(2025-01-09, 12:01 PM)sbu Wrote: You’re judging a technology that only reached prominence around 2018, yet large language models (LLMs) have already demonstrated how much can be derived from data alone. While I still believe there’s an elusive element that underpins consciousness, much of what shapes our humanity seems to be encoded in the brain and is formed through early sensory input. This becomes evident in stroke patients who, after sustaining damage to specific brain regions, may lose cognitive abilities such as complex reasoning, recognition, or empathy—showing how central these data-driven processes are to our identity.
Seems like this is just Compuationalism of the Gaps? Otherwise you could tell me how the input leads to the output in a machine learning program and then I would be forced to concede that execution trace shows something metaphysically significant is happening.
When I was younger there were times I was blown away by video game AI, specifically two flying imps in Diablo I who would circle me. When I went to attack one of them I'd have to swing my sword, and this gave the other imp the opportunity to strike me from behind. I recall even telling my friends about how amazing this was, but this wonder faded as I became more knowledgeable about how it worked under the hood.
Instead that wonder turned to the incredible ingenuity of human consciousness, something I became even more impressed with when I saw how the Universal Truths of Mathematics underpinned the foundations of all maths and thus all sciences.
Similarly, when I was older and had gotten my bachelor's in maths, I was amazed by theorem provers but then I learned more about how they worked.
Perhaps given my own experience with the magic trick of AI, it's just confusing to me people can know how AI companies exploit workers as humans in the loop, understand the basics of machine learning, and see how complex domains of human knowledge can be structured programmatically and then still assert that something metaphysically significant is going on that wasn't going on with any game AI or any Theorem Prover.
Games involve real time decision making, proofs of theorems are a higher mathematical abstraction, yet once one understands how the AI works the seeming novelty is gone. LLMs, AFAICTell, are like the GPS of old - just one more case of people being impressed by the output and then inferring something special is happening under the hood. My guess is as we become better able to "unwind" the "black box" of machine learning and actually trace the program flow from input to output the illusion will become less impressive.
In the meantime the basic reality of what a Turing Machine running a program actually is and how it differs from our own embodies selves is something even a materialist like Searle can see, as per his paper Is the Brain a Digital Computer? The Dualist (of sorts) Lanier also makes similar arguments in the excellent You Can't Argue with Zombie.
As for the example of stroke patients all we know about the brain - an object in experience - is that our experience of interacting with that icon is correlated with aspects of our general experience. There's nothing "encoded" in the brain, if by which you mean our thoughts about things are somehow intrinsically connected to some brain structure. See neurocientist Erik Hoel's essay Neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic. Consciousness is Why.
Now all that said, I do want reiterate that I do believe synthetic life will be possible one day when we figure out the correct minimally necessary structures in our own embodies consciousness that allows for this (synthetic microtubules playing a role is my bet). But it won't help us decide much to anything about which "ism" of consciousness is the right one, because the AI question isn't a Materialism vs Non-Materialism one.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
(This post was last modified: 2025-01-09, 12:31 PM by Sciborg_S_Patel.)
- Bertrand Russell