this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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Panpsychism is the idea that everything is conscious to some degree (which, to be clear, isn't what I think). In the past, the common response to the idea was, "So, rocks are conscious?" This argument was meant to illustrate the absurdity of panpsychism.

Now, we have made rocks represent pins and switches, enabling us to use them as computers. We made them complex enough that we developed neural networks and created large language models--the most complex of which have nodes that represent space, time, and the abstraction of truth, according to some papers. So many people are convinced these things are conscious, which has many suggesting that everything may be conscious to some degree.

In other words, the possibility of rocks being conscious is now commonly used to argue in favor of panpsychism, when previously it was used to argue against it.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Sometimes i use the ugly spoon because i feel sad for it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Yep, this is the major flaw that's becoming clear about the Turing test, and why people are so hyped over LLMs: computers don't have to be good at imitating people, because people are so good at anthropomorphizing computers (along with everything else).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (3 children)

You ask someone if the ugly spoon is human, they know it's not.

We asked people if they were talking to a human, and it said yes.

These are not the same.

I see it as the opposite, and now that it's getting uncomfortably close to seeming human, that makes people uncomfortable and so we are rejecting the turing test in favor of.. what? It seems like nothing. It's convenient that what makes us human is intangible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

We are the Pinnacle of creation! Nothing can be better than us by definition! Even the thought that a mere complex computer can be a person is heresy and absurd and can only be answered by ridicule and mockery. /s

Unfortunately a lot of professional philosophers think a bit like the above :(

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