On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 13:37, Terren Suydam <terren.suy...@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 11:13 PM Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 10:48, Terren Suydam <terren.suy...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 8:42 PM Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 10:03, Terren Suydam <terren.suy...@gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> it is true that my brain has been trained on a large amount of data -
>>>>> data that contains intelligence outside of my own. But when I introspect, 
>>>>> I
>>>>> notice that my understanding of things is ultimately rooted/grounded in my
>>>>> phenomenal experience. Ultimately, everything we know, we know either by
>>>>> our experience, or by analogy to experiences we've had. This is in
>>>>> opposition to how LLMs train on data, which is strictly about how
>>>>> words/symbols relate to one another.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The functionalist position is that phenomenal experience supervenes on
>>>> behaviour, such that if the behaviour is replicated (same output for same
>>>> input) the phenomenal experience will also be replicated. This is what
>>>> philosophers like Searle (and many laypeople) can’t stomach.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I think the kind of phenomenal supervenience you're talking about is
>>> typically asserted for behavior at the level of the neuron, not the level
>>> of the whole agent. Is that what you're saying?  That chatGPT must be
>>> having a phenomenal experience if it talks like a human?   If so, that is
>>> stretching the explanatory domain of functionalism past its breaking point.
>>>
>>
>> The best justification for functionalism is David Chalmers' "Fading
>> Qualia" argument. The paper considers replacing neurons with functionally
>> equivalent silicon chips, but it could be generalised to replacing any part
>> of the brain with a functionally equivalent black box, the whole brain, the
>> whole person.
>>
>
> You're saying that an algorithm that provably does not have experiences of
> rabbits and lollipops - but can still talk about them in a way that's
> indistinguishable from a human - essentially has the same phenomenology as
> a human talking about rabbits and lollipops. That's just absurd on its
> face. You're essentially hand-waving away the grounding problem. Is that
> your position? That symbols don't need to be grounded in any sort of
> phenomenal experience?
>

It's not just talking about them in a way that is indistinguishable from a
human, in order to have human-like consciousness the entire I/O behaviour
of the human would need to be replicated. But in principle, I don't see why
a LLM could not have some other type of phenomenal experience. And I don't
think the grounding problem is a problem: I was never grounded in anything,
I just grew up associating one symbol with another symbol, it's symbols all
the way down.

-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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