Hmm. I don't think I moved the goal.

You expresses some agreement with the phenomenological approach to defining consciousness. I have pointed out that it's a useless definition. It cannot help us to decide if ChatGPT, @creativesoul, or your air conditioner are conscious.

And despite quite a few posts. that's about as far as we have got.

Hence my referring us back to the methodological point. Treating air conditioners or ChatGPT as conscious requires a change to the way we usually use the term, that is not found in treating creativesoul as conscious.

I see where you are going — schopenhauer1

I don't think so. I don't think you noted the methodological point made earlier, that the issue of whether ChatGPT or your air conditioner are conscious is one of word use.

, This muddled stuff about subject and object is, for my money, off-topic.

Using the convention of "snow is white" is true IFF snow is white, perhaps one could say:

"the sky is blue" is synthetic, the sky is blue is a posteriori, "an X is NOT not X" is analytic and an X is NOT not X is a priori.

"The sky is blue" being synthetic brings in the debate between Indirect and Direct Realism — RussellA

What?

I don't think you think your air conditioner has consciousness. But that looks inconsistent with your view that consciousness is an inner subjective experience, together with the impossibility of demonstrating when inner subjective experiences occur.

It seems your view should lead to a moral obligation towards your air conditioner.

And again, it might be more interesting were we to address the methodological issue.

massive amounts of information — schopenhauer1

Do you now wish to add this to your definition of consciousness?

I don't agree with you if you are saying, "Consciousness is something other than some inner phenomenological experience". — schopenhauer1

Kant's madness again.

Your air conditioner has inner phenomenological experiences. Prove me wrong.


By your own argument, you ought not turn it off.

What do you want from me, in other words? — schopenhauer1

:grin:

You appeared to imply that the phenomenological approach would work, saying:

This is the one. — schopenhauer1

Now you are agreeing with me that it doesn't.

That'll do.

you are obviously attributing consciousness to things that shouldn't be. — schopenhauer1

That's how a reductio works.

The trouble with this area of enquiry is that "consciousness" is used with such gay abandon. I've pointed out the several perfectly serviceable definitions of consciousness used by medical staff and taught in first aid courses. I should have given greater emphasis to the fact that these definitions cannot be applied to air conditioners and chatbots. — Banno

It'd take no time at all to set up shutdown and boot sequences to do what you describe.

Consider again the methodological point:

...what is at issue is not the status of ChatGPT, but the correct usage of "conscious". — Banno

Small is Beautiful, by E F Schumacher... — Wayfarer

...ooo I suspect the ideas therein are sitting quietly in the background, an un-noted stoa for various Green political movements and alternate economic theories.

yep, folks ethics often improve when they leave their religion. Again, there is the inability of some folk to comprehend an ethic not based on god.

...has anyone here made use of Wolfram Language and/or Wolfram|Alpha? — Banno

Seems not?

It looks like the sort of thing that should be useful, but isn't. And the reason it isn't is not obvious. At least not to me.

That works. Spent last night showing Girl how to use it to write essays for undergrad accounting courses.

I characterise it as a bullshit generator, in the strict philosophical sense of "bullshit", of course.

What if we define a moral ought as something like “What all well informed, rational, people would advocate”? — Mark S

This has the same issues as your previous formulations. For a start, the notions "well-informed" and "rational" are normative. You have embedded prior moral judgements in you definition of "moral".

All it might be saying is "A moral ought is what people like me say it is".

Then there is the naturalistic fallacy involved in claiming that the way we have evolved to behave is the way we ought behave.

And then there are the previously discussed difficulties with claiming that cooperation is a virtue - folk cooperate on immoral acts.

In all I don't see any progress since your previous threads.

Again, and despite the ubiquitous ruinations hereabouts, it is not clear that awareness of events - the phenomenal approach to consciousness - is of much use at all.

Unless you wish to redefine consciousness to the extent that it applies to your air conditioner.

After all, it is aware of suitable changes in temperature and responds appropriately.

I raised the neo-phenomenological approach only to point out that it is useless.

trouble is, it does nothing to help sort things out. See . If you can’t tell if Way is a P-zombie or not, how will the notion help with an AI?

Another notion of consciousness is the neo-phenomenological one, in which to be conscious is to experience - qualia and all that. It's a pretty odd idea - does a thermometer experience temperature?

There's no reason to think ChatGPT does this.

I might even say it is superficially analytic. — schopenhauer1

Quine's point is that all analytic statements are superficially so.

Even if the world contained no notion of marriage, the notion of marriage would remain possible, and hence bachelors would still be possible. It gets complicated.

The joke was a bit obvious....

How do we know ChatGpt isn't conscious? — RogueAI

Yes, good question. The trouble with this area of enquiry is that "consciousness" is used with such gay abandon. I've pointed out the several perfectly serviceable definitions of consciousness used by medical staff and taught in first aid courses. I should have given greater emphasis to the fact that these definitions cannot be applied to air conditioners and chatbots.

When one asks it ChatGPT is conscious, one is asking if the word "conscious" can be well-applied to ChatGPT. That is, what is at issue is not the status of ChatGPT, but the correct usage of "conscious".

Wittgenstein and all that.

The first answer is, if we are using "conscious" as it applies in first aid courses, then ChatGPT is nto conscious.

The second answer is that we can always change the way "conscious is used so that it applies to ChatGPT.

Is "consciousness" broad enough already to apply to ChatGPT? reads things ("high-level emergent features") into it's outputs in the way you and I read intentions into the acts of other people. I remain unconvinced.

Do, you really want to turn this thread into a doctrinal debate between Scientism & Christianism? — Gnomon

Why not.

But my point was missed, so I'll put it again, more directly. There are those who leave one fundamentalism only to find another, who putting down one bible, choose another. Such folk might miss the distinction makes.

There is a significant difference in cognitive abilities between them. — Pierre-Normand

But much the same architecture. It's still just picking the next word from a list of expected words.

How can a random process produce those results? — RogueAI

It's anything but random.

Indeed, why take the triangle as being important? What rule was followed? And even if triangles are taken as primal, why not AME or AJK?

What counts as prime depends on the task in hand.

I doubt he would, since existence is not bound to individual worlds.

The point was a simple one:

The value of this promise depends on how well we understand the supervenience relation itself. If it is a dangling, inexplicable, metaphysical fact that the Fs relate in this way to the Gs, then supervenience inherits rather than solves the problems of understanding the various areas. — supervenience

You may not believe me... — RussellA

Indeed, I do not. I think you understand that a child knows its mother, without the child being able to provide a definition. Especially since you went on to talk of a further instance of understanding a concept without being able to provide a definition, this time from Russell.

Again, it seems to me you have not grasped the gist of Quine's argument. Hence your odd insistence that you have solved "the gavagai problem", the inscrutability of reference, with a solution that doesn't appear to so much as address it.

Keep reading. It'll come.

A Batchelor was long a young knight, not yet displaying his own banner, but that of a senior knight. Later did it become used for one who had completed but their first degree, and for unmarried men, "who have often pain and woe" (Chaucer).

So did Robert of Gloucester know a priori that a Bachelor is but "Syre ȝong bacheler..þow art strong & corageus"? Was he mistaken, not knowing the real meaning of the word was to do with matrimony? Or is there more to the relation between a word and its meaning than is given in a cluster of synonyms?

And why did we drop the letters yogh and thorn?

You think it would be a good thing if ethics were based on faith and a social hierarchy? — praxis

No.

Where did that come from?

So here is where connectionism comes in to the discussion, with the possibility of cognition without (at least local) representation.

A neural network need not, and usually does not, work things out using symbols to represent the things on which it is working.

analyticity in concepts. — RussellA

Analyticity without language? What could that be? I can make sense of two lexical elements standing for the same concept, but of two concepts standing for the same concept? How could that work?

Thoughts and concepts stand in for words — RussellA

Is this your opinion, or your view of Chomsky, or both?

...supervene... — RussellA

An odd word, now becoming surprisingly common. What could it mean to have properties supervene onto individuals... green supervene on grass... that the green "occurs as an interruption" to the grass? Hu?

And what does it relate to what I have said?

Communication using language would break down without definitions. — RussellA

Why? A child knows its mother, despite not being able to provide a definition. And so on for the vast majority of words. I think you are here just wrong.

The following argument is stolen from Austin:

Look up the definition of a word in the dictionary.

Then look up the definition of each of the words in that definition.

Iterate.

Given that there are a finite number of words in the dictionary, the process will eventually lead to repetition.

If one's goal were to understand a word, one might suppose that one must first understand the words in its definition. But this process is circular.

There must, therefore, be a way of understanding a word that is not given by providing its definition.

Now this seems quite obvious; and yet so many begin their discussion with "let's first define our terms". — Banno

Ironically, in my personal experience with an anti-catholic fundamentalist religion, the Catholic Bible was taken on faith as an accurate record of "God's Word". — Gnomon

This is ambiguous. Who was it took the Catholic bible literally - the anti-catholic fundamentalist? How perverse of them. Or did the anti-catholic fundamentalist think that Catholics think that Catholics do not need a priestly cast to interpret the Bible correctly? Again, how odd.

In any case, when will you be dropping that fundamentalists buttressing so evident in your thinking?

What would say about a new religion... — Benj96

Not much.

The point would be to replace dogmas with problem solving.

A good read.

I noted the similarity between the "thick moment" and Douglas Hofstadter's I am a strange loop. Prophetic stuff.

That and the suggestion that having a self is evidenced by wanking.

Roughly speaking, science tells us how things are, while religion attempts to tell us how things ought to be, usually very badly.

Science and religion are working in opposite directions.

So science will not replace religion. But it would be an excellent development if ethics did.

...would such a progression of linear time to a conscious being allow them to understand its infinite nature though not being able experience infinity itself due to their limited timespan — invicta

One might hardly count past a few hundred, but that does not prevent one understanding much larger numbers, together with infinity, transfinite numbers and other mathematical beasts.

the two concepts of time and change are inseparable. — invicta

You might enjoy What's the big mystery about time?, in which that notion is taken to the cleaners.

The question for Professor Chomsky is at https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/804011

Draft form. Suggestions welcome.

Dear Professor Chomsky,

Are there analytic statements? And if so, in virtue of what might they considered to be analytic?

The SEP supplement Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics shows evidence for what Georges Rey suggests is a vacillation on your part, supporting analyticity in some places, rejecting it in others.
Rey suggesting that perhaps analyticity resides in a framework of concept or belief rather than in our semantics. Have you some sympathy for this view?

We have had some discussion of the issue in this forum.

I, and others here, would be grateful for any light you might care to shed on this issue.

Thank you in anticipation.

It occurs to me that since the characteristic of language most central to Chomsky's approach is that language is compositional, hence permitting a small finite range of words to provide innumerable structured sentences, that it is compositionally that might best serve to remove a dog's associating a leash with a walk from what we might commonly call conceptualisation.

Concepts can be merged to construct new concepts.

Hence the dog might understand that it's master will take it for a walk, but not that its master will take it for a walk next Tuesday.

It even appears that Chomsky is directly challenging Wittgenstein's concept of a private language. — schopenhauer1

I'll take some small issue with this. Wittgenstein's private language is used to refer to supposedly private sensations, to that feeling you have when your blood pressure is high, to that pain. That's different to what is being described in your quote.

The last speaker of a natural language, and Robinson Crusoe, do not provide examples of such a private language.

Could a Boltzmann Brain develop a language? Perhaps, if it divided itself against itself.