On Tue, Jan 23, 2024 at 3:38 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
* > Who wrote this? you, JC?* > No, Scott Alexander did, he's a pretty smart guy but I think he got some things wrong. I did write this in the comments section: "You say "If we’re lucky, consciousness is a basic feature of information processing and anything smart enough to outcompete us will be at least as conscious as we are" and I agree with you about that because there is evidence that it is true. I know for a fact that random mutation and natural selection managed to produce consciousness at least once (me) and probably many billions of times, but Evolution can't directly detect consciousness any better than I can, except in myself, and it can't select for something it can't see, but evolution can detect intelligent behavior. I could not function if I really believed that solipsism was true, therefore I must take it as an axiom, as a brute fact, that consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed intelligently. You also say "consciousness seems very closely linked to brain waves in humans" but how was that fact determined? It was observed that when people behave intelligently their brain waves take a certain form and when they don't behave intelligently the brain waves are different than that. I'm sure you don't think that other people are conscious when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they are in those conditions they are not behaving very intelligently. As for the fear of paperclip maximizers, I think that's kind of silly. It assumes the possibility of an intelligent entity having an absolutely fixed goal they can never change, but such a thing is impossible. In the 1930s Kurt Gödel prove that there are some things that are true but have no proof and Alan Turing proved that there is no way to know for certain if a given task is even possible. For example, is it possible to prove or disprove that every even number greater than two is the sum of two prime numbers? Nobody knows. If an intelligent being was able to have goals that could never change it would soon be caught in an infinite loop because sooner or later it would attempt a task that was impossible, that's why Evolution invented the very important emotion of boredom. Certainly human beings don't have fix goals, not even the goal of self preservation, and I don't see how an AI could either." John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1-_8qbg8WHe3FCr_3b4H7%2BaDYKTkTWwu8r6JLdyjruUg%40mail.gmail.com.
