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A Microsoft researcher built a goat-powered LLM in Age of Empires II to prove it's not sentient (www.xda-developers.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 4 points 2 months ago (5 children)

You say that with some confidence. What makes being aware of being a simulation a binary criteria for self awareness? You may just as well be in a simulation and probably see yourself as fairly self aware.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (4 children)

    Sure, and how do you know your thoughts are your own? Like if you have to defend your position by questioning the nature of reality then you got bigger problems.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (3 children)

    You made some absolute statements about consciousness that I don’t think you can back up. But I can’t fault you on not having proof, but at least be open to some thought experiments to challenge the concept.

    Being self aware of myself and my surroundings but not aware of the entire world does not make me not self aware.

    Same as an entity in a simulation could potentially be self aware but not aware of being in a simulation.

    But you disregard the possibility that consciousness could be emulated. But get a sense that it comes from a “gut feeling” or some sort of “common sense” perspective. What nature of reality are you referring to, that I am ignoring?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

    Being self aware of myself and my surroundings but not aware of the entire world does not make me not self aware. Same as an entity in a simulation could potentially be self aware but not aware of being in a simulation.

    Let's take this to it's full conclusion to see why this is not a meaningful distinction. I am not even aware of every cell in my own body, you don't even need to make reference to the outside world to argue we are not self aware. This line of reasoning makes self-awareness a rather meaningless word.

    And stating why I think the simulation hypothesis is not adequate is not the same as disregarding, even if I didn't fully explain the reasons.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    I think I agree with you about self awareness absolute self awareness is impossible. But I also think you can be partially aware of yourself, so not binary.

    I accept I may have extrapolated my understanding of your argument, but I also did not have much to go on. My apologies.

    Your statement about not being able to emulate consciousness is what I reacted to mostly. Feel free to fill in the blanks as I see not reasoning for that statement.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Fair enough. The crux of my argument is self awareness is an evolutionary trait for evolutionary purposes. If you sim/emulate the same processes in a different environment then it does not serve the evolutionary purposes of the organism, its definitionally not self awareness. To put it another way, the system doing the simulation is less efficient then the thing it is simulating. And energy efficiency is part of what self awareness delivers to an evolutionary system. To be clear I am not ruling out a machine can be aware of its own economy as part of making it intelligent, I am just saying a simulation distorts the very economy that self awareness is to operate on.

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