this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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I think I disagree that neuroscience is the path to AI, that any functional AI must be based on findings about how human cognition works, and that we have to understand or develop the physics behind consciousness to create AI (if that's even relevant). Neuroscience hasn't had a breakthrough in decades. Machine learning has been exploding and making unbelievable progress over the past few decades. Like, Deep Blue was nearly thirty years ago. Now the computer chip in my bidet can obliterate any human chess player.
no one questions LLM advances, just the use of the term AI and the frankly untrue implications that term has that are used by marketers to justify misleading claims. plus chess is 'solved' mathematically, of course an automatic counting machine can do it.
edit: specifically, the implication is that LLM's are 'sentient' or have human-like experiential mental existence, when all they can do even in a hypothetical idealized scenario is replicate the information-processing aspects of human cognition, creating something like a 'philosophical zombie' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie) that reacts like a human based on statistical models with no internal experience of their existence or awareness of their cognition or sense impressions. since we don't fully understand the nature or origin of human sentience and experience in biological humans or other animals, it is unlikely we will 'accidentally' invent something that produces human-like sentience and experience in contemporary computers. we cannot model human consciousness with physics (at least, not yet), so how can we possibly create technology that creates consciousness? its like trying to create a nuclear power plant when you don't know how electricity works, you might make the world's most efficient water-wheel powered mill complex but it won't ever split an atom because you don't know what an 'atom' even is in a basic or fundamental sense.
basically, and there is room for more or less reasonable philosophical disagreement on this, i and a lot of others think that the so-called 'Hard Problem of Consciousness' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness) (https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/) does in fact exist and has in fact yet to be 'solved'.
Right, yeah so our differing perspectives are that I don't think the problem exists, philosophical zombies are impossible, and people themselves are less conscious than they think they are on a moment-to-moment basis. You'll see this last comment brought up a lot in meditation, we will have occasional moments of awareness and project backward that we were also this way for the last however long period of time. You can even catch yourself doing it.
Evolution created consciousness without understanding what it was, and this is also true of many, many scientific discoveries - the popular conception that theory precedes experimental discovery is not how science has ever historically worked (ref Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn). Also, chess is not yet solved. It is still a search and evaluation problem. But this is also a bit frustrating; whenever scientists replicate some hitherto-human-only ability it becomes "well of course a computer can do that, it's just ", where is the mechanistic process that was the fundamental discovery. One actually wonders whether any mechanistic description of consciousness or human abilities could ever satisfy the p-zombie crowd, or they've trapped themselves on a slowly-eroding island of unfalsifiability.
the p-zombie is a thought experiment, not something that should 'actually exist'. the fact that a p-zombie is impossible intuitively is the point, it demonstrates that our experiential mental life is an important part of our thought, that something we cannot reduce to information processing has a real impact on our lives and thought processes. the reason a 'mechanistic' description of consciousness won't ever satisfy the 'p-zombie crowd' (serious academic philosophers, just as credible as the ones you might agree with) is that the entire point of the philosophical zombie is that there is something about consciousness that is non-physical, or that is not yet captured by what we currently call physics or information-processing. any task you can set a computer to perform is definitionally a information-processing task, and the point of the philosophical zombie thought experiment is to demonstrate the difference between information-processing (which we more or less understand) and first person, internal experience of that information processing. there are no proposed physical descriptions of that experiential quality of human mental existence, and no even hypothetical ways to reduce it to physical processes. if you don't think the 'hard problem' exists, then show your work - prove it, in a way that doesn't just assume that our experience of our minds 'doesn't exist' (then what are we experiencing?) or is 'illusory' (an illusion for the benefit of what? what is being decieved with this illusion?)
evolution did not intentionally 'create' anything, you are anthropomorphizing a random, chaotic, unconscious (as far as we know) process. human scientific methods may not start with a complete theory of anything, but no one went from not knowing what electricity was to immediately having a nuclear power plant - the material conditions of the possible experiments and the superstructure associated (the theories such experiments might imply or discover) both drive scientific process. saying 'well evolution did it so we can too, and faster' is just foolish beyond belief.
no one doubts that computers can replicate more or less all the information processing aspects of human cognition, but no scientist can tell you why we have a first person experience of our information processing, not yet anyway. we can correlate any number of experiences to brain states, but we have yet to comprehensively explain how those brain states and structures produce subjectivity. Its unfalsifiable because it is literally not a 'scientific' or 'physical' question, science and physics were simply not created or designed to inquire into the source of their own creation - a logical system can never accurately and fully analyze itself - this has been rigourously and mathematically proven as by godel's incompleteness theorems. you can complain this is 'unfalsifiable' but so is literal matter - the way we define 'matter' as 'whatever corresponds to the current prevailing system of physics at the moment' (this definition is implied by standard concepts of science and physics) leaves 'materialism' (in the ontological sense, not the marxist sense) only trivially true. Any property, even consciousness or mind or god or the flying spaghetti monster, can be considered material, if one defines matter as having that property. there is no experiment that can prove that all the phenomena and properties we experience and catalogue empirically are 'really matter' or 'really mind', we can prove the empirical observations but whether 'reality' is 'made of' 'matter' or 'mind' is unfalsifiable no matter which position you take.
the following is from the wikipedia entry on 'materialism'
Look, most of what you've written is basically nonsense.
In the end you're the one claiming there's some nonphysical aspect to consciousness, hence you're the one that has to prove it. Like most people with this belief I suspect it's just latent secular hope that there's an immaterial soul and your death will not be the end.
this is ridiculous and you clearly don't know what you are talking about.
then prove the bolded claim, don't just state it. what exactly about information processing on the level of humans produces subjectivity and experiential aspects of cognition? you may as well have re-stated your original position. the point of the p-zombie is simply to elucidate the difference between information processing and subjective experience, the 'intuititive conclusion' being that if a p-zombie did not have internal subjective experience, it would intuitively seem that it would not be able to perform our information processing tasks - so what, other than information processing capabilities, is the P-zombie lacking? subjectivity, exactly the phenomena physics and materialism cannot account for or explain.
i was criticizing the way you compare the progress of 'evolution', an asocial, thoughtless, natural process, directly to the progress of human science, an intentional, socially constructed/mediated activity, which is quite absurd. not the specific choice of words used. they operate on fundamentally different processes.
I was paraphrasing with the understanding that we were familiar with the developments and implications Godel had on others. If Godel's theroems aren't to your taste, try the related Tarski's undefinability theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theorem) which applies to any semantics whatsoever.
it is absolutely not irrelevant, metaphysics is in fact the very thing we are discussing, whether or not our system of physics can accurately describe an important aspect of human experience enough to successfully replicate it with technology, or to even know if we have replicated it with technology. the fact is that claiming the universe is made of 'matter' is equally unfalsifiable as claiming the universe is made of 'mind that behaves like/is experienced as matter at least sometimes', both are metaphysical claims, both are unfalsifiable. they are both empirically neutral claims as of now - except only one of these (of these two in specific, others exist and can be reasonably - as in without contradicting any empirically verified facts - formulated) can explain or account for the experience humans have of their subjectivity. read literally any philosopher other than kuhn plz. i wasn't quoting no one and nothing, i wasn't referencing uneducated amateurs, i have sourced most of my claims or they are trivially researched. you don't have to agree but this is a real philosophical position which has yet to be comprehensively 'debunked' or anything like that. metaphysics is as valid of a meta-criticism as any other - physics is not an inhuman thing beyond reproach, its a human activity we have to constantly update and revise over time, and we have to do metaphysics to do that updating and revision in a rigorous and thoughtful way, the same way we use meta-analyses for literally every other area of human study and knowledge.
You don't understand Gödel and you don't understand Tarski. Stop trying to pretend you do. Like I doubt you could even define what a formal language is, let along a semantics, let alone connect these to something as nebulous as science, physics, and consciousness.