On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 5:20 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]> 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. You have made an implicit assumption that consciousness is the inevitable byproduct of 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 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? * *>> 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 conscious Natural Selection nevertheless managed to manufacture consciousness at least once and probably many billions of times; the only way that could have happened is if consciousness is an evolutionary spandrel, a byproduct of another trate that Evolution can see. Intelligent behavior for example. * > *>> I could not say this two years ago but today if you could only observe >> what an intelligent agent did then 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 and natural 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. * *>> 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 before although 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 Ostensive Definition conveys the meaning of a term by pointing out examples."* * John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* rfx *Without examples language would be useless because there would be no way > to make a connection between the squiggles on a page and something in the > real world, a dictionary would just be a book that links one squiggle to > another squiggle. * > > -- 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 visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2HiY5iJtnhKg2__HzoU86uz9TjeoiZ5o7fNoZUtOL1sw%40mail.gmail.com.
