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this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Another critihype article from the BBC, with far too much credulousness at the idea behind supposed AI consciousness at the cost of covering the harms of AI as things stand, e.g. the privacy, environmental, data set bias problems:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0k3700zljjo
Tried to read it, ended up glazing over after the first or second paragraph, so I'll fire off a hot take and call it a day:
Artificial intelligence is a pseudoscience, and it should be treated as such.
I'm gonna be polite, but your position is deeply sneerworthy; I don't really respect folks who don't read. The article has quite a few quotes from neuroscientist Anil Seth (not to be confused with AI booster Anil Dash) who says that consciousness can be explained via neuroscience as a sort of post-hoc rationalizing hallucination akin to the multiple-drafts model; his POV helps deflate the AI hype. Quote:
At the end of the article, another quote explains that Seth is broadly aligned with us about the dangers:
A pseudoscience has an illusory object of study. For example, parapsychology studies non-existent energy fields outside the Standard Model, and criminology asserts that not only do minds exist but some minds are criminal and some are not. Robotics/cybernetics/artificial intelligence studies control loops and systems with feedback, which do actually exist; further, the study of robots directly leads to improved safety in workplaces where robots can crush employees, so it's a useful science even if it turns out to be ill-founded. I think that your complaint would be better directed at specific AGI position papers published by techbros, but that would require reading. Still, I'll try to salvage your position:
Any field of study which presupposes that a mind is a discrete isolated event in spacetime is a pseudoscience. That is, fields oriented around neurology are scientific, but fields oriented around psychology are pseudoscientific. This position has no open evidence against it (because it's definitional!) and aligns with the expectations of Seth and others. It is compatible with definitions of mind given by Dennett and Hofstadter. It immediately forecloses the possibility that a computer can think or feel like humans; at best, maybe a computer could slowly poorly emulate a connectome.
Touting neuroscience as especially informed and scientific about minds is very brave.