Literally just mainlining marketing material straight into whatever’s left of their rotting brains.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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so i know a lot of other users will just be dismissive but i like to hone my critical thinking skills, and most people are completely unfamiliar with these advanced concepts, so here's my philosophical examination of the issue.
the thing is, we don't even know how to prove HUMANS are sentient except by self-reports of our internal subjective experiences.
so sentience/consciousness as i discuss it here refers primarily to Qualia, or to a being existing in such a state as to experience Qualia. Qualia are the internal, subjective, mental experiences of external, physical phenomena.
here's the task of people that want to prove that the human brain is a meat computer: Explain, in exact detail, how (i.e. the procsses by which) Qualia, (i.e. internal, subjective, mental experiences) arise from external, objective, physical phenomena.
hint: you can't. the move by physicalist philosophy is simply to deny the existence of qualia, consciousness, and subjective experience altogether as 'illusory' - but illusory to what? an illusion necessarily has an audience, something it is fooling or decieving. this 'something' would be the 'consciousness' or 'sentience' or to put it in your oh so smug terms the 'soul' that non-physicalist philosophy might posit. this move by physicalists is therefore syntactically absurd and merely moves the goalpost from 'what are qualia' to 'what are those illusory, deceitful qualia decieving'. consciousness/sentience/qualia are distinctly not information processing phenomena, they are entirely superfluous to information processing tasks. sentience/consciousness/Qualia is/are not the information processing, but internal, subjective, mental awareness and experience of some of these information processing tasks.
Consider information processing, and the kinds of information processing that our brains/minds are capable of.
What about information processing requires an internal, subjective, mental experience? Nothing at all. An information processing system could hypothetically manage all of the tasks of a human's normal activities (moving, eating, speaking, planning, etc.) flawlessly, without having such an internal, subjective, mental experience. (this hypothetical kind of person with no internal experiences is where the term 'philosophical zombie' comes from) There is no reason to assume that an information processing system that contains information about itself would have to be 'aware' of this information in a conscious sense of having an internal, subjective, mental experience of the information, like how a calculator or computer is assumed to perform information processing without any internal subjective mental experiences of its own (independently of the human operators).
and yet, humans (and likely other kinds of life) do have these strange internal subjective mental phenomena anyway.
our science has yet to figure out how or why this is, and the usual neuroscience task of merely correlating internal experiences to external brain activity measurements will fundamentally and definitionally never be able to prove causation, even hypothetically.
so the options we are left with in terms of conclusions to draw are:
And personally the only option i have any disdain for is number 2, as i cannot bring myself to deny the very thing i am constantly and completely immersed inside of/identical with.
Why not? I understand that we cannot, at this particular moment, explain every step of the process and how every cause translates to an effect until you have consciousness, but we can point at the results of observation and study and less complex systems we understand the workings of better and say that it's most likely that the human brain functions in the same way, and these processes produce Qualia.
It's not absolute proof, but there's nothing wrong with just saying that from what we understand, this is the most likely explanation.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying here, why is the idea that it can't be done the takeaway rather than it will take a long time for us to be able to say whether or not it's possible?
Once you believe you understand exactly what external brain activity leads to particular internal experiences, you could surely prove it experimentally by building a system where you can induce that activity and seeing if the system can report back the expected experience (though this might not be possible to do ethically).
As a final point, surely your own argument above about an illusion requiring an observer rules out concluding anything along the lines of point 2?
"All knowledge is unprovable and so nothing can be known" is a more hopeless position than "existence is absurd and meaning has to come from within". I shall both fight and perish.
Silly meme that I had just posted aside, that isn't my actual position and I don't think that is the position others here have taken. I said that there is a lot more left to be known and the current academic leading edge of neuroscience (not tech company marketing hype or pop nihilistic reductionistic Reddit New Atheist takes) backs that up.
From here it just looks like you're just touching the computer and doing the heavy lifting for LLM hype marketers.
I'm not fighting for those idiots. We're a long way away from a real machine intelligence.
You may be doing the heavy lifting in an unexamined way because you've been comparing living organic brains to LLMs with the implication that there's no meaningful difference and nothing left out of the comparison except mysticism.
Oh, no. I didn't mean to come across that way at all. Sorry if it looked like that.
I mean, "meaning has to come from within" is sort of solipsistic but, depending on your definition, completely true.
The biggest problem with Camus (besides his credulity towards the western press and his lack of commitment to trains, oh and lacking any desire for systemic understanding) is that he views this question in an extremely antisocial manner. Yes, if you want affirmation from rocks and you will kill yourself if you don't get affirmation from rocks, there's not much to do but get some rope. However, it's hard to imagine how differently the rhetorical direction of the Myth of Sisyphus would have gone if he had just considered more seriously the idea of finding meaning in relationships with and impact on others rather than just resenting the trees for not respecting you. Seriously, go and reread it, the idea seems as though it didn't even cross his mind.
The Myth of Solipsists