They moved goalposts. Linux and worms think too, the question is how smart are they. And if you assume consciousness has no manifestation even in case of humans, caring about it is pointless too.

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fellowniusmonk 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, worms think, let the computers have thinking too, the philosophers can still argue all they want about consciousness.

Humans are special, we emit meaning the way stars emit photons, we are rare in the universe as far as empirical observation has revealed. Even with AGI the existence of each complex meaning generator will be a cosmic rarity.

For some people that seems to be not enough, due to their factually wrong word views they see themselves as common and worthless (when they empirically aren't) and need this little psychological boost of unexaminable metaphysical superiority.

But there is an issue of course, the type of thinking humans do is dangerous but net positive and relatively stable, we have a long history where most instantiations of humans can persist and grow themselves and the species as a whole, we have a track record.

These new models do not, people have brains that as they stop functioning they stop persisting the apparatus that supports the brain and they die, people tend to become less capable and active as their thinking deteriorates and hold less influence ocer others accept in rare cases.

This is not the case for an LLM, they seem to be able to hallucinate endlessly and as they have access to the outside world maintain roughly their same amount of causal leverage, their clarity and accuracy of their thinking isn't tied to their persisting.

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fragmede 2 days ago | parent [-]

Are we that special? We may be the only species left on Earth that's built civilization, but there are other species on Earth that we've deemed sentient, even if they don't have smartphones. (That may argue that they're smarter than us though.) If octopodes can dream, if elephants get depressed when their spouse dies, then I'd we're not so totally alone on our own planet, then it seems, despite no evidence, that we can't be totally alone in the universe. That is for philosophy professors to ponder Drakes equation until we have irrefutable evidence, however.

	▲	fellowniusmonk 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Empirically? Observationally? Yes. Until we have empirical evidence to the contrary we need to preserve our species. If we discover other smarter species or never do, either way I don't care, it's immaterial to the precautionary principle. We are fucking awesome and rare, and any other species with our amount of meaning generation or even capability for meaning generation is also fucking awesome. I would 100% grant that ceatacenas and octopuses have human or higher level intelligence, I don't care, I don't need to put other species capabilities down to highlight my species accomplishment, the simple fact is that we have written more facts about the universe, discovered more, done more, gone further than any species we have empirically observed. I mean it's incontrovertibly true, maybe dolphins have crazy libraries I'm not aware of, but until we verify that fact we need to preserve ourselves (and afterwards too), and we should preserve them too. Even with other species, aliens, etc, they all need to be preserved because we can't ex ante predict which entities within a species will be part of the causal chain that solves entropy (if it's even possible.)

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goatlover 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What does it mean to assume consciousness has no manifestation even in the case of humans? Is that denying that we have an experience of sensation like colors, sounds, or that we experience dreaming, memories, inner dialog, etc?

That's prima facie absurd on the face of it, so I don't know what it means. You would have to a philosophical zombie to make such an argument.