Morphic fields, and morphic resonance, even though generally (and angrily) rejected by mainstream science... — Wayfarer

You are projecting again. Scientists are pretty used to many people preferring woo.

For a biologist's take...

Again, I offer this for readers’ comments; they aren’t yet my own final definitions. I say this because the subject is touchy and though I want to be biologically accurate, I also want to be civil. And we should recognize that there are diverse definitions of the terms below, though nearly all biologists adhere to the gametic criterion for “biological sex.”

So, here goes:

Sex: Classes of individuals in a species that have the potential to fuse their gametes with those of individuals from a different class, producing a zygote.

Humans (like all mammals and most metazoans) fall into two classes:

Biological Male: Individuals having the capacity/biological equipment to make small, mobile gametes: sperm.

Biological Female: Individuals having the capacity/biological equipment to make large, immobile gametes: eggs.

Under this definition sex is based on gamete type, which nearly always (but not always) correlates with chromosome type or bodily morphology (e.g., secondary sex characters like breasts and body hair). For example, some individuals with Turner syndrome (XO females, lacking one X instead of the common XX females) can make eggs and become pregnant), while some males with Klinefelter syndrome (XXY rather than XY) have motile sperm, though most are usually sterile. Regardless, these individuals fit into the biological “male” or “female” categories above, and do not constitute new sexes.

Likewise, many individuals with ambiguous genitalia can nevertheless make viable sperm or eggs, and thus fit into one of the two classes above...

That all makes sense. And, although I know nothing about computers has the flexibility ol you are describing, what is it most analogous with? The difference between windows and iOS? Or the difference between C++ and Java? Or between phpBB3 and whatever is used at this site? Or some other level? I don't know nearly enough about all this stuff to even know what the possibilities are. — Patterner

I suppose the least bad analogy would be different CPUs. C code can be compiled to run on different CPUs, and yield the same user interface, although the details of the physical processes that occur in running the code would be different.

That was a standard claim I used to hear amongst New Age types. You don't see them because 'you're a crass materialist who lacks sensitivity' or 'you are a skeptic and so are nto receptive'. I think this romantic approach to occult matters is still popular. — Tom Storm

:up:

Do different brains have different operating systems, or logic gates, or chips (I don't know what the appropriate thing to ask is)? — Patterner

Different human brains have their neurons interconnected in different ways. (And this is just one dimension of variation in the brains of individuals.) Furthermore, interconnections between neurons get strengthened or weakened in the process of learning, so the strength or weakness of specific neural interconnections is a matter of both biology and environment.

4. Therefore, ancient peoples coherently talked about their brain states. — Leontiskos

They just didn't know they were talking about brain activity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_neuroscience:

Already in the 4th century BC, Aristotle thought that the heart was the seat of intelligence, while the brain was a cooling mechanism for the blood. He reasoned that humans are more rational than the beasts because, among other reasons, they have a larger brain to cool their hot-bloodedness.

Explain how you (we) know that "cooperation strategies are innate to our universe" and therefore that they are also "innate" in all human individuals. — 180 Proof

:up:

Some nontrivial percentage of individuals are psychopaths, and that has been investigated in a game theory context as well:

Abstract
Static networks have been shown to foster cooperation for specific cost–benefit ratios and numbers of connections across a series of interactions. At the same time, psychopathic traits have been discovered to predict defective behaviours in game theory scenarios. This experiment combines these two aspects to investigate how group cooperation can emerge when changing group compositions based on psychopathic traits. We implemented a modified version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game which has been demonstrated theoretically and empirically to sustain a constant level of cooperation over rounds. A sample of 190 undergraduate students played in small groups where the percentage of psychopathic traits in each group was manipulated. Groups entirely composed of low psychopathic individuals were compared with communities with 50% high and 50% low psychopathic players, to observe the behavioural differences at the group level. Results showed a significant divergence of the mean cooperation of the two conditions, regardless of the small range of participants’ psychopathy scores. Groups with a large density of high psychopathic subjects cooperated significantly less than groups entirely composed of low psychopathic players, confirming our hypothesis that psychopathic traits affect not only individuals’ decisions but also the group behaviour. This experiment highlights how differences in group composition with respect to psychopathic traits can have a significant impact on group dynamics, and it emphasizes the importance of individual characteristics when investigating group behaviours.

Do you understand that humans can become less wrong over a period of time? As a result of, among other things, paying attention to what we can be learned about the world we live in.

1. There is no valid logical inference there.

2. It seems to me that if we want to speak accurately, it would be more realistic to talk about mental events and neurological events, rather than talking about states.

3. Ancient people didn't have the opportunity, to become much better informed, that is available to us now. So what do ancient people have to do with the subject?

There is certainly an interesting way in which we approach science as a field superstitiously, endowing it with impossible attributes. — Leontiskos

What impossible attributes?

Yes, the insidious notion of the "elect", those who believe themselves favored in God's eyes. It is mind-boggling how long such childish delusions can survive. — Janus

Ugh! You reminded me of when I did some reading reading at https://www.puritanboard.com. Part of the atmosphere was browbeating people for showing normal human empathy. It was sad to see.

I see concern about the "fate of the immortal soul" as a sad state of delusion. I don't deny that for those who cannot see their way clear of such delusions that faith in salvation of some kind may indeed be their only way forward. — Janus

:100:

Unfortunately some also have a narcissistic need to believe themselves superior, and religions frequently feed such a need.

This kind of thinking in no way at all undoes or second guesses our general knowledge claims. It simply says that when you look closely, you find this absurdity that knowledge claims REALLY are pragmatic functions dealing with the world. — Astrophel

I don't see it as absurd myself. To me it seems awfully sensible, to see knowledge claims as pragmatic functions dealing with the world.

Those who live on the edge of time, in a rapidly evolving environment, such as a high risk occupation, or a professional athlete in a fast sport, are usually the ones who find the most purpose for superstition. In these situations a large part of a person's professional environment is completely unpredictable, and many of the happenings appear to be at the hands of fate, or chance. — Metaphysician Undercover

Interesting observation. It makes sense that people who make their living off their ability to act effectively in the heat of the moment are used to being able to go with their intuitions successfully, and tend to do so even when critical thinking might serve them better.

What if the desire for coldness is just a way to mask the unappealing flavor of one's drink, as some Europeans would say with respect to American beer? Subconscious mitigation of unappealing flavor? :razz: — Leontiskos

Well that too. I tend to go for Guiness.

I tend to separate superstitious thinking "Hey, this red shirt is a lucky charm!" from OCD "I HAVE TO count the chairs in my row, or I'll be really uncomfortable." I have a habit, or mild compulsion, to rinse out my glass before I fill it with cold water from the tap. I find a wet glass more appealing. A plastic glass, on the other hand, can't be helped by rinsing it out first. Yuck. It's a non-functional behavior. I used to have more of these, but they have faded away. — BC

Is it superstition, or subconscious deep learning. By rinsing a glass, you can remove a substantial amount of heat from the glass. Without pre-chilling the glass, the heat in the glass would warm your drink and result in less enjoyment of the coldness of your drink.

Sounds like subconscious thermodynamics to me. :nerd:

There is considerable debate over whether plants are conscious and this, indeed, is an important question. Here I look at developments in neuroscience, physics and mathematics that may impact on this question. Two major concomitants of consciousness in animals are microtubule function and electrical gamma wave synchrony. Both these factors may also play a role in plant consciousness. I show that plants possess aperiodic quasicrystal structures composed of ribosomes that may enable quantum computing, which has been suggested to lie at the core of animal consciousness. Finally I look at whether a microtubule fractal suggests that electric current plays a part in conventional neurocomputing processes in plants." — RogueAI

Careful. That way lies crank magnetism or even worse, fractal wrongness.

Sneaky little things. — Patterner

Indeed.

Great card! :lol:

Nevertheless we would have to find the "ego-neuron" so to speak to locate the point in space where all this information transmitted by our nerves come together to generate our experience of a "personality". — Pez

I.e. we would need to find a homunculus?

There is no cognition in perception; the senses don’t think. — Mww

I suppose it depends on what one categorizes under "thinking", but I'd say there is ample evidence of perception and thinking being entangled.

Meaning that, we have a consensus view of the nature of reality, and that view is, at the end of the day, that the physical sciences are definitive, and that psychic phenomena and belief in higher planes of being can only be understood in subjective terms. — Wayfarer

Psi. (Pun intended.)

Yep. What we see is not an upside-down sense-impression created by the brain, but the things in the world.

But Michael now thinks there isn't an upside down and a right way up anyway, so the point is moot, so far as the thread goes. One can't nail jelly to the wall, the discussion hereabouts being the jelly. — Banno

From my perspective, the question of the thread looks like an attempt to address a complex subject (actually a diverse set of subjects) with a false dichotomy. Those arguing for direct realism seeming to have the pragmatic advantage, of being able to acknowledge common ground for discussion.

For there to be a "right way up" would seem to require something like absolute space and/or a preferred frame which I believe is at odds with modern scientific theory. — Michael

Ordinary language is tied to a frame of reference where the direction of the center of gravity of the Earth plays an important role. So it's not really a problem to translate, "Banno (in Oz) reached down to catch the cup falling off the table." to a frame of reference suitable for an accurate understanding of what happened.

So could there be a species in which half the population see the world upside down?

Wouldn't they "flip" the image in the way your paper describes, seeing the world right way up? — Banno

Yeah, a species in which half the population sees the world upside down doesn't seem scientifically plausible.

Yep. What does this tell us? — Banno

I'd say it tells us that our brains, given time, can adjust our perceptions so that we see things in a way that allows us to behave in a way consistent with the way the world is, despite an added layer of 'indirectness'.

One can imagine your creature's physiologist making the "discovery" that half the population sees things upside down, and their philosophers explaining carefully that no, they don't.
— Banno

The philosopher would be wrong. The scientist knows best. They're the ones actually studying how the world and perception works. — Michael

Some relevant science:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable-research-seeing-upside-down

The professor made Kohler wear a pair of hand-engineered goggles. Inside those goggles, specially arranged mirrors flipped the light that would reach Kohler's eyes, top becoming bottom, and bottom top.

At first, Kohler stumbled wildly when trying to grasp an object held out to him, navigate around a chair, or walk down stairs. In a simple fencing game with sticks, Kohler would rise his stick high when attacked low, and low in response to a high stab.

Holding a teacup out to be filled, he would turn the cup upside down the instant he saw the water apparently pouring upward. The sight of smoke rising from a match, or a helium balloon bobbing on a string, could trigger an instant change in his sense of which direction was up, and which down.

But over the next week, Kohler found himself adapting, in fits and starts, then more consistently, to such sights.

After 10 days, he had grown so accustomed to the invariably upside-down world that, paradoxically and happily, everything seemed to him normal, rightside-up. Kohler could do everyday activities in public perfectly well: walk along a crowded sidewalk, even ride a bicycle. Passersby on the street did ogle the man, though, because his eyewear looked, from the outside, unfashionable.

There is an interesting parallel to humans being overly reliant on human authorities, and the development of religions.

Two hundred years ago, a machine that does what Chat-GPT does was unimaginable. Why think that the limits of your imagination is so informative?

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871) introduction

This seems to assume that AI will never be provided with 'sensory organs', so that AI can never learn about reality first hand. That doesn't seem like a good assumption to me.

So, there is no issue. — AmadeusD

Tell that to the spouse of the duplicated person. :wink:

Can you give a definition of "creative thinking " that could be used in a Turing-type test? — Ludwig V

AI outperforms humans in standardized tests of creative potential:

Score another one for artificial intelligence. In a recent study, 151 human participants were pitted against ChatGPT-4 in three tests designed to measure divergent thinking, which is considered to be an indicator of creative thought.

Divergent thinking is characterized by the ability to generate a unique solution to a question that does not have one expected solution, such as "What is the best way to avoid talking about politics with my parents?" In the study, GPT-4 provided more original and elaborate answers than the human participants...

The definition I linked to was as follows:

Biological reductionism: A theoretical approach that aims to explain all social or cultural phenomena in biological terms, denying them any causal autonomy. Twentieth-century incarnations of biological reductionism have relied to varying degrees on Darwin's theory of evolution and principles of natural selection. Within the human sciences, there have been attempts to explain observed differences in group behaviour—such as performance on intelligence tests, rates of mental illness, intergenerational poverty, male dominance or patriarchy, and propensity for crime—as being biologically determined, by claiming that groups have different biological capacities or evolutionary trajectories. The theories of Social Darwinism, eugenics, and sociobiology often involve biological reductionism. A recognition of the importance of biological conditions and human nature need not involve biological reductionism. — Wayfarer

There's a bit of argumentum ad odium to that definition.

One might also say, that some understanding of the way things reduce to biology is a matter or being educated.

...I can't believe we just 'pick it up' by nature. — kudos

It seems to me we pick up experience and knowledge by nature. Experience and knowledge are part of most definitions of wisdom I have seen.

Why think that people wouldn't tend to pick up wisdom by nature?

That's exactly why Turing's test is so persuasive - except that when we find machines that could pass it, we don't accept the conclusion, but start worrying about what's going on inside them. If our test is going to be that the putative human needs to have a human inside - mentally if not necessarily physically, the game's over. — Ludwig V

It seems to me that it is time to rethink the relevance of the Turing Test. If humans ever create a machine that develops sentience, I would expect the machine to think in ways quite alien to us. So I don't see 'being indistinguishable from a human' as a very good criteria for judging sentience. (Or at the very least, humanity will need to attain much deeper understanding of our own natures, to create sentient machines whose sentience is human-like.)

Furthermore, it seems quite plausible that machines with no sentience will soon be able to convince many Turing Test judges. So to me, the Turing Test doesn't seem to provide a useful criteria for much of anything.

It isn't dismissive, it's objective. The fundamental mechanism of information processing via artificial neural networks has not changed. — Pantagruel

There are different aspects of information processing to be considered. Yes, understanding of how neural networks can process data in powerful ways has been around for a long time. The hardware that allows that sort of information processing to be practical is a much more recent arrival.

It is simply faster and more robust. It isn't one whit more intelligent than any other kind of mechanism. — Pantagruel

Well, it has an important aspect of intelligence that many other systems don't have, which is learning. Do you think that a distinction between learning mechanisms and non-learning mechanisms is worthwhile to recognize?

Nvidia hasn't become a two trillion dollar corporation because hype.
— wonderer1

This has absolutely no bearing on inherent nature of the technology in question. — Pantagruel

It certainly has bearing on the systems that are actually implemented these days. The type of physical systems available to implement artificial neural nets play a significant role in what can be achieved with such systems. The degree of parallel distributed processing is higher these days, and in that sense the hardware is more brain-like.

What is being hyped as "AI" for marketing purposes is a simulation, a simulacrum, a model, nothing more. — Pantagruel

This seems overly dismissive to me. Nvidia hasn't become a two trillion dollar corporation because hype. Nvidia has become a two trillion dollar corporation because their parallel processing GPUs allow information processing to be done in ways which weren't feasible without highly parallel processor architectures.

There is revolutionary information processing going on in modern "AI" systems. Of course there is no good reason to think that there is anything like human consciousness happening in these systems, but that is a different matter from whether there is something substantially different between the leading edge information processing of today and that of ten years ago. (Which your post seems to suggest.)

Sure. I was just giving a thumb's up to the recognition of value in considering one's 'training set' shown by @Olento's post.

Lately I've been thinking that maybe human thought really is some kind of language model. We expose ourselves to massive amount of text and discussion, and then just "continue the prompt". Well I'm not saying this very seriously, but for sure I'm going to prepare myself to that scenario by reading and writing as much as I can. It will be good for me in any case — Olento

:up:

The issue is that the definition of reason itself, per Adorno and Habermas, has changed in post-Enlightenment philosophy. To throw that into relief, consider the mainstream consensus of the essentially meaningless nature of the Universe. On the one hand, from a purely scientific point of view, it makes complete sense, as we're looking at it from a completely objective point of view. — Wayfarer

On a scientifically informed perspective, it would be naive to think that we're looking at anything from a completely objective point of view.

We are creatures that find things meaningful. Looking for meaning, beyond actually finding things meaningful in this life, might be a fool's errand.

Science consciously excludes anything subjective in its reckonings. — Wayfarer

That is clearly one of your favorite things to say. But it's simply not true. It strongly suggests you are ignorant of a whole lot of scientific thought.

But when this becomes a belief about the 'the way things really are' that it opens up the chasm of nihislim. — Wayfarer

Your bogeyman.

Because we don't actually live in the scientific universe, we dwell in the human condition. — Wayfarer

False dichotomy.

...and then you have to factor climate change in again.... — Pantagruel

AMOC collapse would make Britain a far less balmy place.