A scary chat with ChatGPT about latest NDE account in NDE thread

I think a good real-world example of AI was/is the concept of a driverless car. This idea never seems o have got off the ground... [ ]... Anyway, driverless cars still don't work as of 2023!

There are hundreds of Weymo taxi's in the USA, taking passengers all day, every day. There are literally thousands of youtube video's...?

My claim is not that’s consciousness. Consciousness is particular ill-defined in objective terms with philosophers unable to agreeing on which attributes to assign to it. There’s a whole branch of philosophers even denying the existence of qualia as anything but an illusion.
What I hypothesize is that as the AI models evolves with ever more parameters it will eventually ‘behave’ indistinguishable from a human. You will not be able to fool it in a few years to reveal what it is.

Interesting phrasing. Mentioning the ability to fool the AI is a good cue to point out that the contrary is the more relevant aspect - that the AI is fooling us.

However, what you are describing here is mimicry. Creating an appearance of something is not the same as becoming that thing.
A lyre bird is not a chainsaw for example.

Attenborough: the amazing Lyre Bird sings like a chainsaw!

However, what you are describing here is mimicry. Creating an appearance of something is not the same as becoming that thing.
A lyre bird is not a chainsaw for example.

What an amazing creature. Love it.

Consciousness is particular ill-defined in objective terms with philosophers unable to agreeing on which attributes to assign to it.

No one on earth has the slightest clue what consciousness is, Sbu. They don't even know how to correctly formulate the question

What I hypothesize is that as the AI models evolves with ever more parameters it will eventually ‘behave’ indistinguishable from a human. You will not be able to fool it in a few years to reveal what it is.

Then it will just be a Lyre bird. And not being fooled wouldn't indicate consciousness was present. Humans are the biggest fools on earth.

[Ninshub]

What an amazing creature. Love it.

Indeed!

My claim is not that’s consciousness. Consciousness is particular ill-defined in objective terms with philosophers unable to agreeing on which attributes to assign to it. There’s a whole branch of philosophers even denying the existence of qualia as anything but an illusion.
What I hypothesize is that as the AI models evolves with ever more parameters it will eventually ‘behave’ indistinguishable from a human. You will not be able to fool it in a few years to reveal what it is.

Consciousness is an illusion? Who's being fooled?

Actually I think outside of atheist-materialist fundamentalism consciousness is pretty clear.

What's unclear is "matter".

As for AI models, again I ask if you have knowledge of the maths + compsci that underlies machine "learning". I'm just unclear on what your guesses are based on.

As for AI models, again I ask if you have knowledge of the maths + compsci that underlies machine "learning". I'm just unclear on what your guesses are based on.

Since my educational background seems so very important to you, I can reveal that I hold a master's degree in Computer Science and a bachelor's degree in Mathematics. I work for a company that delivers AI models among other software products, although these models are vastly simpler than the ones in question here. I don't claim to be an expert in AI, but I do have hands-on experience with TensorFlow, which is a well-known tool for building AIs. I also know a fair bit about the theory behind artificial neural networks, such as how they are trained to optimize a 'cost function' using backpropagation.

Yes, I fully understand that ChatGPT, at the end of the day, is 'just' a statistical model of the structure of languages that predicts the next word based on the string of input 'word' tokens provided by the user. I interpret your repeated question about my background as an indication of an "I know better" arrogance, which also surfaces in this oneliner: "Actually, I think outside of atheist-materialist fundamentalism, consciousness is pretty clear." Well, I think the group of people who actually accept the atheist-materialist fundamentalist worldview is pretty big. If we take "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett as a promotion of this worldview, the book was designated by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year. In The New York Times Book Review, George Johnson called it "nothing short of brilliant.". Is it safe to assume that a publication having millions of readers requires a fairly high intellectual standard of from their journalists and is able to attract these people?

In fact, there are no logical arguments that can convincingly invalidate Dennett's view, just as there are no logical arguments that can convincingly invalidate David Chalmers' view. This is not science as defined by Karl Popper; we are in the territory of metaphysical musings when discussing these matters. People spend their entire careers contemplating consciousness, and yet we have an expert here who already knows all the answers?

Even though modern electronic circuits work fundamentally identically to the electronics of my old Commodore 64, the potential problems that are algorithmically solvable with the ever-increasing available RAM and processor capacity are basically exploding. Just recently, an AI that predicts protein folding from a chain of amino acids has become available. This has really surprised experts in the field who thought it would take many more years. Now we have chatbots, which I predict will be able to provide answers to questions that will fool anyone outside Searle's box in a few years' time. I agree that the way this will be achieved is to train it, among other sources, on "the efforts of millions of humans who have contributed to the Internet piece by piece," to quote David's earlier post. But in the end, it will appear to have as much reason as us, as you are unlikely to be able to provide it with any input outside the parameters it has been trained on.

Who knows how our thoughts work? One theory explains that thoughts are generated when neurons fire. Our external environment, such as home, relationships, media, etc., leads to a pattern of neuron firing, which results in a thought process. A continuous pattern of neuronal firing reinforces the circuitry.

Since my educational background seems so very important to you I can reveal that I hold a master degree in Computer Science and a bachelor degree in Mathematics.

You offered a time table, so it's only natural to ask what the basis of your guess is. I didn't ask for your degrees, I asked if you actually looked at the underlying basis of machine learning.

I actually interprete your repeated question about my background as an indication of an "I know better arrogance" which also surfaces in this oneliner "Actually I think outside of atheist-materialist fundamentalism consciousness is pretty clear".

I don't see that as arrogance, just observation. The "know better" arrogance is the province of the pseudo-skeptics.

There is no serious intellectual physicalist/materialist argument for how that which lacks consciousness can produce consciousness, just a fear that accepting consciousness as irreducible means their war against religion can't be won.

Well, I think the group of people who actually de-facto accepts the atheist-materialist fundamentalist worldview is pretty big. If we take "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett as an promotion of this worldview, the book was designated by New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year. In New York Times Book Review, George Johnson called it "nothing short of brilliant".

Not sure why this should matter. A lot of media is atheist-materialist driven. I've no idea who George Johnson is.

Is there an argument in the book that you personally think is "nothing short of brilliant"?

The parts I read seemed to aptly categorized by Howard Robinson:

"Dennett’s general method...is what might be called ‘the Jericho method’: he believes that if he marches around a philosophical problem often enough, proclaiming what are, plausibly, relevant scientific truths, the problem will dissolve before our eyes."

In fact there are no logical argument that can convincingly invalidate Dennett's view, just as there are no logical argument that can convincingly invalidate David Chalmers view. This is not science as defined by Karl Popper, we are in metaphysical musings territory, when discussing these matters. People are spending their entire career contemplating consciosness and yet we have an expert here who already knows all the answers?

Dennet's view is inherently illogical, see Neuroscientist PhD + New Atheist Horseman Sam Harris's writing on how materialism is nonsensical.

Who knows how are thoughts works? One theory explains that thoughts are generated when neurons fire. Our external environment (such as home, relationships, media, etc.) leads to a pattern of neuron firing which results in a thought process. A continuous pattern of neuronal firing reinforces the circuitry.

I don't think we need to know how thoughts work to axe out the ideas that are just bad. If the stuff of neurons is "matter", whatever that is, whose defining characteristic is lacking mental content...how do you [get] the Something of Thought from the Nothing of Matter that lacks all mental content?

To see how bizarre this is check out Rosenberg's Atheist Guide to Reality:

“A more general version of this question is this: How can one clump of stuff anywhere in the universe be about some other clump of stuff anywhere else in the universe—right next to it or 100 million light-years away? …Let’s suppose that the Paris neurons are about Paris the same way red octagons are about stopping. This is the first step down a slippery slope, a regress into total confusion.

If the Paris neurons are about Paris the same way a red octagon is about stopping, then there has to be something in the brain that interprets the Paris neurons as being about Paris. After all, that’s how the stop sign is about stopping. It gets interpreted by us in a certain way. The difference is that in the case of the Paris neurons, the interpreter can only be another part of the brain… What we need to get off the regress is some set of neurons that is about some stuff outside the brain without being interpreted—by anyone or anything else (including any other part of the brain)—as being about that stuff outside the brain. What we need is a clump of matter, in this case the Paris neurons, that by the very arrangement of its synapses points at, indicates, singles out, picks out, identifies (and here we just start piling up more and more synonyms for “being about”) another clump of matter outside the brain. But there is no such physical stuff. Physics has ruled out the existence of clumps of matter of the required sort…

…What you absolutely cannot be wrong about is that your conscious thought was about something. Even having a wildly wrong thought about something requires that the thought be about something. It’s this last notion that introspection conveys that science has to deny. Thinking about things can’t happen at all…When consciousness convinces you that you, or your mind, or your brain has thoughts about things, it is wrong.”

As I said above, there are no serious materialist-physicalist arguments.

Yes, I fully understand that ChatGPT, at the end of the day, is 'just' a statistical model of the structure of languages that predicts the next word based on the string of input 'word' tokens provided by the user. I interpret your repeated question about my background as an indication of an "I know better" arrogance, which also surfaces in this oneliner: "Actually, I think outside of atheist-materialist fundamentalism, consciousness is pretty clear." Well, I think the group of people who actually accept the atheist-materialist fundamentalist worldview is pretty big. If we take "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett as a promotion of this worldview, the book was designated by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year. In The New York Times Book Review, George Johnson called it "nothing short of brilliant.". Is it safe to assume that a publication having millions of readers requires a fairly high intellectual standard of from their journalists and is able to attract these people?

In fact, there are no logical arguments that can convincingly invalidate Dennett's view, just as there are no logical arguments that can convincingly invalidate David Chalmers' view. This is not science as defined by Karl Popper; we are in the territory of metaphysical musings when discussing these matters. People spend their entire careers contemplating consciousness, and yet we have an expert here who already knows all the answers?

Lol... I get a high probability that some parts of this post have been written by AI/GPT

Is there an argument in the book that you personally think is "nothing short of brilliant"?

I wouldn't know as I haven't read it and don't intend to. I just observe that a lot of 'smart' people supposedly subscribe to this worldview.

Dennet's view is inherently illogical, see Neuroscientist PhD + New Atheist Horseman Sam Harris's writing on how materialism is nonsensical.

Googling Sam Harris reveals this position on the question of the 'self': “The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body…. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuro-anatomical sense. There’s no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding.”

Are you sure he thinks materialism it's nonsensical? I think he just critizes the possibility to objectively 'measure' a subjective experience.

There is no serious intellectual physicalist/materialist argument for how that which lacks consciousness can produce consciousness, just a fear that accepting consciousness as irreducible means their war against religion can't be won.

Do you really believe this is the driving motivation for materialism/physicalism? Atheism? I would have thought the correlation between brain states and mental states which is hard to explain outside materialism/physicalism motivates this argument. It's really the elephant in the room I feel you 'dualists' tends to ignore.