• L'éléphant
    1.4k
    Sorry, but AI intelligence is not the same as human intelligence. I've also been outspoken about this in another thread. We can't say that computing is the same as thinking.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    I dont go along with writers like Nagel who want to establish some sort of self-identical ‘I’ that accompanies every perception and infuses it with some sort of special feeling of me-ness.Joshs

    He says in What is it like to be a bat: Therefore the analogical form of the English expression "what it is like" is misleading. It does not mean "what (in our experience) it resembles," but rather "how it is for the subject himself." (footnote 6).

    Nagel really never explains what this means and I think the concept is incoherent.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    I think the self is contingent, and constantly changes along with other aspects of our experience.Joshs

    Agree.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    Therefore , what it is like for me to experience the ‘same’ color over time is never the same for me, because I am never the same ‘I’.Joshs

    Yes. A trained artist literally sees colors other do not. They can, but is a learned skill.
  • javra
    2.4k
    We can't say that computing is the same as thinking.L'éléphant

    I agree. As different examples, plants and even ameba exhibit intelligent behavior. Are they intelligent? They are alive; and some, such as myself, deem them to have awareness, hence some measure of consciousness.

    At any rate, I still hold these questions to not be answerable via biological evolution per se.

    Maybe we can agree to disagree ... this with gratitude for your answers.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    We can't say that computing is the same as thinking.L'éléphant

    No, but I think AI will be a different kind of thinking and not merely computing.
  • L'éléphant
    1.4k
    No, but I think AI will be a different kind of thinking and not merely computing.Jackson
    Until then, let's stick to reality.
  • Joshs
    5.3k
    Nagel really never explains what this means and I think the concept is incoherent.Jackson

    Dan Zahavi has spent his career meticulously defining ‘the feeling of what it is like for me’. I dont happen to agree with him; too Kantian for me.
  • L'éléphant
    1.4k
    At any rate, I still hold these questions to not be answerable via biological evolution per se.javra
    You can't talk about evolution without the biology. That's what evolution explains -- the biological changes in humans.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    Dan Zahavi has spent his career meticulously defining ‘the feeling of what it is like for me’. I dont happen to agree with him; too Kantian for me.Joshs

    Fuck Kant. I think he is a dope. And I read the Critique of Pure Reason entirely in grad school.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    Until then, let's stick to reality.L'éléphant

    No idea what that means.
  • L'éléphant
    1.4k
    It means, as we speak, AI remains to be a computer. Until someone had created a human with human minds, let's keep this discussion within the reality of what we have available.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    It means, as we speak, AI remains to be a computer. Until someone had created a human with human minds, let's keep this discussion within the reality of what we have available.L'éléphant

    I do not think we know what human intelligence is. So, AI is as good a form of intelligence and any other. AI is not trying to imitate the human mind.
  • javra
    2.4k
    You can't talk about evolution without the biology.L'éléphant

    Hey, never claimed you can. But evolution is what happens to biological beings. They're not the same thing.
  • L'éléphant
    1.4k
    I do not think we know what human intelligence is.Jackson
    I'm linking a thread here where there are articles linked to support biological changes leading to intelligence of humans.

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12484/the-decline-of-intelligence-in-modern-humans
  • L'éléphant
    1.4k
    Quibble in placement of words. Nah.
  • Jackson
    1.8k
    I'm linking a thread here where there are articles linked to support biological changes leading to intelligence of humans.L'éléphant

    First, I never read links.
    Second, I do not see how my comment led to you talking about biology.
  • javra
    2.4k

    To be clearer:

    evolution: natural selection upon mutations ... and further details related to this
    biology: the study of life

    If the argument is that the occurrence of life explains the occurrence of consciousness ... I'll be parting from the debate. My intuitive gut belief is that life and consciousness are correlated. But I can't provide you with a proof of this.
  • litewave
    801
    Is ontological definition the same as determinism? Can a non-deterministic world be defined in the way you describe?Joshs

    Non-deterministic traditionally means involving absence or incompleteness of causal relations, meaning that future events cannot be logically derived from prior events and laws of physics. That doesn't mean that the future events are not well defined; we just can't predict them. This applies to quantum mechanics too; it limits prediction of future events from prior events and laws of physics (only probabilities of possible outcomes of measurements can be predicted), but the mathematics (structure) of quantum mechanics, or of the quantum-mechanical world, is reducible to well-defined pure sets, just as all mathematics is.
  • Joshs
    5.3k
    the mathematics (structure) of quantum mechanics, or of the quantum-mechanical world, is reducible to well-defined pure sets, just as all mathematics is.litewave

    The model of well-defined pure sets is perfectly suited to a philosophical grounding of the real in terms of the empirical object , and this in turn makes use of assumptions from logic concerning the definition of identity.

    Continental Philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries has set its sights on critiquing traditional notions
    of identity.

    As Dan Smirh writes :


    “Classical logic identified three such principles: (1) the principle of identity (which says that ‘A is ‘A’, or ‘A thing is what it is’), (2) the principle of non-contradiction, which
    says that ‘A is not non-A’ (‘A thing is not what it is not’), and (3) the prin­ciple of the excluded middle, which says that between A or not-A, there is no middle term). Taken together, these three principles determine what is impossible, that is to say, what is unthinkable: something that would not be what it is (which would contradict the principle of identity); some­thing that would be what it is not (which would contradict the principle of non-contradiction); and something that would be both what it is and what it is not (which would contradict the principle of the excluded middle). By means of these three principles, thought is able to think the world of what is possible (or what traditional philosophy called the
    world of ‘essences’). But this is why logic does not take us very far.”

    Common to Wittgenstein , phenomenology and various postmodern strands of thought is a re-thinking of the relation between identity and difference. Difference is not added onto , as the interactive behavior of, defined objects, but the precondition of identity.
  • L'éléphant
    1.4k
    If the argument is that the occurrence of life explains the occurrence of consciousness ... I'll be parting from the debate. My intuitive gut belief is that life and consciousness are correlated. But I can't provide you with a proof of this.javra
    That's what we're trying to answer. Because humans evolved from animalistic awareness to intelligent humans. For example, homo sapiens?
  • litewave
    801
    Continental Philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries has set its sights on critiquing traditional notions
    of identity.
    Joshs

    If they reject the principle of identity (or non-contradiction, or excluded middle) then I don't know what they are talking about. A circle that is not a circle? What would that be? Even in the relations-only ontology I suppose that every relation is what it is and not some other relation.

    Common to Wittgenstein , phenomenology and various postmodern strands of thought is a re-thinking of the relation between identity and difference. Difference is not added onto , as the interactive behavior of, defined objects, but the precondition of identity.Joshs

    Sure, difference between objects means that they have different identities. In general, every two objects have some different properties and some same properties and thus there is a particular difference (or similarity) relation between the two objects.
  • Joshs
    5.3k
    difference between objects means that they have different identities. In general, every two objects have some different properties and some same properties and thus there is a particular difference (or similarity) relation between the two objects.litewave

    Evan Thompson, in Mind in Life , offers the new vision of objective science:

    “In the context of contemporary science … ―nature does not consist of basic particulars, but fields and processes … there is no bottom level of basic particulars with intrinsic properties that upwardly determines everything else. Everything is process all the way down and all the way up, and processes are irreducibly relational—they exist only in patterns, networks, organizations, configurations, or webs…. There is no base level of elementary entities to serve as the ultimate emergence base on which to ground everything. “(Thompson 2007: 440-1)
  • litewave
    801
    In the context of contemporary science … ―nature does not consist of basic particulars, but fields and processesJoshs

    And yet those fields and processes have a mathematical description and all mathematical descriptions are reducible to pure sets.
  • Joshs
    5.3k
    And yet those fields and processes have a mathematical description and all mathematical descriptions are reducible to pure sets.litewave

    Are pure sets transcendent foundations in math, like platonic essences? The statement that “all mathematical descriptions are reducible to pure sets” sounds very final and eternal, as if it must always be thus.
  • 180 Proof
    14.1k
    How does one actually get the point across why this ["evolution"] is not an acceptable answer as far as the hard problem is concerned?schopenhauer1
    "The hard problem" is a pseudo-problem due to assuming an unwarranted confusion / conflation of an ontological duality with semantic duality compounded subsequently by observing that polar opposite terms "subjectivity" and "objectivity" cannot be described in terms of one another, which amounts to framing the "problem" based on a category mistake. There isn't an "hard problem" to begin with, schop.

    Can this ["evolution"] be seen as answering it, or is it just inadvertently answering an easier problem? If so, how to explain how it isn't quite getting at the hard problem?
    Saying "evolution" (empirical model) doesn't even address the alleged philosophical issue at hand (conceptual incoherence).
  • SolarWind
    205
    "The hard problem" is a pseudo-problem due to assuming an unwarranted confusion / conflation of an ontological duality with semantic duality compounded subsequently by observing that polar opposite terms "subjectivity" and "objectivity" cannot be described in terms of one another, which amounts to framing the "problem" based on a category mistake. There isn't an "hard problem" to begin with, schop.180 Proof

    "The hard problem" is not only a real problem, but even extremely important. If you see animals as non-sentient machines, there is no reason at all for animal welfare for the sake of animals, and you could recycle the animals as we do with plants
  • 180 Proof
    14.1k
    Nothing I've written contains a claim or an implication that "animals (are) non-sentient machines".
  • SolarWind
    205
    Nothing I've written claims or implies that "animals (are) non-sentient machines".180 Proof

    It is part of the "hard problem" whether animals have sentience or not. So much would be easier if they didn't have any. And if human political opponents didn't have sentience either, then you could dispose of them without a guilty conscience.
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