Literally just mainlining marketing material straight into whatever’s left of their rotting brains.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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You had a small fallacy in the middle, when you said "assume the negative claim", you then made a positive claim.
"subjectivity is not explained by information processing theory" is a positive claim, but you said it was negative. I know it has the word "not" in it, but positive/negative doesn't have to do with claims for or against existence, it has to do with burden of proof. A negative "claim" isn't actually a claim at all.
The negative claim here would be "subjectivity may not be explained by information processing theory". People usually have more understanding about these distinctions in religious contexts:
Positive claim: god definitely exists Positive claim: god definitely doesn't exist Negative claim: god may or may not exist.
The default stance is an atheistic one, but it's not "capital A" atheist (for what it's worth I do make the positive claim against a theological God's existence). Someone who lacks a belief in God is still an atheist (e.g someone who has never even heard of a theological God), but they're not making a positive claim against his existence.
So the default stance is "information theory may or may not account for subjectivity", we don't assume it does, but we also don't discount the possibility that it does as necessarily untrue, like you are.
If you notice, you made another mistake, you misread what I was saying. I never made a positive claim about subjectivity being information processing. I only alluded to the possibility. You on the other hand did make a positive claim about subjectivity definitely not being information processing.
you are focusing on minor points of rhetoric instead of engaging with my broader point and the relevant LLM discussion. I am in fact assuming the null hypothesis in this argument.
first: the null hypothesis is a general statement or default position that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena, or no association among groups.
in this case, the phenomena whose relationship is in question are information processing theory and subjectivity.
consider Hitchen's Razor, which states that 'what may be asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence'
even if your specific argument is different, the subject of the OP with which i presumed you more or less agree, argued that not only can information processing theory account for subjectivity, but that it does, and that LLM chatbots possess such subjectivity. This is asserted without proof, and according to hitchen's razor I dismiss this pair of theses equally without proof.
as to your stance that information processing may or may not account for subjectivity, we can formulate this position as the positive claim that 'information processing may account for subjectivity' without losing any meaning. if nothing else, assume this is the position i am arguing against. i am not opposed to agnosticism on this matter.
i offer a syllogism:
A: if information processing can account for subjectivity, it would have done so by now - or, if it can account for subjectivity with only trivial modifications, we would have some indication of paths towards such an account.
B. we do not, in fact, have such an account within current information theory, or theoretical paths of investigation towards such an account.
c. therefore, information theory as it is today, or only trivially modified, does not account for subjectivity