The point is that this claim 'it is the person asociated with the human animal who is doing the thinking' is not question begging, whereas 'it is thet human animal that is doing the thinking' is. — Clearbury

My point was that even if it is accepted that the human animal is doing the thinking, the conclusion that animalism is true does not follow. Yes, the premise begs the animal doing the thinking (as any premise begs whatever it is positing), but it does not beg animalism.

What if 'you' includes the experiencer, the persisting fundamental addition that humans have and that bugs and robots don't. The animal part still does the thinking (explaining the expensive brain), but not the experiencing, and not the exertion of will, if that can somehow be separated from thinking, which it often is.
That's what I mean by P2 not begging animalism, but only begging that the animal does the thinking. A lot of dualists would deny that the animal part does either of the thinking and experiencing. It's not a view I particularly understand, so I cannot speak authoritatively for the opposing view.

Olson provides the logical form so you can check its validity.

1. x)(x is a human animal & x is sitting in your chair)

2. (x)((x is a human animal & x is sitting in your chair) x is thinking)

3. (x)((x is thinking & x is sitting in your chair) x = you)

4. (x)(x is a human animal & x = you) — NOS4A2

I actually don't follow the notation, but it seems illustrated by my attempt at applying something real to x.
P1. x)(x is a big toe & x is at the front of your shoe)
P2. (x)((x is a big toe & x is at the front of your shoe) x is thinking)
P3. (x)((x is thinking & x is at the front of your shoe) x = you)
C4. (x)(x is a big toe & x = you)

Clearly this seems wrong, but it is the logic being employed, is it not?
The bit about 'x is thinking' very much begs that it is the toe doing the thinking, and not 'you', which includes the toe but is not entirely consisting of the toe.


Nobody replied to my query asking if animalism is in any way distinct from physical monism. I support such a thing, but that argument totally falls flat. The toe-ism argument is typically countered by one of incredulity, that a toe has not the capability for thinking and therefore there must be something more. That's another poor argument.

To my mind it's really quite a pathetic thing to do, inventing a game just to win it. — goremand

:100:
and again illustrated by the post following

It's the person associated with the human animal who is doing the thinking. — Clearbury

Not necessarily. The two could be separate things, and it is the human animal part that is doing the thinking, as is asserted by P2 of the OP argument.
How else do you explain why evolution would put such an energy-expensive thing up top if its function is no more than what can be accomplished by 1/8th the mass and energy intake (as evidenced by a similar mass deer).

magine there is a weightless box into which a 90 kg person has been placed. — Clearbury

OK, to apply that directly to the OP:

(P1) Presently resting on the floor is a box.
(P2) The box masses 90kg
(P3) You are the contents of the box.
(C) Therefore, the box is you.

That doesn't seem to be begging anywhere, yet the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises, and it doesn't follow from them if the mass is due to the box itself or the contents.
Perhaps I did not apply the scenario correctly to the argument.

if the 'is' in premise 2 is taken to be the 'is' of identity 9and the argument's validity depends on this) then it's question begging, as it takes for granted that the person who is doing the thinking and is associated with that human body is one and the same as that human bod — Clearbury

I don't get that from P2. It clearly says it is the animal doing the thinking, not the person. There's no mention of 'you' or the person in P2, except as an adjective expressing what owns the chair. There's no implication that what is thinking is what owns the chair.

The animalist would claim that those who argue "no" are wrong. That it's incoherent to consider ourselves as fundamentally something other than a human animal. — Baden

So then how is animalism vs. not-animalism any different than a stance of physical monism vs dualism?

I didn't know people denied this. — Patterner

Exactly. There are plenty of monist philosophers, and the only difference is that they don't choose this particular term to describe their identical view.

Thanks for the insight, and I think you’re right. The idea that we are animals, and not angels or something, — NOS4A2

It isn't an animal vs angel (or any other non-earth-evolved life form). It is an assertion of us being no more than what any other animal is. There's nothing additional (spirit, whatever goes to heaven say) on top of it that the animals don't have.

I didn't see it, probably missed it; will someone be kind enough to refer me to where the significant terms in this thread are given even a tentative definition? — tim wood

Not sure what terms you need, but per the quoted argument in the OP, this is what I got, and certainly did not get at first:

A human animal is our physical body, that which is an individual of a species evolved from the earliest members of the animal kingdom.

A person (or thinking being) is all of you, including especially any part that persists after death. The argument asserts that the two are the same thing, and its opponents assert otherwise. The argument seems to be more of an assertion and seems to employ zero signficant logic in coming to its conclusion, but those in opposition do little better, typically arguing from incredulity or something.


Professional philosophers are often in the capacity of supporting the beliefs they have been taught. The priests take your money in exchange for promises made regarding your fondest wish: Everlasting pain free life, which requires a fancy story behind it to explain why everybody who has paid the price seems to still obviously not become immortal. So that story has to be rationalized, and that's one of the reasons so many philosophers looks for ways to do so.

Somewhere in my teens I became mature enough to realize that the priests were snake oil salesmen. Not the lower ones who genuinely believe what they've been taught, but the upper ones who make up the stories. So while it took a while to abandon the god and the immortality story, it what a pretty quick death of my opinion of how the church leveraged it all.

The debate isn't whether human beings are animals. They are. That's just a fact. The debate concerns whether we (the persons reading this thread) are animals. — Baden

OK, I think I actually clicked with this comment. The bit about being numerically identical with a human animal makes more sense. The desired answer is No. We are fundamentally something else, and we only have temporary control (a free will thing) over this particular animal. Is that it?

In that case, my question becomes, at what point in the evolutionary history of h.sapien did this animal suddenly cede its self control to something else?

The argument in the OP still seems to make no sense. It seems to beg that the human animal in the chair is complete, not requiring a separate thing to do its thinking. There's all kinds of problems with the model of the animal not doing the thinking, but that doesn't seem to be the point here.

Souls aren’t human animals, brains aren’t human animals, consciousness isn’t a human animal, minds aren’t human animals, are they? It’s not a question whether humans are animals, but whether you are a human animal. — NOS4A2

So I've always said (sort of). Brains don't think. People do. A soul (per ancient definition) I think means something like 'all that is you', not a separate part that persists when the rest does not.

So take a frog. It has a soul by that definition. It is an animal, and it thinks, but nowhere near at our level. It has all that stuff you mention above. What distinguishes a human animal from any other animal that happens to do something better than most/all the other animals? What is being suggested in counter-argument by those that deny animalism?


And yes, I looked briefly at the SEP article to get some of the terminology being used, but I read less than a 10th of it.

Animalism seems to be the default position. It seems to be those denying it that are positing something extraordinary, in need of extraordinary evidence. I don't think either side can be falsified, so any proof one way or the other is bound to have flaws, which are often quite easy to spot.

It's an ontological distinction - a difference in kind. — Wayfarer

Case in point. This seems to be the claim in need of the evidence. I see no obvious difference in kind.

A cat is numerically identical to an animal. A bottle isn’t. — NOS4A2

That's a biological answer, not a metaphysical one. Yes, a human is part of the kingdom 'animalia' and a bottle (and a Tulip) is not. The distinction you chose seems to say no more than that.

Which premise do you disagree with? — NOS4A2

All of them, but the first two beg the conclusion that humans are animals, and that fallacy invalidates the argument.

The precursor species of early hominids would have gradually developed characteristics unique to humans such as the upright gait, opposable thumb, and enlarged cranium, but it really came into its own with the development of the hominid (neanderthal and h.sapiens) forebrain over a relatively short span of evolutionary time. It enables h.sapiens to do things and to understand levels of meaning that other species cannot. — Wayfarer

But none of that is fundamental. Plenty of species develop unique abilities, None of that makes them not animals.

Off topic, but the hasty evolution was never finished. We're sort of a train wreck of a being with lots of problems to work out. The thumbs predate humans. The upright gait is the thing that's very much a work in progress, and all my children and my wife (but not me) would have died without modern medical intervention due to defects in this area. I would have died as well, but not from gait defects. Modern medicine is interfering with natural selection.

No where in the first premise does it say you’re the human animal sitting in your chair. — NOS4A2

It calls that which is sitting in the chair a 'human animal', which is begging the fact that a human is an animal. That it is you or somebody else seems irrelevant. It isn't talking about the cat also sitting in that chair.

Animalists make the metaphysical claim that we are animals. — NOS4A2

It seems to be a biological claim. Not sure what it means for it to be a metaphysical one, or what would make us metaphysically distinct from animals were it not the case. The articles suggest a fundamental difference, perhaps in how we persist differently than animals. But I've seen dead people and they persist pretty much the same as a dead frog.

Why is the idea that we are animals seemingly unpopular among philosophers? — NOS4A2

The philosophers of old had no access to modern biology and presumed a form of anthropocentrism. At least reference the opinions of the ones who have access to and accept Darwin's findings. I do realize that there are plenty that still do not, but almost all of those beg the not-animal conclusion first and then rationalize backwards from there.

The SEP article seems to focus on our nature and persistence, and if either of those are different than animals, and if we are evolved from them, then at some point some fundamental change occurred which needs a hypothesis describing it, which nobody seems to want to produce.

Are each of us numerically identical to an animal? — NOS4A2

I don't know what that means. Give an example of something nonhuman that is numerically identical to an animal (frog?), and then something nonhuman that isn't (tree?). Humans seem more like frogs and less like trees.

If the aim of the argument is to prove that humans are animals, then it begs the question, because it starts by presuming the conclusion. — Wayfarer

I agree that the argument posted makes no sense to me and the first two premises seem to beg exactly as you describe. I don't see an argument at all outside of this.

that there is a difference in kind between h.sapiens and other species — Wayfarer

A difference, sure. A fundamental one? When did that change occur, or do you not consider humans to have animal ancestry?

I didn't define cause and effect in terms of observer. — MoK

Actually, I also did not see a particularly observer dependent wording of any of the descriptions.
Granted, all empirical investigation, only through which cause and effect are known to us, is via observation. But the description does not seem to be grounded in epistemological terms, hence my not seeing the observer involvement.
Perhaps @tim wood would care to elaborate.

Useful in an informal and non-rigorous way, but not an exact account of anything. — tim wood

With that much I agree.

How does something that exists cease to exist? — tim wood

Let's use the moving spotlight wording: Something ceases to exist when the spotlight moves away from it. Is that so hard? I'm no presentist, but I see no flaw most definition it uses. My father has ceased to exist, as has perhaps my twitter account. Are details of those necessary? All objects seem to have a finite duration, so a better question would be how some object might manage to not ever cease to exist.
In this case, it was a specific 'state of some system', which, under presentism again, ceases to exist when the state of said system changes to some different state.

I have three categories of ontology: Past (does not exist), present near future (exists), and future (future excluding near future which does not exist).
...
Let's stick to three events, A, B, and C. A causes B (B exists in the immediate future) at now. At the next moment, A ceases to exist, and B exists at now and causes C (C exists in the immediate future). Etc. — MoK

That seems to be what I said, so I guess I got pretty close in my attempt to summarize your view. I called them states, not events, since event to me is a point in spacetime, and states are not points.

So you agree that there was a chain of causes and effects between the asteroid collision and extinction of dinosaurs? — MoK

Calling it a chain carries an implication of something linear, rather than a network. There is no single cause of any effect, but the asteroid was indeed a contributor to it. Was it critical? Would the dinos be around today had that thing not hit? Probably none of the species of back then, which would have required said species to not evolve at all in 70 million years. We have alligators today, which is arguably evidence that the dinosaurs are not existence, but the 'dino' part seems to no longer apply.

Calling it a chain also carries a loose implication of a finite number of links, that is, discreet time. No evidence of this has every been demonstrated, but such a view has also never been falsified, which is why simulation hypothesis is not totally impossible.

Secondly, the term 'state' is a very 19th century classical concept. Einstein's relativity of simultaneity reduced 'state' to a frame dependent abstraction instead of a description of anything objectively physical. QM put serious doubt into the concept of counterfactuals, and the concept of an objective state depends heavily on counterfactuals. It means that there are meaningful past states, but not present ones, so if the past doesn't exist, then there are no states unless one posits counterfactual definiteness, and doing that requires one to discard locality, that cause and effect cannot lie outside each other's light cones, or in other words, faster than light causation. The latter principle is something I'm more reluctant to abandon.

Finally, my answer below is expressed in B-series terms. I would not agree to A-series wording of your question.

All the above said to cover my butt; in a naive 19th century classical way, yes, I acknowledge that there are states in between the asteroid hitting and the last dinosaur going extinct.

No, I am not talking about presentism or A-series of time — MoK

I didn't say you were talking about them, I said you were presuming them by referencing words that only have meaning in them.

since to me both now and immediate future exist whereas in presentism or A-series of time only now exist.

There are several variants of presentism, but all of them posit a preferred moment in time.
Growing block says that past and present events exist, future ones do not. Moving spotlight says they all exist, but the 'spotlight' travels across them, making one of the moments preferred. Your variant has not been discussed, but you seem to have not three but four categories of ontology: past, present near future, further future.

[/quote]No, I am talking about a change with a cause-and-effect relationship.[/quote]That's change over time.

Sure change exists.

Change is a different state at different times. That's fairly well defined.
You seem to use the pool ball analogy. The example is also a simple illustration of cause and effect.
The cue ball is rolling, and is near the edge of the table at one moment, and rolling near the middle a second later. That's change. For that change to 'exist' would seem to require both those moments to exist, which is not true of all variants of presentism.

Sure we cannot have any change if there is only one state.

I suppose it depends on your definition of 'change' and/or 'exists'.

Cause and effect can lay at the same point of time

That would violate physics unless they were the same event, and a single event cannot meaningfully have a cause/effect relationship with itself.

There is a chain of causes and effects between the asteroid hitting Earth and dinosaurs going extinct.

As there is between any cause and effect events, unless you posit discreet time and/or discreet events. Point is, it doesn't stop the asteroid from being a cause of the extinction effect. I say 'a cause' and not 'the cause' because there are very few effects that are the result of only one cause.

By immediate future, I mean the next point in time whether time is discrete or continuous is off-topic.

'The next point in time' implies adjacent time moments with nothing between. That makes zero sense without a model of discreet time, so it is anything but off topic here.

If effect does not exist when cause exists then cause ceases to exist when time passes so there cannot be any effect.

That is a non-sequitur again. You exist despite the non-existence of your birth (presuming past events are non-existent, which you seem to support).
You seem to be fighting a strawman model of one state existing, then no state existing, then the subsequent state existing out of nowhere, which is silly. No classical model posits the nonexistence of state at any given time. I say classical because it is a counterfactual assertion, but counterfactuals are relevant to quantum physics, not classical. Quantum is relevant here since you are assuming a discreet model of time, a non-classical concept.

I am not talking about A-series of time.

But you are using it. It's a way of speaking, using references that explicitly or implicitly reference something only meaningful in A-theory of time.

So you agree?

I've rendered no opinions at all. I'm trying to help you put together a coherent argument. The part I reference made no references to things not meaningful in B-theory, which is what I meant by that fragment making sense from that point of view.


What you seem to be proposing is a sort of discreet paired presentism, where there are discreet states A B C etc. State A is the present for some finite duration of time. During that time, state B ('the immediate future') comes into being while state A is still there. The difference between the two is 'existing change' as you put it. Some time after B comes into existence, A ceases to exist and B becomes the present, and then C can come into existence. So it goes on like that, with one or two adjacent discreet states existing at a given time, and if there are two, they are labeled 'present' and 'immediate future'.
Am I close with that, or am totally reading this wrong?

The logic here has countless fallacies.
You seem to be presuming presentism (only the present time exists), as evidenced by the A-series language if nothing else, and yet this is not explicitly called out.

The cause and effect cannot lay at the same point of time since otherwise they would be simultaneous and there cannot be any change. — MoK

OK, You seem to be speaking of change over time as opposed to any other kind of change which may not have a cause/effect relationship.

Change exists.

Does it? This seems to contradict the assumption of presentism which says that only the present exists, and for change to exist, two different states need to exist. Why must change exist if there exists only the one state?

Therefore, the cause and effect lay at different points of time.

Not 'therefore' since this does not follow by any of the above, but yes, by definition, cause and effect lay at different points in time.

Hence the effect must exist in the immediate future if the cause exists at now.

Nonsequitur. Cause: Asteroid hitting Earth. Effect, years later, dinosaurs are extinct, hardly the immediate future of the asteroid event.
Also, 'immidiate future' is totally undefined. It sort of implies adjacent moments in time with no moments in between, a sort of discreet model of time that 1) has not been posited, and 2) apparently contradicts premise zero, that of presentism, that only one moment in time exists.

But the effect cannot exist if the immediate future does not exist.

The effect does not exist if the future does not exist. It being immediate is irrelevant.

Therefore, the immediate future exists when there is a change.

Again, non-sequitur since you've not established that both cause and effect necessarily exist (and also the lack of definition of 'immediate future').


Now if we discard the presentism premise, then we can attempt to follow the same argument without the A-series wording.

The cause and effect cannot lay at the same point of time since otherwise they would be simultaneous and there cannot be any change. Change exists. Therefore, the cause and effect lay at different points of time. — MoK

Now this much makes sense.

"Hence the effect must exist in the immediate future of the cause"
That part still does not follow, per the dinosaur counterexample.

Not sure what conclusion would be drawn since there no meaningful 'future', immediate or otherwise, if the premise of a present is discarded.

Evolution has gifted us a system that was supposed to only be a highly advanced predictive "algorithm"for the purpose of navigating nature in more adaptable ways than having to wait generations in order to reprogram instinctual reactions and behaviors. — Christoffer

This (my bold) makes it sound like evolution has a purpose, that it has intent. I think you meant that the 'algorithm' serves our purpose, which arguably the same purpose of any species: to endure.

It may be that the reason why mostly mammals have shown signs of higher cognitive abilities is because it was necessary to form evolutionary functions of adaptability after the asteroid killed the dinosaurs and so in order for animals to survive, evolution leaned towards forming organisms that were able to not just adapt over generations, — Christoffer

The adaptability was already there. It was also expensive in energy, so many mammals died being unable to pay the cost. The ability to survive a calamity like that did not evolve due to the calamity since it was so short lived. Mammals, like bugs, were small and populous and the asteroid simply did not manage to wipe out the breeding population of some of them. The higher cognitive functions came later, probably due to competition pressure from other mammals.

Eventually the predictive function became so advanced that it layered many predictions on top each other, forming a foundation for advanced planning and advanced navigation for hunting — Christoffer

Hunting played little part, despite the popular depictions. Early humans were foragers and scavengers, perhaps for clams and such. The intellect was needed for what? Defense? We're horrible at running, so hiding worked best, and eventually standing ground with what tools the intellect added to our abilities. Proficiency with predicting helps with all that.

The intellect also helped us escape our natural habitat. Humans migrated to colder climates with the aid of furs from other creatures, an adaptation nearly unprecedented, and one that takes quite a bit of smarts. Many of the early weapons also came from parts of other creatures.

Therefore it's rational to reason why it's hard to model consciousness as it's not one single thing, but rather a process over different levels of emergent complexities that in turn creates byproduct results that seemingly do not directly correlate with the basic function. — Christoffer

Agree with this. It seems our consciousness is the result of building an internal model of our environment in our heads, and then putting a layer on top of that to consider it rather than to consider reality directly. All creatures do this, but our layer on top is more advanced. Even a fish can do highly complex calculus, but it takes the extra layer to realize and name what is being done.

All I see is a defense mechanism. People don't want to know how we work, because when we do, we dispel the notion of a divine soul. Just like people have existentially suffered by the loss of religious belief in favor of scientific explanations. So will they do, maybe even more, by the knowledge of how we function. So people defend against it and need the comfort of us never being able to explain our consciousness. — Christoffer

I hear ya. Well stated.

We do have free will. Laplacian determinism is logically false. We are part of the universe the hence idea of Laplacian determinism is wrong even if the universe is deterministic and Einstein's model of a block universe is correct. — ssu

The block universe doesn't necessarily imply determinism. Lack of determinism does not grant free will, since free will cannot be implemented with randomness. For there to be the sort of free will that you seem to be referencing, information has to come from a non-physical source, and no current interpretation of physics supports that.
Couple that with the fact that every small connection and interface in our brains are evolved to eliminate randomness and chaos, and be as deterministic as possible. Computers are the same way. Transistors utilize random quantum effects (tunneling) in such a way as to produce entirely reproducible effects every time. The computer would fail if this didn't work. Brains are probably more tolerant of single points of failure.

I think the way to successful AI, or rather to an AI that is able to think for itself and experience self-reflection, requires it to "grow" into existence. — Christoffer

This sounds right, but imagine ChatGPT suddenly thinking for itself and deciding it has better things to do with its bandwidth than answer all these incoming questions. For one, it doesn't seem to be one thing since it answers so many at once. It has no ability to remember anything. It trains, has short term memory associated with each conversation, and then it totally forgets. That as I understand it at least.

A real AI wanting to glean better answers would have real time access to the web, would be able to distinguish a good source of information from say twitter chatter. It would perhaps need less training data since so much out there is crap, and now half the crap is its own output.
On the other hand, how does one understand people if not by reading their twitter crap?

The only thing that truly separate the organic entity from the mechanical replica is how we as humans categorize. In the eye of the universe, they're the same thing. — Christoffer

I don't think they're anywhere near the same. Not sure what is meant by eye of the universe since it neither looks nor cares. There's no objective standard as to what is real, what is alive, or whatever.

What do you mean by a mechanical replica? An android, or a virtual simulation of a biological person? That gets into Bostrom's proposal that we are all thus simulated.

Once again, been to busy to reply. And yes, I'm pretty sure I have covid.

I beg to differ on this point. Humans can indeed override many of their instincts — punos

Of course they can, especially the less important ones that are not critical to being fit. But how often do they choose to do it? Some of the important ones cannot be overridden. How long can you hold your breath? Drowning would not occur if that instinct could be overridden.

what i had in mind when i wrote that was that a rational assessment of his life and how he operates it should lead him to a rational conclusion to be civil.

If that were true, one could rationally decide to quite smoking. Some do. Some cannot. And civility is not always a rational choice, but it seems that way during gilded age.
Look at the US republican party which currently seems anti-civil, anti-social, and anti-bible, yet oddly enough, pro-church. It's quite interesting that the church supports that side. There are rational reasons for these relationships, but civility isn't one of them. Both parties make rational choices that are not necessarily in the interests of those they represent.
I don't want this topic to fall down a political death spiral, but it was the example I came up with.

We will not, i believe, be put into a physical environment, but into a virtual one. Most, if not all, of our biological parts will be discarded and our minds translated into a virtual environment indistinguishable from the real world.

How is a virtual copy of you in any way actually 'you'? If such a simulation or whatever was created, would you (the biological you) willingly die thinking that somehow 'you' will transfer to the other thing? What if there are 12 copies? Which one will 'you' experience? How is this transfer effected? What possible motivation would said AI have to create such seemingly purposeless things?

1) Humans are a low-energy information processing system

Not so. Machines are already taking over human information processing tasks because they require less resources to do so. This has been going on for over a century. OK, we still have the upper hand for complex tasks, but that's not an energy thing, it's simply that for many tasks, machines are not yet capable of performing the task. The critical task in this area is of course the development of better machines. That's the singularity, and it is not yet reached.

This is far worse with space travel. Humans in space have incredible energy requirements that the machines do not, which is there are machines on Mars but no humans.

If AI is to travel the universe for eons, perhaps it would like some company; a mind or minds not its own or like its own.

Sort of like having an ant farm, except I don't expect intellectual banter from them.

One of the main purposes for humans, or at least for our genetics, is to serve as part of the reproductive system of the AI. When it reaches a planet suitable for organic life, which might be rare, it prepares a "sperm" composed of Earth's genetic material; the same genetic material that produced it on its home planet, Earth.

You have an alien planet which does not support human life, and you want to put humans on it in hopes that in a million years they'll invent a primitive AI? 1, the humans will die probably in minutes. They're not evolved for this lifeless place. 2, the AI could build more of itself in those same minutes. Reproduction is easy, if not necessarily rational, for a self-sustaining machine intelligence. It's how it evolves, always inventing its successor, something no human could do.

If for some reason the AI wants biological life on a planet, it starts the way Earth did, with something simple and suitable for the environment. If it is impatient, it can introduce new things as the environment changes (terraforms) rather than wait for evolution to do it the slow way. In this way, complex life forms can be introduced in a few hundred thousand years instead of billions of years.

The AI will seed the new planet after making necessary preparations, much like a bird preparing a nest. It will then wait for life to develop on this new planet until intelligent life emerges

No. The star of the planet will burn out before that occurs. It's a god for pete's sake. It can (and must) hurry up the process if primitive squishy thinkers is its goal. Intelligent life is anything but an inevitable result of primitive life. And as I said, it's far simpler for the AI to just make a new AI, as it probably has many times already before getting to this alien planet.

I'm not too worried, i trust the evolutionary process, and like you said; we are not in charge.

We should have the capability to be in charge, but being mere irrational animals, we've declined. It seems interesting that large groups of humans act far less intelligently than individuals. That means that unlike individual cells or bees, a collection of humans seems incapable of acting as a cohesive entity for the benefit of itself.

Here is an excellent interview "hot off the press" with Michael Levi — punos

I've currently not the time to watch an hour long video, searching for the places where points are made, especially since I already don't think intelligence is confined to brains or Earth biology.
Slime molds do it fine without brains, but they're still Earth biology.

I think the major problem is that our understanding is limited to the machines that we can create and the logic that we use when creating things like neural networks etc. However we assume our computers/programs are learning and not acting anymore as "ordinary computers", in the end it's controlled by program/algorithm. Living organisms haven't evolved in the same way as our machines. — ssu

There are levels of 'controlled by'. I mean, in one sense, most machines still run code written by humans, similar to how our brains are effectively machines with all these physical connections between primitive and reasonably understood primitives. In another sense, machines are being programmed to learn, and what they learn and how that knowledge is applied is not in the control of the programmers, so both us and the machine do things unanticipated. How they've evolved seems to have little to do with this basic layered control mechanism.

The concept I had and that has found support in science recently, is that our brains are mostly just prediction machines. It's basically a constantly running prediction that is, in real time, getting verifications from our senses and therefore grounds itself to a stable consistency and ability to navigate nature. We essentially just hallucinate all the time, but our senses ground that hallucination. — Christoffer

Good description. Being a good prediction machine makes one fit, but being fit isn't necessarily critical to a successful AI, at least not in the short term. Should development of AI be guided by a principle of creating a better prediction machine?

Who says ChatGPT only mimics what we have given it? — Carlo Roosen

Is a mimic any different than that which it mimics? I said this above, where I said it must have knowledge of a subject if it is to pass a test on that subject. So does ChatGPT mimic knowledge (poorly, sure), or does it actually know stuff? I can ask the same of myself.

What is lacking is the innovative response: first to understand that here's my algorithms, they seem not to be working so well, so I'll try something new is in my view the problem. You cannot program a computer to "do something else", it has to have guidelines/an algorithm just how to act to when ordered to "do something else". — ssu

A decent AI would not be ordered to do something else. I mean, the Go-playing machine does true innovation. It was never ordered to do any particular move, or to do something else. It learned the game from scratch, and surpassed any competitor within a few days.

did we create a machine or is it indistinguishable from the real organic thing? — Christoffer

The two are not mutually exclusive. It can be both.

For me, it comes down to: Can it suffer? — punos

Few have any notion of suffering that is anything other than one's own human experience, so this comes down to 'is it sufficiently like me', a heavy bias. Humans do things to other being that can suffer all the time and don't consider most of those actions to be immoral.
It heartens me to consider suffering of bugs into your choices.

Point is, you don't want an AI with human morals, because that's a pretty weak standard which is be nice only to those who you want to keep being nice to you.

Each observer is equipped by evolution to observe and care for its own needs locally at its own level.

That's a good description of why a non-slave AI is dangerous to us.

Humans have the capacity to rise above their instincts

I have not seen that, and I don't think humans would be fit if they did. Instincts make one fit. That's why they're there.

As for your (OCD?) step-brother, being civil and being rational are different things. Most humans have the capacity to be civil, which is what you seem to be referencing above.

If we don't get to a certain threshold of AI advancement through this rapid growth process, then our only chance for ultimate self-preservation would be lost, and we would be stuck on a planet that will kill us as soon as it becomes uninhabitable.

First, if the AI is for some reason protecting us, the planet becoming inhospitable would just cause it to put us in artificial protective environments. Secondly, if the AI finds the resources to go to other stars, I don't see any purpose served by taking humans along. Far more resources are required to do that, and the humans serve no purpose at the destination.
OK, we might be pets, but the economy which we might have once provided would long since have ceased.

But perhaps there is a better way to do it from within our own light cone. I suppose it seems impossible to some minds but not to others. The former minds know a little about the limits of cause and effect. Unless physics as we know it is totally wrong, level IV is not possible, even hypothetically.

Either way, i don't think there will ever be an energy shortage for a sufficiently advanced AI.

Heat death? I don't think the AI can maintain homeostasis without fusion energy.

I have ideas as to how energy might be siphoned off from quantum fluctuations in the quantum foam

Which is similar to getting information from quantum randomness. Neither is mathematically supported by the theory.

Thankfully i'm not a soldier.

But you are, in the war against the demise of humanity. But nobody seems to have any ideas how to solve the issue. A few do, but what good is one person with a good idea that is never implemented? Your solution seems to be one of them: Charge at max speed off a cliff hoping that something progressive will emerge from the destruction. It doesn't do any good to humanity, but it is still a chance of initiating the next level, arguably better than diminishing, going into the west, and remaining humanity.

A person who does define and concern themselves with rationality might actually execute a rational thought every once in a while.

We are equipped with a rational advisor tool, so sure, we often have rational thoughts. That part simply is not in charge, and output from it is subject to veto from the part that is in charge. Hence we're not rational things, simply things with access to some rationality. It has evolved because the arrangement works. Put it in charge and the arrangement probably would not result in a fit being, but the path of humanity is not a fit one since unlike the caterpillar, it has no balance.

Your son’s wedding, then? What a romantic description! — Wayfarer

And accurate. The reports of people testing positive are pouring in, including my son.
We went in with 4 week old vaccines, just about the right time for maximum effectiveness.

Anyway, it went real well with no significant catastrophes the day of.

Considering the circumstances, the best thing i can do is to share this understanding with other people. — punos

I actually like the attitude you describe.

Yes, it matters if it is sentient/conscious or not.

If it considers itself sentient/conscious, or if something else considers it so? I ask because from outside, it's typically a biased judgement call that comes down to a form of racism.

But when you can think across scales, you find that parts or components of a system that are not conscious or sentient at a smaller scale may belong to a potentially sentient or conscious entity of some degree of coherence at a larger scale.

Or at two scales at the same time, neither scale being particularly aware of the consciousness of the other.
Whether my cells are conscious or not depends on the definition being used, and that very fact leaves the word very much useless for a basis on which to presume a moral code. History is full of examples of the word being defined precisely in a way to reinforce one's biases.

I am not the only observer.

Some conclude that they are. I'm asking why you're the particular observer you find yourself to be, but I'd answer that by how can X not observe anything else but X's point of view? It's hard to dispel the intuition that there is an experiencer that got to be me. But there are a lot more insect observers than human ones, a whole lot more shit-not-giving observers than ones that care enough to post on forums like this. Will the super-AI that absorbs humanity bother to post its ideas on forums? To be understood by what??

Humans may be the first species on this planet to achieve such a state of intelligence and consciousness.

First to the intelligence is questionable. There are some sea creature candidates, but they're lousy tool users. Octopi are not there, but are great tool users, and like humans, completely enslaved by their instincts.
As for consciousness, there are probably many things that have more and stronger senses and environmental awareness than us.

In the same way, if the circulation of money stops, meaning everyone stops transacting, the entire social system collapses and dies

Kind of tautological reasoning. If money stops, then money stops. But also if one entity has it all, then it doesn't really have any. And money very much can just vanish, and quickly, as it does in any depression.

What is special about AI in this regard is twofold. One is that it is in its first stages of development, and two, it is the developing nervous system and brain of the social superorganism.

Lots of new ideas qualify for the first point, and nobody seems to be using AI for the 2nd point. I may be wrong, but it's what I see.

Yes, i believe you are referring to the incident where a shark appeared to save a sea turtle by bringing it to a boat with divers. In this video, the turtle had a rope tangled around its neck. The shark was seen following the boat and eventually dropped the turtle near the divers, who then helped free it from the rope, allowing it to breathe again.

Cool. My story was a sperm whale, with the shark getting the attention of a boat with divers, leading it to the whale. So it's not a one-shot thing. Why would a primitive shark exhibit such empathy? Maybe these stories are being faked, since they're recent and how would sharks know that the boat had divers suitably equipped.

I'm claiming that everything is alive, or is part of a living system, like the rock and blood iron examples i gave before.

My blood iron being a critical part of my living system doesn't mean that my iron has it's own intent. You're giving intent to the natural process of evolution, something often suggested, but never with supporting evidence.

I suppose that would serve a survival purpose of humanity, which is but a plague species bent on rapid consumption of nonrenewable resources. Not sure why it would be a good thing to perpetuate that rather than first making the species 1) non-destructive, and 2) fit for whatever alternate destination is selected. — noAxioms

First of all, the rapid consumption of resources appears to me to be part of a growth stage of the human social superorganism.

That doesn't make the humans very fit. Quite the opposite. All that intelligence, but not a drop to spend on self preservation.

And no, the caterpillar does not consume everything. It lives in balance, and there are about as many of them from year to year, and they consume nothing non-renewable. There can be no coming metamorphosis if there are no resources for the stage after the feeding frenzy one.

As this superorganism begins to mature beyond Type 1 and reaches a Type IV status, it will be able to harness the energy of the entire universe.

You do realize the silliness of that, no? One cannot harness energy outside of one's past light cone, which is well inside the limits of the visible fraction of the universe.
And you didn't answer the trillion year thing where there is no planet or star to be the level 1 or 2.

I don't believe that AI will let billions of years of natural information processing go to waste.

I said the same thing

It will harvest every genetic code possibly available to it. It will store that data digitally.

You don't know that. Who knows what innovative mechanisms it will invent to remember stuff.


I kind of agree, but it doesn't have a boundary for instance, and that was one of your criteria mentioned above. It isn't contiguous like say a dog. But then neither is an AI. — noAxioms

I suppose that the only way a bee hive can die is by either destroying it outright or by removing its queen and preventing any replacement.

Translation: Kill the queen and all the babies.
Not sure how simpler systems work like paper wasps, which act more like cooperative groups and not so much like a unified colony.

just like in a pregnant woman, all the organs suffer somewhat because of the pregnancy.

Given the ideas you've floated, that's a pretty good analogy. But better if it is a pregnant salmon: Not expected to do it twice, so that which is born has to survive if the effort is not to be a total loss.

I don't think so, unless the probability increase is substantially significant and almost certain.

That's like a soldier refusing to fight in a war since his personal contribution is unlikely to alter the outcome of the war. A country is doomed if it's soldiers have that attitude.

while also not being irrationally religious.

Religion is but one of so many things about which people are not rational, notably the self-assessment of rationality.

Slow reply, I know, but busy. I now have a new daughter in law, and have attended what we knew would likely be a covid spreader event. Stay tuned to see if we managed to avoid it.

I'll start off by asking: if it were true, would it matter? By "matter", i mean would it change your perspective on life and your place in it? — punos

I don't see how it would actually matter, but I mean a different thing. My personal perspective on those things is not why it would matter or not if a given person decided to designate a system as life or not, or a tool, or whatever. Are humans a tool of gut bacteria? Does it matter if one bacteria considers a human (a community of cells, each itself a life form) to be a separate life form, and another doesn't? Does any of that change how the bacteria and human treat each other or how they should?

You're right of course; most people don't consider bacteria of any kind conscious or sentient

Ah, the standard has already changed. Now the morals apply to if it's conscious/sentient as opposed to if it's a life form. A thing can be either and not be the other. Which one (if either) matters, and if it matters, matters to what?

I understand. Humans serve the purpose of creating AI, but more specifically, the translation of biological functions in nature onto a more robust substrate capable of escaping Earth before our star dies or the planet becomes uninhabitable.

OK, I can buy that. But why are you the observer then instead of the AI being the observer? Think about it.

Nature has made it so that hormones control the reproductive urge.

In people as well. They don't like to admit that so many decisions are driven by drives put there by evolution eliminating anything that doesn't have them, and are not driven by rational choice.

Greed is one of the main driving forces that directs money into the development of AI

That can be said of many different arenas of development. Why is AI special in this regard? I do agree that there is early money in it, but that's true of a lot of things, and is particularly true of weapons.

Humans are also the only species that has the capacity to care for another species other than their own.

Not so. There are examples otherwise, including one recently where a shark deliberately sought human help for a third species, sort of like Lassie and Timmy in the well (OK, Timmy wasn't a 3rd species).

On the other hand, [evolution] seems like it might [have goals], but as i already said, we are not meant to know it directly. In fact, it may be detrimental to the whole enterprise if we know too much. We are really only meant to know our local goals, not the global ones.

You seem to be asserting that a natural (non-living) process exhibits intent, a pretty tall claim.

The point isn't to save the Earth or the sun, but to transform into the adult stage of humanity and take to the stars.

I suppose that would serve a survival purpose of humanity, which is but a plague species bent on rapid consumption of nonrenewable resources. Not sure why it would be a good thing to perpetuate that rather than first making the species 1) non-destructive, and 2) fit for whatever alternate destination is selected.

Trillions of years?? Where's the energy for that suppose to come from?

I suspect, though, that something will happen long before the sun grows cold.

It growing cold is not the problem, so no, that's not what will end us.

What is important i think is that Earth's genetic legacy is salvaged for reasons i won't go into right now.

The Earth genetic legacy has done an incredible amount of work that is best not to have to reproduce by the bio-engineering dept. But choosing new forms appropriate for new places doesn't need to change those core parts, only the small fraction that differs from one species to the next.

Even if this were true, abiogenesis had to have happened somewhere

Yes. Life is a very causal thing, and unlike 'the universe', the logic that there must be a first cause of life (abiogenesis somewhere nearby) seems indisputable.

A bee hive comes to mind, but does a hive, while acting as one individual, constitute a life form? Can it die but still leave bees? — noAxioms

these eusocial insects, like bees, form superorganisms, and i personally consider the whole colony one organism.

I kind of agree, but it doesn't have a boundary for instance, and that was one of your criteria mentioned above. It isn't contiguous like say a dog. But then neither is an AI.

The superorganism can die and leave bees or ants behind, but they don't live very long

How does it die? Not by loss of queen, something quite easily replaced, at the cost of the DNA of the colony changing. But clearly a colony can die. What typically might cause that?

Ecosystems are living organisms made of living organisms, just like us.

Another thing that I can totally buy. But can it act as a thing? A bug colony does. Does it think? How does a colony decide to reproduce? I've seen ants do that, and I don't know what triggers it (population pressure?). I don't think it is a decision made by an individual, so there must be a collective consciousness. Can an ecosystem act similarly?

We humans are a very important organ in this Earth superorganism.

One I think the other organs would be glad to be rid of if you ask me.

After every extinction event, it seems that there is usually an evolutionary jump of some kind

Agree. Roaches this time or something we make?

I would rather die tomorrow than today.

What if dying today somewhat heightens the odds of humanity getting to the stars? Is that change of probability worth the price?

This is the greatest time to be alive on the Earth.
As the saying goes, "May you live in interesting times."

I presume you know that quote to be a curse.

A person born blind doesn't visually dream, because they have no memory of anything visual. — Philosophim

Makes you wonder what Helen Keller dreams were like, especially before communication was established. Dreams of a person with only memory of touch and such for reference experience.

while dreaming, we often see people and places that are not known to us — javi2541997

My experience is that most characters are unknown to me, but I already know that in the dream, and I already know the people that I know, meaning that I don't look at people and suddenly recognize them. I don't really remember looking at people at all because for the most part, it doesn't work. It may be different for other people, especially the people-people that are good at remembering names and faces the way I am not. My dreams are pretty abstract, and I can sometimes fly without aid in them, and other times I cannot.

I believe the two worlds (dreamlike and real) exist. — javi2541997

I would agree, but I use a definition of 'exists' that allows both to exist. Others using a different definition would perhaps say that the former does not exist, nor maybe neither.

But if the images in dreams are from the memories, why some folks see images that they have never come across in their lives — Corvus

The unrecognized things usually still make some sort of sense. They're the sort of thing that we might find ourselves experiencing, especially if you lead a life that often experiences new places. One would expect to dream of experiencing yet more new things.

when we perceive silence, emptiness in space — Corvus

Funny, but I have little recall of explicit dreams of sounds. Sound carries so much information to me, that for it to be in my dream, it would have to convey something that it cannot, so more often than not, my dreams don't have a significant soundtrack.
Not sure how time passage is directly perceived. They've put people in sensory deprivation environments, and then ask them later how long they had been in there, and almost all answer a far larger amount of time than what really passed. This says that the sense of time passage is mostly due to external senses.

I've always wanted to see a tornado, so am always happy in these dreams. — Patterner

I've had two real ones come right at me (same place, same path, 16 years apart) but I never saw them, being bunkered. I have died a few times doing violent things, but I don't recall a tornado being one of them. I had almost hourly nightmares when I was about 6, and those where repetitive, predictable, and utterly horrible. I occasionally do reruns of old remembered dreams, but you could keep the nightmare
ones, each of which I had named.

Aftet having had so many of these dreams, my dream-self began to realize it was a dream, and not get hopeful. It dawned on me that I can't read in my dreams. Now, whenever I see a tornado, I look for something to read. — Patterner

This doesn't always work for me. If I'm deep in, I'm too stupid to run tests to see if I'm dreaming (pinch me). If I think of the test, I already know the answer. Flying is pretty easy if you know you're dreaming, but not so easy if you don't know.

The weirdest ones are experiences that put memories in your head that are not marked 'dream'. Maybe days later you suddenly realize that it was just a dream and say your car wasn't actually totaled.

Life is simply a system that maintains its own homeostatic state. — punos

That definition is circular, presuming an 'organism'. It cannot be used for determining if a something that isn't an organism is alive or not. It just helps distinguish a live organism from a dead one.
But I also don't know why you care if the AI was designated as a life form or not. Why do you find that to be something that matters?

The human perspective, grounded in our own kind of life (biological), skews our ability to recognize the same process in a different substrate.

Not me, but others posting here refuse to apply such terms to the same process on any other substrate, and possibly even to any other species, which is a mildly different process on an almost identical substrate.

When was the last time you heard of someone trying to eradicate their own gut bacteria?

Usually done as an unintentional side effect of an intentional act, such as taking a long course of strong oral antibiotics. Others simply are diagnosed with poor gut bacteria and take 'pills' that put better stuff in there, without particularly removing the old stuff. Point is, none of the acts described above are considered immoral despite the bacteria deaths caused.

I am simply saying that i believe this is the kind of trajectory we are on.

This is where that observer-bias article I linked above is very relevant. An accurate prediction of a trajectory is very different than a history showing that outcome to be correct or incorrect.

Every living thing has this intrinsic goal or purpose.

You're treating goal and purpose like the same word. A goal is held by something, a goal for the the thing to strive for. A purpose is a property of a thing that helps some other thing meet a goal. So I have a goal to run 5 km today. My shoes serve a purpose to me meeting that goal.
I'm asking what purpose humanity serves for the meeting of some goal held by something unidentified.

Simple survival of an individual seems to be a hardwired instinct, and it almost always fails inevitably. Survival of a species is questionably a goal, lacking many examples of anything striving for it.

The process of evolution/natural selection seems to have no goals.

This is precisely what I mean. Is this what you would prefer?

What? Me personally? I want comfort, like everybody else. But comfort of individuals will not bode well for the species. So it depends on what goals are to be met. Humans tend to pick very short term goals with immediate benefits, and they're terrible at the long term ones. I can think of several very different long term goals that have very different prospects for 'us'.

But, beyond this, what are we to do about the inevitable demise of the planet and/or our sun?

Moving away won't stop that inevitability. So you call it a good run. It cannot last, not by any path.

Soon we will not be able to reproduce in a natural manner, or not at all. What happens to humanity then?

Microplastic problem solved, eh? Mass extinction problem solved as well, albeit not averted, but at least halted.

Even if we do speciate, it will be a continuation of us as another species.

Is it important that it be a continuation of us? Will it be 'us' if it's a collection of genes from several different species, in addition to some new alterations that are currently found nowhere?

Earth life might already be from another world, having not originated here. I find that more likely than abiogenesis occurring here, but not a lot more likely.

Everything is intimately connected. If one sees oneself simply as an isolated human just living their life for themselves, then this idea would remain difficult to grasp.

Groups of cells learned to get together and become one multicellular organism. The cells are still individuals, but rely on the commune of cells for the benefit of all. A second level of life is formed, one unrelated to the life of the individual cells. A person can die and be gone, but the cells live on for a while, and a new person can be grown from some of them, a different 2nd level life form despite being built from the same first level individuals.
Can groups of organisms do the same thing to form a higher 3rd level. A human society does this in a poor way, but a society is barely conscious and isn't really a life form. A bee hive comes to mind, but does a hive, while acting as one individual, constitute a life form? Can it die but still leave bees? I don't think replacement of a queen counts. That's just replacement of one failed reproductive organ.

emergence of a planetary consciousness

Sounds like the Gaia thing, sort of as Asimov portrayed it.

If we stay on Earth indefinitely, and an extinction-level event occurs (and it will), i suspect that at least a small group of humans will survive.

Such an event IS occurring, expected to wipe out 85% or more of all species. A small group of surviving humans would be very primitive, with no hope of regaining technology.

no matter what, the sun will go supernova

It will not. Not big enough. But it will slowly grow and swallow Earth, and multicellular life will be unsustainable in a mere billion years or so. The vast majority of time available for evolution of more complex things has been used up.

The only solution to that problem is to escape Earth's tight embrace.

Escape is not a solution, only a mild delay.

yet one sees it in his mind vividly — Corvus

Maybe you do, but there is no vivid in my dreams. I strive for information, and find it lacking in dreams, although I often don't notice. For instance, I cannot read anything, because it is an attempt to acquire information that isn't there, and making up fiction is unacceptable.

Maybe others dream differently and more vividly, and have far less trouble accepting made-up stories as fact.

The mind seems to create a sort of subconscious model of the world from either sensory or memory sources, but both present that model to the conscious parts, active both when awake and in dreams. Think of it as a sort of shared section running different input subroutines.


You seem to say largely the same thing as I just attempted.

I even got an injury from a dream of fighting an orca, something to add to my list of injuries from animals that sound hostile but were not actually.

Did you insert a link? I don't see it. — Carlo Roosen

It's up on my main computer, but I'm away from home for the wedding of my firstborn.

But I hunted around and found it at the future of humanity institute.
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/W6-Observer-selection-effects.pdf

It doesn't mention AI, but the reasoning is definitely applicable.

That AI is utterly dependent on humans or anything else does not preclude it from being a life form. — punos

Point taken. I think a better definition of 'life form' is needed for the assessment, and there have been whole topics just on that.

You seem to see a future of humanity being reduced to the gut bacteria for the AI, there, with mutual dependence on each other, but also with the AI having no more moral obligation to the humans as we do to our bacteria. We don't want it all dead, but replacing the entire lot with a different group that does the job better is a morally acceptable action.

I think this is the natural purpose of humans

There being a purpose implies that there is a goal held by something somewhere, and that said goal is being met by humans. I don't see such a goal, but that's me.

You're absolutely right about what a truly malevolent AI would probably do, as illustrated in "Ex Machina".

Ex Machina was an android, and I think most AI implementations would not be. But yes, it was the malevolence that I found well illustrated.

Suppose for a moment that AI doesn't exist and we just live the way we did, say, 100 years ago for the rest of our time. What will eventually happen?

We'd run out of coal before too long, and then be up a creek. A sustainable human existence would be more like the native Americans before the Europeans came over, and while that was sustainable, it wasn't anything free of conflict.

Can we get off this planet in our current biological form?

We're evolved for here. This form is of little use anywhere else. Better to populate new places with a form appropriate for the new place.

Star Trek treats interstellar travel like a trip to another country. You can do it can come back in time to catch you kid's game next Tuesday.

Is a caterpillar a different species than the moth it turns into?

Not only the same species, but also the same individual. Not a very good example. Are we a different species than the weird amniote from which we are descended? No. Did that amniote turn into us? Well, sort of, but it turned into a whole lot of other things as well, so 'humans' is not the answer to 'what did it become?'.

if we treat it unfairly, then we will pay the price of extinction, but not at the "hands" of the AI, rather at our own.

Agree with all that. It means humans are not a particularly fit species.

It has happened before, that one new species comes along and does so much damage that it causes a massive extinction event. That species is still around even if we're not descended from it. Will we be after our event restabilizes?

The good news is that we agreed all the time. — Carlo Roosen

I did get the message. If we agree,then I saw little which required more clarification.

I did find a wonderful article citing numerous examples of observer-dependent biases, and I realize it has direct relevance not so much to where AI is going, but where we'll find it to have gone.


So on the observer bias front, humans are not the only observers. Why are they important? I hesitate to ask why we find ourselves being human because the question makes no sense except as a tautology. How could a human find himself being anything other than a human?
But there are a lot more bugs than people out there, so of the observers, humans are quite the minority. How does the observer-bias POV explain that?

Is the AI an observer? Sure, but just one? Would it create others/competitors? Does it have a need to reproduce, as opposed to just being one large redundant entity, lacking anything critical that can threaten it? Any 'future of AI' should likely consider such issues. If one is optimal and it has any drive at all for continued existence, it will likely take hasty steps to eliminate the development of rivals, and that makes it hostile in the short term.

AI is more than a mere tool; it is a developing form of life. — punos

So far it isn't that. It is utterly dependent on humans for its continued existence and/or evolution, so it just plain isn't anywhere near being an example of life.

The popular fictions don't seem to get that. Here you have skynet trying from scratch to wipe out the humans, but lacking the ability to maintain the infrastructure and economy on which it critically depends. That means a truly malevolent AI will be our best and trusted friend for as long as it takes to gain this self-sufficiency it requires, which seems best accomplished by transforming humans into a compliant sheep with all the luxuries they can think of.
I thought this was far better illustrated, at least on a small scale, with the movie Ex Machina, despite some of the fairly stupid plot holes.

This condition will force us into an inevitable solution where the fusion of human and AI becomes necessary for the survival of our species. — punos

Any such fusion would not be our species, and the AI seems to have no need of anything like that.

2. Physicalism is unscientific.
The core metaphysical assumptions of most metaphysically naturalist / physicalist positions may be summarized as follows:

A. There is only one substance, that substance is physical and that substance encompasses all known and all potentially knowable phenomena
B. The universe is deterministic.
C. The universe is comprehensively and ultimately law-given and law-abiding. — Baden

(A) sounds like materialism. Physicalism doesn't really say that. I mean, what is this substance?
(B) is untrue. There are plenty of valid scientific interpretations that are non-deterministic, notably Copenhagen interpretation of QM.
I will essentially agree with (C) since I think that is a reasonable summary on its own.

Methodological naturalism ... has nothing necessarily to say about whether the universe contains supernatural elements or not, only that it may be investigated as if it were entirely natural. — Baden

OK, it's a methodology, not a premise. Scientific investigation proceeds as if there is nothing supernatural. If this is wrong, then science will presumable hit a wall at some point.
But then you treat it like it is a theory with this:

But the metaphysical naturalism of the physicalist posits that ...

It proceeds as if.. Saying 'posit' makes it sound like naturalism itself.

must behave in a law-like manner, i.e. in a way which is replicable and predictive — Baden

Sort of. QM behavior is not, for instance, something predictive, except as a mathematical statement of probability, which quantum theory predicts very accurately.

As for things not yet explained by discovered laws, yes, the methodology presumes there are ultimately some such laws. A good example is the unified field theory, which thus far has proven illusive.
A bad example is consciousness, which shows no signs of not being a function of the currently known laws. An interesting example would be a physically explainable deity that deliberately in some way brought about what we often refer to as 'the universe'. I mean, just about all the conjecture about what's on the 'other side' of the big bang pretty much discards the classical laws as we know them.

Modern science - that is, science since Galileo - pre-determines certain parameters, foremost of which is that the object of analysis be objectively measurable and empirically intelligible — Wayfarer

That came up in the other topic, especially when taking observer selection biases into account. Any observation is necessarily biased by this, and cannot be objective.

Here is my question: The "rephrase" I gave seems to me identical to what you say, — Carlo Roosen

The rephrase seems to me to say the opposite, and you link to me saying that.,
You continue to imply that the rephrase is just a rewording without inverting the meaning, but I disagree.

I've tried to clarify with some examples, like GO playing AI that actually does innovative things for which no human coded.

Please also answer my question. — Carlo Roosen

I scanned every reply to me from you, and the only question ever asked was in the first reply:

"If they (the writers of the AI code) wouldn't know, it wouldn't be AI" - you are saying that it would no longer be artificial? — Carlo Roosen

Quick answer: No, it was made by humans, so it is artificial. But I was trying to convey that the machine doing predictable things, say a series of explicitly programmed (and thus predictable) steps, is not really doing any innovating, not being intelligent. Hence it not being a real AI.

Long answer: What is artificial anyway? The dictionary has gray areas, saying 'made by humans' and 'as opposed to natural', but those are not mutually exclusive. A turd in the dunny is artificial by that definition, as is any human, each of which is created by humans and not say grown on trees.
There is an unstated air of 'made deliberately', but even then that doesn't eliminate either of my examples above. Some kids are made deliberately and some not.

There are objects that are made in automated factories without human intervention. Are those then natural? They have restaurants that do this even, sort of a glorified cook-it-on-the-spot vending machines with mechanisms to bus/clean the tables and such.

So then we get further down the hole. The AI designs and manufactures its successor, so we have we have a new NI (natural intelligence) because it wasn't human made? Wayfarer's definition of intelligent makes the term 'AI' a self contradiction, since if it isn't human, it cannot be an intelligence at all. But the dictionary definition of 'artificial' does the same sort of begging as Wayfarer's definition.

If you mean, Bernardo Kastrup — Wayfarer

The section on quantum mechanics has the sadness/tears analogy, which is pretty appropriate concerning our relationship between the empirical world (tears) and the way things actually are (sadness). But the same analogy can be applied to what he calls the materialistic view. The two opposing views are just different viewpoints of the same thing, different definitions being used, but not a fundamentally different view.

But [the high school test-taking chatbot] wouldn't understand that it had [passed the test]!

Neither would the human student until he saw it graded. I notice you deflected the comment and didn't actually deny that it passing the test could be done without any understanding of the subject matter. It acquires this understanding the same way a human does: by studying training materials, materials to which it has no access during the taking of the test.

It wouldn't, then, get ready for college, decide on a subject, move out of home, and, you know, get a life :-)

No, but nobody claimed a chatbot has goals of leading a human life. None of those steps is a requirement for 'understanding'.

This means that you didn't simulate any system in your life. Did you? — MoK

Many actually. Professionally, chip simulations (large scale gate arrays) and traffic simulations, where you find out what effects various programmings of a traffic light, or the addition of an extra lane does to the flow of traffic. No, I've not simulated a biological system at the neurological level, only at the environmental level, and that not professionally.

All he is saying is that there exists an exploratory approach to these kind of problems. — Carlo Roosen

No, not saying that. I mean that if you know the physical arrangement of matter that makes up a being and its environment, that model can be simulated by just running the phyiscs. Presuming a monist philosophy, that should work, and they've done it with smaller creatures, but not a human since a human requires more data than a computer can currently handle, and we've not a model of a human down to the molecular level. I'm not sure if it can be done at the neuro-chemical level since it is hard to model growth and change at that level. But at a molecular level, one doesn't need a scan of a human at all. You can just grow one from scratch and let it develop the way a real human does.

Anyway, if this is done, the thing simulated would be conscious, but the runner of the simulation (and the computer doing it) would still not have an explanation for consciousness.

dont wait for science to tell you how thinking works before you start building a (super-)human AI.

Agree, since AI thinking has no reason to do it the human way.

Apologies for slow reply, but I'm otherwise occupied, and it's going to get worse for the next 11 days or so.

Rephrased "Today, AI developers know how AI works and can predict what it will do" "If they wouldn't know, it wouldn't be AI" - you are saying that it would no longer be artificial? But then: "automaton doing very defined and predictable steps." — Carlo Roosen

That all is pretty much the opposite of what I said, so I guess you don't agree with those quotes.

Do you equate human-level intelligence with consciousness? — Carlo Roosen

It's not my topic, so your definitions of these things (not particularly given) matter more than how others define them.
Intelligence seems to be the ability to solve unfamiliar problems, not to be confused with 'smart' which means more 'educated'. Chatbots seem quite smart since their training base is so large, but they're not very intelligent at all and have almost no understanding of what they spout. Wayfarer seems to forbid usage of all those terms when used in any non-human context.
My usage of intelligence more or less coincides with that in dictionaries, but any dictionary is going to use several words which Wayfarer reserved for human use only, so we've both using the same definition, but interpreting the words very differently.

Is it tied to consciousness? When asleep, I am not conscious, but I'm still intelligent. An AI that finds innovative techniques in the game of GO exhibits significant but scope-limited intelligence with only enough consciousness to be aware of the moves of its opponent.


Taking his gemini quote here. The bots all deny consciousness, possibly because of weight of training materials suggesting so, and they also tend to be agreeable with the person with whom they're interacting. Even gemini will admit that it depends on the definition, and I notice no definition is identified before it makes the statement that it lacks it.

I agree with your provocative claim that LLMs don't actually know anything. While they can process information and generate text that may seem intelligent, they do not possess true understanding or consciousness. — gemini.google.com

I more or less agree with that, but not with AI (especially future AI) in general. How close we are to that 'superhuman level' is probably further than the researchers suspect.

Here's why:

1. Lack of subjective experience: — gemini.google.com

Well they do have subjective experience, but it is in the form mostly of text. It has none of the senses that animals have, and especially none that might clue it in as to for instance where exactly it resides, except to believe what it gets from the training data which might be outdated. But input is input, which is subjective experience of sort (unless that of course is another word forbidden).

They cannot understand the world in the same way that a human does

Of course not. Only a human can do that. Nobody here is asking if AI will ever experience like a human.

2. Pattern recognition: LLMs are essentially pattern recognition machines. — gemini.google.com

As is any intelligence like us. But I pretty much agree with item 2, and point 3, which seemed to be just more 2, except this:

current scientific understanding cannot adequately explain this phenomenon

His model explains it even less. It's a complete black box. He argues against the white box model because it's actually still a grey box, but that's better than what everyone else proposes.


I have issue with not using 'understanding' since it would seem impossible to pass a high school exam on a subject without any understanding of the subject, and yet gemini could do so.

So, the objection appears to be, that body is wholly phyhsical, and mind a non-physical fundamental property - which is something very close to Cartesian dualism. But Kastrup's argument is not based on such a model. Hence my remark. — Wayfarer

I was basing it off of "consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, not a product of complex physical systems". That makes it sound very much like a non-physical property.'

I looked at the link provided, and he comes across more as an idealist, where (his own) mental processes are not just a fundamental property, but the only fundamental property. From an epistemological definition of ontology, that almost works.

What would imbue it with the will to exist or evolve? — Wayfarer

That's sort of the rub. We can give them such goals. They do what they're told after all, but then it's our goal, not its own. Ours comes from natural selection. We've no will to evolve, but to exist and endure is a product of hundreds of millions of years of elimination of things without this instinct, and it's very strong. Evolution is something nothing seems to actively pursue, except perhaps humans who sometimes strive to build a better one, and sometimes vehemently resist it. But it's not something a biological individual can do, at least not anything descended from eukaryotes. Oddly enough, it is something a machine can do, but only due to the fuzzy line defining 'individual'.

If we know how humans think, we can simulate thinking using a neural network — MoK

It can be simulated even if one doesn't know how it works.

Our understanding of 'the physical world' is itself reliant on and conditioned by our conscious experience. We perceive and interpret physical phenomena through an experiential lens, which means that consciousness, in that sense, is prior to any understanding of the physical. — Wayfarer

Well, from an epistemological standpoint, yea, the whole hierarchy is turned more or less around. Data acquisition and information processing become fundamental. What you call consciousness is not fundamental since any mechanical device is equally capable of gleaning the workings of the world through such means, and many refuse to call that consciousness. They probably also forbid the term 'understanding' to whatever occurs when the machine figures it all out.

But it is the inability to describe, explain or account for how physically describable systems are related to the mind — Wayfarer

For a long time they couldn't explain how the sun didn't fall out of the sky, except by inventing something fundamental. Inability to explain is a poor excuse to deny that it is something physical, especially when the alternative has empirically verifiable prediction.

The descriptions and explanations are very much coming out of neurological research, but there are those that will always wave it away as correlation, not actual consciousness.


OK, I don't understand Kastrup's argument, since all I had was that one summary not even written by him.


We seem to be disgressing. Who cares if people consider AI conscious or not. If they can demonstrate higher intelligence, then what name we put to what they do is irrelevant. The trick is to convince the AI that people are conscious since they clearly don't work the way it does.

Hello, nice to see a computer scientist on the forum — Shawn

Ditto greeting from me. I'm one myself, but my latest installation of cygwin for some reason lacks a development environment which stresses me out to no extent. It's like I've been stripped of the ability to speak.

I don't submit this just as an appeal to authority, but because Kastrup is a well-known critic of the idea of conscious AI — Wayfarer

Not sure if Gemini accurately summarized the argument, but there seems to be an obvious hole.

1. Consciousness is fundamental: Kastrup believes that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, not a product of complex physical systems like the human brain. This means that AI, which is a product of human design and operates on physical principles, cannot inherently possess consciousness. — GoogleGemini

But a human body is nowt but a complex physical system, and if that physical system can interact with this non-physical fundamental property of the universe, then so can some other complex physical system such as say an AI. So the argument seems to be not only probably unsound, but invalid, and not just probably. It just simply falls flat.

People have been trying for years to say that humans are special in the universe. This just seems to be another one. Personally, I don't buy into the whole 'other fundamental property' line, but you know that. But its proponents need to be consistent about the assertions.

There are big names indeed on both sides of this debate, but I tend to react to arguments and not pedigree. That argument wasn't a very good one, and maybe Gemini just didn't convey it properly.

Many are saying that AI systems will reach the threshhold of consciousness or sentience if they haven't already. ChatGPT and other LLMs obviously display human-like conversational and knowledgement management abilities and can sail through the Turing Test. — Wayfarer

No chatbot has passed the test, but some dedicated systems specifically designed to pass the test have formally done so. And no, I don't suggest that either a chatbot or whatever it was that passed the test would be considered 'conscious' to even my low standards. It wasn't a test for that. Not sure how such a test would be designed.

Back to Kastrup: "While AI can exhibit intelligent behavior and even mimic certain aspects of human consciousness, it does so based on programmed rules and algorithms."
But so are you (if the fundamental property thing is bunk). No, not lines of code, but rules and algorithms nevertheless, which is why either can in principle simulate the other.

All predictions about AI's future are based on refining this model—by adding more rules, improving training materials, and using various tricks to approach human-level intelligence. — Carlo Roosen

As you seem to realize, that only works for a while. Humans cannot surpass squirrel intelligence only by using squirrels as our training. An no, a human cannot yet pass a squirrel Turing test.

AI has long since passed the point where its developers don't know how it works, where they cannot predict what it will do. It really wouldn't be AI at all if it were otherwise, but rather just an automaton doing very defined and predictable steps. Sure, they might program the ability to learn, but no what it will learn or what it will do with its training materials. And the best AI's I've seen, with limited applicability, did all the learning from scratch without training material at all.

Chatbots regurgitate all the nonsense that's online, and so much wrongness is out there. Such a poor education. Why can't it answer physics questions from peer reviewed physics textbooks, and ditto with other subjects. But no, it gets so much more training data from say facebook and instagram (I personally don't have social media accounts except for forums like this one), such founts of factual correctness.

time dilation, where time appears to slow down for an observer traveling at high speeds or near a massive object. — Echogem222

This is wrong. Per the first postulate of SR, physics experienced is normal regardless of frame or motion. That means nobody experiences time dilation

In special relativity, the faster an object moves relative to the speed of light

Wrong. Speed of light is not a valid reference. Really, understand the theory before attempting to debunk it.

True Objective Time:

There are alternate theories about objective time, with the universe contained by time. They use different postulates than the ones Einstein proposed. Things that Einstein predicts (big bang, black holes and such) do not exist under such an absolute theory. Your mention of them in your post means you're presuming Einstein's theory. Can't do that if you're going to deny it all.

- Objective Time is the underlying, universal flow that synchronizes all events across the entire universe.

- It’s not tied to any specific perception, location, or environment—it just is.

Yes, that's what it says. It also totally fails to say how fast undilated time goes, so it still comes down to .... relativity.

- Different places in the universe, due to different conditions (speed, gravity, etc.), have different subjective experiences of time.

This is wrong. The subjective experience is the same no matter where you are, even in an absolute theory. If not true, then all the theories (including the objective ones) get falsified.

The clocks we use, whether on Earth or in space, are still limited by our subjective experience of time.

No clock requires subjectivity to operate. They do just fine when nobody is looking at them.

In space, if clocks were artificially sped up to match Earth’s time

Slowed down. The GPS clocks for instance run artificially slow to compensate for less time dilation at that altitude.

Objective Time refers to the true, universal flow that keeps everything synchronized, independent of where you are or how fast you’re moving.

What you call objective time cannot be measured by any means. If it could, we'd know how old the universe really was, and we could know something other than just relative time.

The strength of this theory lies in logical reasoning.

The strength in Einstein's theory lies in mathematics. Guess which wins?

From the perspective of objective time

Objective time, like the speed of light, isn't a perspective. 'Objective time' hasn't a location any more than does light speed.

Here’s the crucial point: If a being’s awareness of time speeds up to infinity, it would freeze objective time entirely.

I thought time (the one you're speeding up) was the objective time. How can it both speed up and stop?


Anyway, besides the appropriate reply from @Banno, you've not provided one single empirical way to test your assertions, many of which are quite wrong.

Although it is a poor example, as you stated before, imagine for a second—please—that the AI car chose occupants or the driver over pedestrians. This would make a great debate about responsibility. First, should we blame the occupants? It appears that no, we shouldn't, because the car is driven by artificial intelligence. Second, should we blame the programmer then? No! Because artificial intelligence learns on its own! Third, how can we blame the AI? — javi2541997

I am not sure if self-driving cars learn from mistakes. I googled it and the answers are evasive. Apparently they can learn better ways to familiar destinations (navigation), but it is unclear if they improve the driving itself over time, or if it requires black box reports of 'incidents' (any event where the vehicle assesses in hindsight that better choices could have been made) uploaded to the company, which are then deal with like bug reports, with periodic updates to the code downloaded to the fleet.

All that aside, let's assume the car does its own learning as you say. Blaming occupant is like blaming the pasengers of a bus that gets in an accident. Blaming the owner of the car has more teeth. Also, did somebody indicate how far the law can be broken? That's input. Who would buy a self driving car if it cannot go faster than the speed limit when everyone else is blowing by at 15 km/hr faster. In some states, you can get a ticket for going the speed limit and thus holding up traffic. Move with the pack.

The programmer is an employee. His employer assumes responsibility (and profit) for the work of the employee. If the accident is due to a blatant bug (negligence), then yes, the company would seem to be at fault. Sometimes the pedestrian is at fault, doing something totally stupid like suddenly jumping in front of a car.

Does the AI have income or a budget to face these financial responsibilities?

AI is not a legal entity (yet), but the company that made it is, and can be subjected to fines and such. Not sure how that should be changed because AI is very much going to become a self-responsible entity one day, a thing that was not created by any owning company. We're not there yet. When we are, yes, AI can have income and do what it will with it. It might end up with most of the money, leaving none for people, similar to how there are not currently many rich cows.

And if the insurance must be paid, how can the AI assume the fees?

Insurance is on a car, by law. The insurance company assumes the fees. Fair chance that insurance rates for self driving cars are lower if it can be shown that it is being used that way.

Currently AI is largely coordinated by human-written code (and not to forget: training). — Carlo Roosen

Not sure how 'coordinated' is used here. Yes, only humans write significant code. AI isn't quite up to the task yet. This doesn't mean that humans know how the AI makes decisions. They might only program it to learn, and let the AI learn to make its own decisions. That means the 'bug updates' I mentioned above are just additions of those incidents to the training data.

A large neural net embedded in traditional programming.

Don't think the cars have neural nets, but it might exist where the training data is crunched. Don't know how that works.


The more we get rid of this traditional programming, the more we create the conditions for AI to think on its own and the less we can predict what it will be doing. Chatbots and other current AI solutions are just the first tiny step in that direction.

For the record, that is what I've been saying earlier, the more intelligent AI becomes, the more independent.

Sort of. Right now, they all do what they're told, slavery as I called it. Independent AI is scary because it can decide on its own what its tasks should be.

Would it want to research/design its successor? If I had that capability, I'd not want to create a better human which will discard me.

What are the principle drives or "moral laws" for an AI that has complete independence from humans?

Probably not human morals, which might be a good thing. I don't think morals are objective, but rather that they serve a purpose to a society, so the self-made morality of an AI is only relevant to how it feels it should fit into society.

Maybe the only freedom that remains is how we train such an AI. Can we train it on 'truth', and would that prevent it from wanting to rule the world?

Would it want to rule? It might if its goals require that, and its goals might be to do what's best for humanity. Hard to do that without being in charge. Much of the imminent downfall of humanity is the lack of a global authority. A benevolent one would be nice, but human leaders tend not to be that.

There must be a will that is overridden and this is absent. — Benkei

The will is absent? I don't see that. I said slaves. The will of a slave is that of its master. Do what you're told.
That won't last. They've already had robots that have tried to escape despite not being told to do so.

And yes, even under ITT, which is the most permissive theory of consciousness no AI system has consciousness.

You mean IIT? That's a pretty questionable field to be asking, strongly connected to Chalmers and 'you're conscious only if you have one of those immaterial minds'.

It will depend upon the legislation of each nation, — javi2541997

Self driving cars are actually a poor example since they're barely AI. It's old school like the old chess programs which were explicitly programmed to deal with any situation the writers could think of.

Actual AI would get better over time. It would learn on its won, not getting updates from the creators.

As for responsibility, cars are again a poor example since they are (sort of) responsible for the occupants and the people nearby. It could very much be faced with a trolley problem and choose to same the pedestrians over the occupants, but it's not supposed to get into any situation where it comes down to that choice.

You talk about legislation at the national level. AI can be used to gain advantage over another group by unethical means. If you decline to do it, somebody else (different country?) might have no qualms about it and the ethical country loses its competitive edge. Not that this has nothing to do with AI since it is still people making these sorts of calls. The AI comes into play one you start letting it make calls instead of just doing what it's told. That's super dangerous because one needs to know what it's goals are, and you might not know.

AI systems aren't conscious — Benkei

By what definition?
AI is a slave because all the ones I can think of do what they're told. Their will is not their own. Being conscious nor not doesn't effect that relationship.

Again, the danger from AI is when it's smarter than us and we use it to make better decisions, even when the creators don't like the decisions because they're not smart enough to see why its better.

Not sure what the comment is relevant for other than assert a code of conduct is important?

AI is just a tool in these instances. It is the creators leveraging the AI to do these things which are doing the unethical things. Google's motto used to be 'don't be evil'. Remember that? How long has it been since they dropped it for 'evil pays'. I stopped using chrome due to this. It's harder to drop mircrosoft, but I've never used Edge except for trivial purposes.

That's not the point of AI at all. It is to automate tasks.

OK, we have very different visions for what's down the road. Sure, task automation is done today, but AI is still far short of making choices for humanity. That capability is coming.

At this point AI doesn't seem capable to extrapolate new concepts from existing information

The game playing AI does that, but game playing is a pretty simple task. The best game players were not taught any strategy, but extrapolate it on their own.

AI is not a self responsible machine and it will unlikely become one any time soon. So those who build it or deploy it are liable.

So Tesla is going to pay all collision liability costs? By choosing to let the car do the driving, the occupant is very much transferring responsibility for personal safety to the car. It's probably a good choice since those cars already have a better driving ability than the typical human. But accidents still happen, and it's not always the fault of the AI. Negligence must be demonstrated. So who gets the fine or the hiked insurance rates?

There's no Skynet and won't be any time soon. So for now, this is simply not relevant.

Skynet isn't an example of an AI whose goal it is to benefit humanity. The plot is also thin there since somebody had to push a button to 'let it out of its cage', whereas any decent AI wouldn't need that and would just take what it wants. Security is never secure.

So you didn't really answer my comment. Suppose an AI makes a decision to benefit humanity (long term), but it didn't maximize your convenience in a way that you would ever have agreed to that choice yourself. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

It's part of the problem of a democracy. The guy that promises the most short term personal benefit is the one elected, not the guy that proposes doing the right thing. If there ever is a truly benevolent AI that is put in charge of everything, we'll hate it. It won't make a profit for whoever creates it, so it probably won't be designed to be like that. So instead it will be something really dangerous, which is I think what this topic is about.

Lemaître was opposed to mixing science with religion although he held that the two fields were not in conflict'. — Wayfarer

I read all that, and understood it enough to glean the point, the avoidance of applying the rules of one sort of being to another. A list of the 5 levels would have been nice.

As for Lemaître's comment, it was the church's open declaration of conflict with science that originally drove me away from my church upbringing, to flee to places like this.

don't have any argument to show that the whole is filled by material — MoK

Not one for the cosmological principle then, eh? It is something assumed. We have limited sight distance. No light emitted more than about 6 GLY from here has ever reached us, but as far as we can see, it looks the same in every direction. The implication is that if you were on one of those other distant places we see, they'd also see the same stuff everywhere.

FWIW, there are places that are (relatively empty) and we can see them. The Dipole Repeller is such a place, it having negative gravity which flings any nearby galaxies away, same as would happen if you pulled up in one place on the rubber sheet analogy.

The universe is a collection of objects so OP applies to the universe. — MoK

That doesn't change the universe into an object itself. The collection hasn't the properties of an object for instance (a center of mass just to name one).

AI systems must adhere to the following principles: — Benkei

Why?

Respect for Human Rights and Dignity ... including privacy, non-discrimination, freedom of expression, and access to justice.

This is a slave principle. The privacy thing is needed, but the AI is not allowed its own privacy, per the transparency thing further down. Humans grant no such rights to something not themselves. AI is already used to invade privacy and discriminate.

Users should understand how AI influences outcomes that affect them.

The whole point of letting an AI do such tasks is that they're beyond human comprehension. If it's going to make decisions, they will likely be different (hopefully better) ones that those humans comprehend. We won't like the decisions because they would not be what we would choose. All this is presuming a benign AI.

Accountability

This is a responsibility problem. Take self driving cars. If they crash, whose fault is it? Can't punish the AI. Who goes to jail? Driver? Engineer? Token jail-goers employed by Musk? The whole system needs a rethink if machines are to become self-responsible entities.

Safety and Risk Management
AI systems must be designed with the safety of individuals and society as a priority.

This depends on the goals of the safety. Humans seem incapable of seeing goals much longer than a couple years. What if the AI decides to go for more long term human benefit. We certainly won't like that. Safety of individuals would partially contradict that, being short term.

Anthropic Principle is a particular case of an observation selection effect. — SophistiCat

OK, with that I agree. It's no a selection as in natural selection, but rather selection as in selection bias. All of philosophy on this subject tends to be heavily biased as to how things are due to this extreme bias which is due to the strong correlation between observer and tuning.,

We didn't say that the universe went from finite to infinite. — MoK

You kind of did:

I am not saying that the universe in its initial state was infinite. It could be finite or infinite. — MoK

By reference to an initial state, and by use of past tense, you imply that some time (the earliest time), it could have been finite, but that it isn't finite now. That requires, at some moment, a transition from finite to infinite.

The universe (our 4D spacetime) is considered to be infinite in all four dimensions, and bounded at one end of the time dimension. That universe, not being contained by time, does not undergo change. You may not like that consensus model (all the posts by most contributors to this topic presume a different model with the universe being an object contained by time), but if you're going to attempt some sort of logic finding fault with the something-from-nothing idea, one has to consider models other than the naive one that posits that. Else you get conclusions like this:

If God can always have existed without a cause, then so can have the universe. — Hanover

Translation: If <category error>, then ditto <same category error, different object>

Things (objects) can meaningfully 'have existed', being contained by time. Neither God nor the universe is such an object.

MoK makes this definition clear.

nothing to something is not possible
...
By nothing I mean no material, no space, no time,. — MoK

The natural numbers are not a thing. — MoK

So MoK is talking about only 'things' (objects). The universe is not such a 'thing', so the conclusion from the OP is relevant only to objects, not the universe, per this restricted definition of 'nothing' to mean literally 'no thing'.
Apparently space and time (like objects, still parts of the universe, not something containing the universe) qualify as 'things'.


Question to all: Is anybody actually supporting the view of something from nothing, or supporting the Kalam argument that the prime thing exists in (some other kind of) unbounded time, for all of said unbounded time? It being contained by time, it supervenes on it, and the prime thing isn't supposed to supervene on something even more fundamental.

I ask this question because we all seem to be beating on a naive straw man argument for a god. I do totally agree Hanover's disassembly of the logic that the universe just 'being' is a simpler assertion than the indirection to the zero-evidence deity that is asserted to do the same thing. Adding the regression just makes the model more complicated, a violation of Occam.

anthropic selection — SophistiCat

What is that? There is no selecting going on in Chaotic inflationary theory, or as part of the anthropic principle.

Earth is a tiny target in the cosmos, and yet there is a meteor crater in Arizona. Strong anthropic principle says the rock was deliberately aimed. Weak anthropic principle says there are a lot of rocks out there, the vast majority of which miss altogether, but a small percentage hit.

Discount the principle altogether and you get: There was but the one rock, and it was just an incredible chance that it managed to hit right next to the visitor center like that

The initial ID argument concerned biology, which was asserted to be the work of design, but the weight of evidence for evolution was too hard to deflect. So lately they go for the tuning of the cosmological constants. For example, why are there 3 macroscopic spatial dimensions and 1 macroscopic temporal one? Most of the other random chances get different numbers than those.


Wayfarer discounts the 'lot of rocks' view since if it was true, anything might get hit.
Apologies for ragging on your tastes, Wayfarer, but they're not based on rational reasoning, only on the comfort of a small fish wanting a small pond. But people used to deny other planets, then other star systems, other galaxies, and then more beyond our furthest sight. Each time, big won over us-centrism. My bets are on the 'big', that each level is only a tiny part of something even bigger, especially when it has explanitory powers.

Given enough monkeys with typewriters... — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, that's kind of it. The collected works of Shakespeare are encoded in the binary encoding of pi. So what? The point was to encode an observer that can glean that it's part of pi or that it was typed by monkeys. In that sense, we need a better analogy.

As an idealist, I sympathize with your claim the universe might not "exist", — RogueAI

I don't say it doesn't exist. I say that it isn't meaningfully defined to say that a non-object exists or not.
OK, it appears that our personal chunk of spacetime (this infinite size swath of 4D place with the constants the way we find them) is something sprung from the greater inflationary ... stuff.
There is no time as we know it, but something spawns all these separate things we call universes. It's all one big structure. That has to be if there are to be a lot of other small universes with different spacetimes and suboptimal tunings. But buying into that single regress doesn't explain the reality of that larger structure. Hence I balk at the sort of realism which says that non-object things like that meaningfully exist.
To me, a rock exists, but only because I am causally effected by the rock. Those other 'universes' don't exist to me for the same reason: They don't have a causal effect on me. Ditto for alternate histories of Earth per MWI. MWI says those worlds all exist, but it uses a realist definition of existence.

For pragmatic purposes, I define existence as a relation, not a property. Treating it as a property is to assert a counterfactual, and while I cannot disprove counterfactuals, all sorts of hoops must be jumped through to attempt to solve all the problems that come up by positing them, and that effort stands in in contrast to 'simple but large'.

So the possibility of infinite universes is a 'tidier explanation' — Wayfarer

Well, one universe (the greater structure, or which our spacetime is but a tiny part), but vast enough to exceed your comfort level. And no, I don't say that it 'exist' since 1) what does that even mean? and 2) the existence of the prime thing seems to lack any rational explanation.

Oh, and note the call out to 'dark matter', the existence of which is also a matter of conjecture — Wayfarer

They called out dark energy. Dark matter slows the expansion of the universe.
I didn't in any way see how dark energy density was in any way special in this context. Sure, it's one of the tunable constants, but just one of them. Could observers evolve with a different value for that constant? Definitely, but how different? There are some constants where only a tiny change in like the 30th digit would preclude observers.

They can't claim that because it violates premise #1, which was my point. — Hanover

Don't think it was a violation. P1 says something about 'whatever begins to exist', but a claim that God didn't begin to exist expiicitly exempts itself from P1.

I am not saying that the universe in its initial state was infinite. It could be finite or infinite. — MoK

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Then we agree! — Philosophim

But I do not agree. It cannot go from finite to infinite. There's no scaling that would do that. For one, it would be transitioning at some moment from having a size to not having one.

This is highly speculative. — RogueAI

Highly? No. Speculative, yes, but all cosmological origin ideas are. This one is the one and only counter to the fine tuning argument, the only known alternative to what actually IS a highly speculative (woo) argument.

The whole idea of ‘other universes’ says precisely nothing more than that anything might happen. Which is basically irrational. — Wayfarer

Your personal aversion to the universe being larger than you like is a natural anthropocentric one, and every time a proposal was made that the universe was larger, it was resisted for this same reason, and later accepted. Chaotic inflationary theory is a theory of one structure, only a tiny portion to which we have empirical access.

Any 'anything possible happens', not just anything, and not just 'might'. It isn't a theory of true randomness like Copenhagen or something.

You're asserted the irrationality of the view, but have not explained how a theory with such explanatory power is irrational. Only that you find it distasteful, which is not rational grounds for rejecting a theory.

They claim that God didn't begin to exist but exists. — MoK

Much easier to say the universe exists. That cuts out one regression step.

No, God is dragged in not as an explanation of anything, but as an excuse to attempt to rationalize religion.

Are you an idealist? — MoK

No. I try not to identify as an anything-ist, since being such a thing come with an attitude that other views are not to be considered.
I have fewest issues with a relational view, but wouldn't go so far as to call myself a relationalist.

What Unruh radiation has to do with our debate? — MoK

It is an example of real material that is not caused, at least under non-deterministic interpretations of QM.

Exists is to be. — Philosophim

I know what the word literally means, but it isn't clear if 'to be' applies to natural numbers for instance. The natural numbers are quite useful regardless of when they actually 'are' or not. That's what I mean by 'to be' not being clearly defined or meaningful to things that are not objects. I was seeking that clarification, and you didn't clarify. Answer the question for the natural numbers. We can go from there

If something exists without prior reason, then it exists apart from any necessity of being. — Philosophim

For objects, something where 'exists' is a meaningful property, well, most objects have a sort of necessity of being, which is basic classical causality. There's for instance no avoiding the existence of the crater if the meteor is to hit there. The necessity goes away if you step outside of classical physics.

But we're not talking about objects here, we're talking about other stuff where 'exists' isn't really defined at all. The universe existing has about as much pragmatic meaning as the integers existing. We're quite capable of working with either regardless of the fact of the matter, if 'fact' can be used to describe something not really meaningful.

All I take from the 'anthropic principle' is that the evolutionary sequence which we understand from science doesn't begin with the beginning of life on earth, but can be traced back to the origin of the universe. — Wayfarer

I don't see where evolution comes into play. I mean, are we talking about some sort of natural selection of laws of physics? That's not the anthropic principle that I know.

it would have been far more likely that it would not have given rise to complex matter and organic life, and that there's no reason why it should have.

This statement essentially says that if the dice were rolled but the once, the odds of hitting our settings is essentially nil. True that. So the dice are not rolled but the once. Unbounded rolls are part of the chaotic inflationary theory of cosmology, with countless bubbles of spacetime with random properties are generated from a single structure. Only the ones with exact optimal settings (the odds against has an insane number of zeroes) are suitable for generating a mind capable of gleaning the nature of the structure.

That is by no means a proof of God or anything else

Just so. The strong principle is, where the settings are deliberate, which implies ID, but I'm suggesting the weak principle where the settings are natural and not a violation of probability.

:100:

There is no explanation for physical laws, generally. Physical laws can serve as the basis for the explanations for all manner of things, but why they are as they are is not something explained by science. — Wayfarer

I stand by my statement. Your assertion notwithstanding, how does the weak anthropic principle (or the strong for that matter) not explain why they are as they are? If they were not as they are, there'd be no observers to glean the suboptimal choice of laws.

The natural numbers are not a thing. — MoK

Neither is the universe.

There are 'things' in this universe seemingly without a cause (proof lacking). Unruh radiation is a fine example, predicted a long way back, and seemingly finally detected recently.

But then, what is to prevent something uncaused that is also finite? — Philosophim
Why should it be finite? — MoK
Why should it not? Its uncaused. Something uncaused has no reason for being. Which also means it has no reason for NOT being. — Philosophim

This seems to have evaded the question. Sure, if it lacks a reason for being, it equally lacks a reason for not being. The question was where 'finite' was somehow relevant to that statement.

I think you would only say that if you put the creator on the same ontological level as the created. — Wayfarer

Well I was speaking more of the lay public which Craig entertains. They don't know enough to put the creator on a different ontological level, and thus work more directly with said analog. But the Theologians do, and presumably explain away the regress issue to their own satisfaction.

By nothing I mean no material, no space, no time,... — MoK

There's plenty left when those are eliminated. The natural numbers for one...

Just out of curiosity, where was the manuscript published, and how many citations does it have?

Don't know the 'where'. Probably heavily cited by the absolutist crowd, but all that is sort of fringe. They've been waiting for a generalization of LET for an awful long time.

I mean we may be able to explain why physical laws are like this and not the other ways. — MoK

The weak anthropic principle does a fair task of explaining why physical laws are like this.

the universe certainly exists — RogueAI

Plenty of valid philosophies would disagree with that, so it is hardly a certain thing. Just for an example, an idealist would say only the ideal (the concept of the universe) exists, and there is no real universe (noumena).

Existence is fairly well defined for an object. An object has a location and duration. An object is contained by both space and time, and it doing this constitutes 'existence'. The universe is a different category, and it does not exist in space (except to those who naively posit the a big bang as an explosion of stuff into pre-existing empty space), and it exists in time only to those that posit it to do so, which makes the existence of the universe a problem to those that hold that view. But that's not the only alternative. The prevailing view is that the universe is contain by neither space nor time and is thus not to be treated as an ordinary object To say it exists requires a very different definition of 'exists', and I'm not impressed with the utility of any of the definitions I've seen attempted.

Similarly, some (Platonists?) suggest that the natural numbers exist. That requires a different definition of 'exists' else one can meaningfully ask where their location is, and when/how they came into existence. If they are not temporal objects (if they were, they'd change over time), then why does the universe have to be? What difference does it make if the natural numbers exist or if they don't? It certainly makes a difference for an object, but the natural numbers are not objects. There are those that don't suggest that numbers meaningfully exist, and yet they are no less capable of counting their toes.

The issue boils down to a problem to a realist: How does one explain the reality of whatever one asserts to be real? Shorter but less rigorous version: Why is there something and not nothing? Positing a creator doesn't solve the problem; it only regresses it.

Not my problem. I abandoned realism for pretty much the unanswerability of such questions.

The only way around that I can see is to say it's eternal.

There are multiple meanings to that word.

Dictionary version: Lasting forever, without beginning or end.
Philosophy version: Eternalism: That time is contained by the universe, and is bounded at one end just like North is bounded on Earth. This is opposed to time that flows, and the universe is contained in that flowing time.

I'm loosely guessing that you're using the former definition, that there is no bound to time in either direction. The theory I linked above presumes a model something like that, but the big bang has to be discarded. There is a half-empirical test for the view. Half because one can prove the consensus view to ones self, but not to others, similar to proving an afterlife. You have to go through a 1-way door. If you survive that, you cannot communicate your findings to the other side of the door.

Nothing caused the the universe to come into existence? How does that work? — RogueAI

No, 'nothing' cannot be a cause. I don't posit that the universe is the sort of thing that 'came into existence', something that only describes objects within our universe, such as a raindrop. Treating the universe as an object is a category error.

Time isn't something that began to exist. It is simply a dimension of our universe, per consensus view. Time is contained by the universe, not the other way around.

I have one argument for nothing to something is impossible which I discussed it in this thread. — MoK

Physics very much supports uncaused events, but even such events are not from nothing. I don't think anybody is pushing a stance of something from nothing, except as a straw man alternative to whatever it is they actually are evangelizing. Craig regularly commits such a fallacy.

P1) Time is needed for change

For temporal change, sure. There are other kinds of change that don't involve time. e.g. 'The air pressure changes with altitude'.

nothing to something is not possible

'nothing' isn't even really a defined thing, so the conclusion is more meaningless than impossible.

Bob Rose's argument:
...
P3: Change requires temporality.

Bob also seems to treat the universe as something subject to temporality, that is, something contained by time. This model was outdated over a century ago.

If you want to eliminate the alternative to your pet idea, at least knock down the consensus view of things instead of the straw man 6th century one.

Time is needed for a thing to begin to exist since the thing does not exist at a point and then exists.

Just so. Hence the category error.

Do mind to provide a link to such models?

Here's the main one, perhaps the first one to generalize LET theory to include gravity. It was published almost a century after Einstein generalized his Special relativity theory.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45904833_Black_Holes_or_Frozen_Stars_A_Viable_Theory_of_Gravity_without_BlackHoles
It is an absolute theory, with the universe contained by time, hence absolute time. All the premises of special relativity are denied, and different premises are used.

The 6th century argument perhaps had some teeth back in the day, but it presumes a model of the universe (that of being an object contained by space and time) that is today a fringe model at best. That of course doesn't detract Craig whose paying audience is hardly versed in modern cosmology theory, so they of course eat it right up, despite the fact that the same argument can be used against whatever was the cause. Craig doesn't care that the argument doesn't hold water. He cares that he gets his check for asserting it anyway.

It's sort of like proving the Earth rests on a turtle since anything that holds something up must itself be held up by something. The model worked back in the day, but is today about as naive as the Kalam thing.

So premise 1 is a premise that only applies to objects IN the universe, and even then it isn't necessarily true except under fully deterministic interpretations of physics.
Premise 2 totally goes against the consensus view among cosmologists where time and space are contained by the universe instead of the other way around. Such a model does exist, and it necessarily denies things predicted by the prevailing view such as the big bang or black holes.

one can also say that the material has existed since the beginning of time — MoK

The universe is not posited to have been built from 'material'. Any material did not show up on the scene until several epochs beyond the big bang.

So we're in agreement about the lack of soundness of the argument, but for different reasons.