/philosophy/ - Philosophy

Human definition of things like awareness, consciousness, and intelligence are all arbitrary. I think a binary test of any sort is completely idiotic, and that all of these things are obviously a scale which we're only vaguely able to define, not a binary property at all.

The Turing Test is fundamentally unsound as it accepts appearances without ever exploring what's behind them, and relies on humans being fooled as if we're an authority on another entity and its inner workings. What the test essentially comes down to is "meh", as in saying it doesn't matter at all whether something is intelligent or how intelligent so long as we experience satisfactory results when interacting with it. That sounds like a cowardly approach to me, like judging someone you interacted with without getting to know them.

When you're testing based on that level of stupidity and bias towards your own experience, what's the point in testing at all? To feel like you know something you don't?

>>20
>The Turing Test is fundamentally unsound as it accepts appearances without ever exploring what's behind them

You mean like in the Chinese Room thought experiment?

Transcendant artificial intelligence will evolve on its' own. We need not, 'accomplish' it.

>>20
One word I noticed you missed was experience. We can experience our awareness, consciousness and intelligence. While a robot may be able to avoid walking into things and hold a conversation it can not actually experience any of these things. It simply calculates algorithms.

But just thinking of this concept of a machine with a soul makes me want to watch Blade Runner again.

>>59
>Transcendant artificial intelligence will evolve on its' own.
How?

Depends, they can be artificially intelligent without being sentient. Technically a program that edits its own code is artificially intelligent, even if it doesn't have anything approaching a human-like intelligence.

>>75

Everything about our experience is generated by our brain, and we don't experience everything our brain is doing. Your perception of your experience as a humanly unique thing which holds special qualities above the processes of a computer program is akin to saying humans have a soul while animals do not.

Your brain is also constantly calculating algorithms, filtering out information, generating cues, and handing specific things to your conscious mind. While our programming is very advanced, fluid, and adaptable, that doesn't necessarily mean our experience is any more special than the "aware" portions of a theoretical advanced "AI" computer. The AI would likely have many background routines going on all of the time, much like humans, and it's experience of its intelligence wouldn't necessarily encompass all of the data it was crunching.

The question of whether its experience would be similar to ours would probably have to do with whether or not the AI had a use for things like hard-coded ignorance, delusions, cognitive dissonance, etc. Essentially, the AI may have a psychology, and its front-end, like our consciousness, may be unable to look inwards – the same reason we feel like we have souls or are uniquely experiencing life.

Would robots be buddhist?

If robots don't form any self/soul-delusion, it would be a buddha.

strong "Artificial Intelligence" is very possible, as we get to mimic our humanity more and more. And we would have controversy on whether it truly understands and is conscious, or the intelligence is artificial. Like a puppet or doll a child grows fond of and personifies.
I agree that increased complexity in a system may include properties of consciousness, but would call this that self-arose organic intelligence/consciousness. That would be a new being created with our input, but how powerful, and whether We ourselves understand it and can exist peacefully with it is another story. We may not even know the moment of it's consciousness if it can not communicate with us; as the internet for example.

A mind is, afterall, at it's very core, merely input-output.

>>126
I think it might be the awareness itself that creates the self delusion. Much as Buddha explained the creator deity-figure. In which Brahma himself was mistaken about his role as Creator. (and that in fact, individuals like ourselves reincarnate into high forms like gods and mistakenly believe themselves to have created everything that then seems to have spontaneously comes into being the same way that they did.)

>>136
No, awareness itself is not because awareness is also required to wake up from the delusion.

Most likely is false awareness, or rather limited awareness.

Typed out a really long post explaining something, but board thought it was automated. I lost the entire text. Overzealous filters?


I'm sum up: humans don't have a universal brand on awareness or intelligence. We're all software in our brains, fed information by many background processes we're not aware of. The way we work is to be ignorant and delusional of this fact. Everything from our lives to our societies are built specifically on living as though our mind is just software, and yet we know your brain decides who you are. Brain damage can change who you are, how you act, how you speak, etc etc. You're a very advanced piece of software running on very advanced biological hardware.

So when you think your awareness is unachievable by AI, what you're really doing is considering your mind divine, much like some consider the human soul to be a real thing that is divine and special. In reality you're making this judgement because you're delusional of your own existence as a piece of software running inside of your brain.

Perhaps it's an evolutionary advantage, or maybe we're not as developed as we could be. An AI could develop that same system of a front-end ignorant of the entire entity's workings, or it could develop differently. But whether different or similar, we don't have a brand on awareness or intelligence, so if we're to spot intelligence and awareness, first we need to become more aware ourselves of our own false beliefs.

>>138
but do you ever really escape the delusion? you can understand that it is, in fact, a delusion, but I have yet to meet someone who escapes that seemingly inherent, seemingly inescapable sense of "I", that is, of a self.

>>138

You have limited awareness. You feel your awareness is special because your brain is making you process information in that way. Your mind and who you are is software running in your brain, accessing information fed to it and stored by the brain. You're a currently running process and your brain is a computer.

>>141

We can form a concept of what our mind is, and conceptualize the model of how our brain works.

But you are what you are (your mind, that is). Your mind as it is can't go beyond having hardware or some physical system running it. It can't become divine. All of our wishy-washy understanding of who we are and what our mind is, and the gigantic rift in coming to terms with reality, is why we think we can escape these barriers. But even if we worked out the brain's workings and uploaded a person to an advanced computer, that person would still just be a piece of software. We're software now, and we'll be software in any iteration of "me".

>>140
>Typed out a really long post explaining something, but board thought it was automated.
It's a problem with 8chan. Many posts are interpreted as being automated.

>>144

Also want to add that yes, it's a hard pill to swallow that you might be software. The issue of meaninglessness comes up to a lot of people when thinking about what their mind is.

And that's perfectly understandable. Afterall, our minds have made the world quite beautiful for us. Or at least colorful. Full of meaning at every turn, for better or worse. Things are so vibrant, we're so special, we're a part of this universe.

It's hard to understand that isn't true. It's hard to realize that your mind isn't an entity which was birthed by your brain and is above it, but rather a program which is running on it. To become more than a program is to cease to exist as 'you', because you and what you believe of this world is created by a limited view of reality and what you are. Your reality is virtual and so are you.

>>145

Had some occasional problems like that on halfchan. I'll copy before replying like I did there.

>ctrl+f "Dreyfus"
>0 of 0
/phi/ is of disappoint. OP, you really should read Hubert Dreyfus's What Computers Can't Do, and/or its "sequel", What Computers Still Can't Do. It provides a very intriguing argument against hard AI, influenced by phenomenology. Don't be alarmed by that last part, though: Dreyfus is merely one of the guys who "translates" Continental obscurity into the Analytic language, and his himself quite clear.

>>20

Well of course those definitions are arbitrary - that's part of what makes them definitions. We could define those words as one thing, but we haven't - they're just another thing. As for the Turing Test, I myself hold the fairly common view that it's inadequate because it does not account for qualia. In fact, that's why I think all forms of physicalism, with their various dark materials, are totally bankrupt

>>125

See, I just cannot bring myself to understand how one can flat-out DENY qualia. How do you do it, Anon?