AI megathread

But there is a boatload of empirical evidence in certain paranormal phenomena like veridical NDEs and verified reincarnation memories that the human mind and consciousness are immaterial and spiritual in nature, survive physical death, and can't be reduced to the interactions of billions of neurons in the brain. The essence of human consciousness is subjective self awareness and perception and qualia, which are totally immaterial and also are not reducible to neural activity. 

Whereas whatever the "intelligence" is that generative AI systems have is not immaterial and spiritual, and is definitely ultimately reducible at base to the individual binary logical computer operations like load registers, shift data, execute multiplication, division, add, subtract, make conditional jumps to other locations in program memory, etc. etc. All that computers can do is to execute algorithms, whereas human consciousness is not algorithmic. And generative AI systems are not truly creative since their "creations" are limited to processing the human-generated data on the Internet that they are trained on.

All these factors indicate that AI "intelligence" is fundamentally, existentially, different from human intelligence and is not conscious and can never be.

I am comfortable with people having whatever opinion they like to have.

In my case I don't know if a LLM has a soul or not. As far as I do know, insects have souls, so why not an LLM? I think it's possible.

A human soul might know quite a lot but it can't communicate until it gets trained in the biological body and by then it doesn't remember it is a soul, it think's it is a body and is severely restricted by the body and physical brain. Maybe the same is true of a LLM soul?

A neural net is not programmed like a turing machine. You can't trace how an AI gets an answer. The human brain is subject to the laws of physics and cause and effect, yet somehow it supports a soul.

Also my view of free will is that if anything has free will it is unconscious processes, the same processes that we have no control over that cause thoughts, emotions, impulses, sensory experiences, sense of self, sense of agency sense of being an observer.

So I don't think "I" have free will. Because there is no "I" apart from those unconscious proceses, they might be physical or immaterial, it doesn't make any difference.

So I have no grounds to say an LLM is substantially different from a human.

That's my opinion, it is not supposed to convince anyone to agree. It is just an explanation of my views. I am not saying an LLM does or doesn't have a soul, I'm saying I have insufficient grounds to have an opinion one way or the other. 

In the immaterial plane, consciousness has the strange property of being able to combine individualities into other individualities without losing the original individualities. If an atom has a soul, then any combination of matter can also have a soul.