On 3/12/2025 4:49 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 5:20 PM Brent Meeker <meekerbr...@gmail.com>
wrote:
/>>> I can certainly see the difference between conscious
and unconscious./
*>> No you cannot!*
/> Sure I can. If he's breathing and got a heartbeat but
unresponsive, he's unconscious. If he's breathing and got a
heartbeat and responsive, he's conscious./
*Responsive?That's a test for intelligent behavior not consciousness. *
No it's not. If you shine a light in his eye and his pupil contracts
that's a response. If you ask who he voted for and he says, "Trump"
that's a response.*
*
*You have made an implicit assumption that consciousness is the
inevitable byproduct of intelligence. *
No, I've made an argument that consciousness imagination is an evolved
feature of thought that adds to intelligence.
*I think that is a very reasonable assumption and all I ask is that
you use the same assumption when you judge humans when you judge the
intelligence and consciousness of an AI.
*
I do. Why to you think I don't?
/> I notice you claim to be able to tell whether people are
intelligent or not by their actions.../
*Yes, of course! *
/> something that require inferences about their internal motives
and intents./
*No, good thing too because that's something you don't know. Even
Einstein didn't know what internal motives caused him to become a
genius, so are you really unwilling to unequivocally state that
Einstein was smart?
*
I'm not talking about some vague motives that may have contributed to
his genius over the years. I'm talking about walking to the tavern that
served beer. That's intelligent if he wanted a beer or if he fancied the
bar maid, but not if he wanted to buy shoes. So you had to attribute
certain motives for it to count as intelligent.
*
*
*>> But the thing is, you may be able to "imagine scenarios"
but natural selection can not.And there is no reason to think
your "imaginary scenarios" correspond with anything in the
physical world.*
/> Which is why natural selection is not conscious. /
*True, and yet in spite of not being consciousNatural Selection
neverthelessmanaged to manufactureconsciousness at least once and
probably many billions of times; the only way thatcould have
happened is if consciousness is an evolutionary spandrel,a byproduct
of another trate that Evolution can see. Intelligent behavior for
example.*
Only because you cherry pick what to count as "intelligent behavior".
You and evolution can see language behavior such as describing one's
thoughts about a mathematical proof. This is generally taken as
evidence of conscious thought, and that thought as essential to the
development of the proof. Not a spandrel. Or maybe you think
mathematicians never get laid.
*
**
*
*>> I could not say this two years ago but todayif you could
only observe what an intelligent agent didthen not only
natural selection but also YOU could not tell if it was
performed by an AI or a human, provided that the AI pretended
to be stupider and think slower than it really can. *
/> What does have that to do with anything I wrote?? I didn't say
anything about discriminating AI andnatural intelligence./
*But you did say that to conclude that something is intelligent
"/require inferences about their internal motives and intents/",and
nobody would say such a silly thing if AI didn't exist and nobody had
even proposed that such a thing might someday be possible.
*
LLMs require prompts as motivation. You claim to know they are
intelligent by their response. But you wouldn't say that if the
response didn't match the motivation.
*
*
*>> I asked Google for a synonym for the word "meaning" and it
listed a bunch of them, but the very first one was
"definition". And I asked for a synonym for "description" and
it said"exemplification". As I said , all definitions are
ultimately circular.*
/>So in spite me giving an example of the words use you have still
never hear of ostensive definition./
*I had never heard of that particular phrase beforealthough I was
pretty sure I knew what it meant, but I thought it might have some
obscure technical meaning in formal logic or philosophy so I better
look it up, but it turned out to mean exactly what I thought it did.
This is what Wikipedia said: *
*"/An _O__stensive Definition_ conveys the meaning of a term by
_pointing out examples_/."*
Plural.
Brent
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