I made.

Being conscious is being self aware no?

In saying that I'm not so sure as I know a lot of conscious people who are very NOT self aware.

"These were not the best philosophers of the past that we were reading. They were merely the greatest philosophers."

That's a very thought-provoking thesis, and rings true. Greatness here could be thought of as 'intellectual celebrity'. No philosopher's system will ever be bulletproof, because philosophy is not just logic, but literature, and therefore depends on the fallibility and inexactness of language. The 'greatest' philosophers are those who 'won' the contest for celebrity, but the winning in these cases is more like 'winning' a political campaign than 'winning' a 100m dash — that is, not so straightforward, and involving lots of cultural factors. The 'Greats' are more like stable nodes, or irreducible particles, from which greater networks and systems may be generated. Or they are like prospectors who secure a particular piece of earth for the rest of us to dig into and build upon.

This article is... god-awful. It read's like what a second year undergrad writes assuming they're the first person to ever call bullshit on the ideas they're being presented with (or not even realising that calling bullshit was part of the reason they'd been presented with those ideas in the first place). It's a very "everyone else are just sheeple" vibe.

Starting off with the Plato section, it's talked about how Socrates seems to reply over-literally to Thrasymachus' claim regarding rulers, failing to understand the rhetorical point being illustrated. But Thrasymachus himself probably wasn't even real, or at least was heavily fictionalised by the dialogue - the whole thing itself is a rhetorical device! It's not that I suspect Plato was trying to make Socrates look like a bad thinking, it's that the whole dialogue itself is just an excuse to exposit ideas, not necessarily a realist account of two blokes arguing.

And the end thesis has a gigantic gap in it as well. Philosophy is a field filled with people who love to argue, deep arguments, petty argument, pedantic arguments, broad arguments, and are generally well trained to pick apart each other's reasoning (and strongly incentivised too - bringing down a big philosophical theory is a great way to make a name for yourself). For a "great" philosopher's flawed work to survive in that environment, one of two things must be true. Its flaws must be either so subtle as to require another "great" philosopher to come around to unpick them, or the works must have value in spite of their obvious issues.

The issues picked up on in the article are, well, not new. Hell, the issues with the categorical imperative are so famous that anyone studying formal ethics will learn about it. These are very old observations. It's then reasonable to assume that, given how philosophers tend to bicker, dissect and scrutinise ideas, that these thinkers must hold some value in spite of their very well known flaws.

The article tries to sweep a whole lot under the rug by simply describing these thinkers ideas as "interesting", in a semi-contemptuous way. But most "interesting" ideas put forward by blowhards soon lose people's attention, and many philosophers considered important for a while fall into obscurity. The article doesn't really answer, why THESE thinkers, THESE ideas, in spite of all the scrutiny? Fun hypotheticals alone don't tend to secure people a place in the canon. It completely fails to tackle its own questions by just using the label "interesting" as though that explains anything. Most gradiose ideas with shit reasoning fall away - so in what different way are the "great" philosophers "interesting" that their ideas are kept around in spite of their known mistakes?

My issue is not that these thinkers are sacrosanct and shouldn't be questioned. It's that this article is so goddamned adolescent that it seems to assume the author is the first person to claim the emperor has no clothes, and doesn't seem to even think to pause and then check if that's true.