RationallyDense (they/he/she/any)

We used to be kung fu fighting.

You still haven't articulated an argument for your position. You're just repeatedly saying that Israel is controlled by the US despite clear evidence that they have their own internal political processes and don't just do whatever the US says.

I haven't because it's a pointless argument. Whether a claim is positive or negative depends on how you word it.

I personally prefer works by professionals.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons...

rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phi...

plato.stanford.edu/entries/othe...

I'm not making the positive claim. I'm opposing your own positive claim that we know rocks are not conscious. (Which is not the same thing as having awareness)

The arguments I'm making are not novel. This is very standard problem of other minds stuff. You can just to read the SEP entry on the topic

You haven't made any argument for your position, except for stating that it is against the interest of Israel and imply that the only way Netanyahu could act in opposition to Israel's interest would be if he was compromised by the US. As if non-US leaders can't be fanatical or corrupt nutjobs.

Ok. How can you show that a rock is not conscious in the sense of having subjective experience? Mind you, subjective experience does not have to be particularly interesting. How can you tell whether there is something that it is like to be a rock?

I just don't see why we couldn't posit that about machine life. Sure, it would be different, but other people are also different. The problem of other minds is not exactly new.

Not sure what you find belligerent about what I said. I'm not the one who responded with "lol".

"I'm gonna burn the world so I can have a playground!"

"There's one down the street..."

"Hm... Ok, this might make me sound bad, but do any brown people use it?"

"Sometimes..."

"I'm gonna burn down the world!"

I get it. You're a d*ck.

It's both. If we don't know what consciousness is, we can't definitely say whether something does or does not have it.

No more no less than asserting that humans are ends in themselves.

To assert what?

I was obviously being hyperbolic. It's only been a bit over 3 decades. He provided the intelligence which was used to justify opposition to the JCPOA and later US withdrawal from it. He started the "12 days war" last year which made this attack possible. Israel played a key role in making it happen.

Only a god could claim that our being biological beings does not entail only biological beings can be conscious?

I have read some cognitive neuroscience. We are obviously biological beings. That does not entail that being a biological being is a necessary or sufficient condition for consciousness, thinking, suffering, pleasure, etc...

What makes you think machines cannot be ends in themselves?

How do you know it has anything to do with us being big bags of chemicals? There are no "sufferings, pleasures and desires" in chemistry. Why do you think chemistry is required for it?

Because Netanyahu's first words when he was born were "Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon." War with Iran has been a life-long goal of his and it's helping him stay in power and out of prison. War with Iran is not in the US' national interest.

That's like saying you can't think because you're a big bag of chemical reactions. It really doesn't follow.

cemi doesn't solve the hard problem though. It points at some specific correlates and goes "yeap, that's consciousness".

That would be a really bad argument. But as a counter to the claim that LLMs are definitely not conscious it's very reasonable.

All by itself? No. But then again, babies cannot develop into adults all by themselves either.

POV: Your dad is a little too autistic.

I was talking about modes where you do inference recursively, yes. But my point was more that there are so many sub-systems that can be interpreted in so many ways, I don't think we can conclude with any confidence that none of them are thinking.

One example would be modes of operation where they generate text which they then take as input before generating more text. I think that sufficiently resembles some forms of human thought sufficiently that I'm comfortable calling it "thinking".

I think there's a flaw here, in that probabilistic next word prediction is a particular description/interpretation of some subsets of the systems. There are countless subsets, each of which have many possible interpretations. Maybe some are "thinking" or "consciousness".

I thought the issue was that instead of doing facade maintenance, you can say you are doing facade maintenance and just leave the sheds up to save on actually doing the maintenance.

I used to argue with AI alignment folks that worrying about AI made no sense unless we like, put them in charge of the military and that's just too stupid for anyone to do. So anyways...

Hard times make smart men. Smart men make vaccines. Vaccines make easy times. Easy times make stupid men. Stupid men destroy vaccines.