That’s the illusion, it’s really just the chemicals. It is that simple and our stories making it to be more than what it really is.

Without those chemicals it doesn’t matter what the information is. — Darkneos

I suggest you consider the possibility that your perspective is self contradictory. How do you know anything about chemicals?

Meaningful experiences don't tend to be about something else, it only seems that way due to the chemicals in us. — Darkneos

Nah, you are looking at things far too simplistically. There is a whole lot of structure to how those chemical are arranged. That structuring results in information processing occurring. That information processing is about things.

:up:

Let's think of a USB memory stick. If we open it we do not find any information, we only find an electronic and physical layout. To obtain information we must have a suitable device, a USB reader. I wonder if the expression "to obtain information" is the correct way to refer to the case. Since the information, this is my theory, does not exist inside the USB stick. — JuanZu

The information does exist in the USB stick, in the form of variations in electrical charge in different regions of a flash memory chip. This is why the device works as a memory.

It doesn't appear to me that you are formulating a very useful theory.

:100: :up:

You're not intelligent because of the properties alone of the chemicals in your body. You can't skip the middle step. You're intelligent because of the processes that that specific arrangement of chemicals allows to happen. And those processes AREN'T in all the particles. Those processes aren't in any individual particle at all. — flannel jesus

:up:

Our ability to communicate in this way also requires an understanding of EM fields, which are universal and not "composed of electrons" (rather electrons are the activity of the field, at least on many understandings). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sure, our understanding that those understandings are required for deeper understanding of our environment, has been greatly informed by people looking at things from a smallist perspective. Perhaps, as a pragmatic matter, it is wise to recognize the value of such an epistemological perspective?

Sounds like "smallism" to me. The problem is, there is no prima facie reason for smallism to be true — Count Timothy von Icarus

There is the fact that our communicating as we are is rather dependent on our ability to build computers based on understanding the way small things (e.g. transistors) can be interconnected to result in the behavior of bigger things (e.g. computers). We can see similar things in all sorts of fields, e.g medicine.

Macro things cannot be explained by properties the building blocks do not possess. — Patterner

Macro things are regularly explained by properties that the building blocks do not possess. For example bits of iron don't float on water, yet iron (as steel) is regularly formed into ships that float on water.

Perhaps the fallacy of division is more apropos to panpsychist thinking than the fallacy of composition?

No. I'm suggesting that they might be about the same things, under two different descriptions.
— Banno
I like the idea, but don't see how it can be. Can you explain? I suspect you have been doing that, but, if so, I haven't caught on. I am but an egg. — Patterner

Suppose the psychological language we use in talking about intentionality consists of metaphors which map roughly to different sorts of physical activity occurring in our brains.

I see it as rather analogous to seeing the elements of C++ as metaphors for what goes on phyiscally in the hardware of a machine running C++ code. (In case that helps.)

Sure. I'll take the option of not engaging in what I expect would be a tedious discussion. (I.e. there is a reason I choose this option.)

You can still have choices, it's just that your choices follow from... well, follow from YOU, follow from the state of you. — flannel jesus

:up:

Until then it’s just a blizzard of lies and conspiracy theories, and it’s activating violent psychos to take it upon themselves to take matters into their own hands outside the democratic process. — NOS4A2

Haven't you insisted that such influence on people is impossible?

The reductio conclusion for one who disbelieves in free is that they don't believe in free will because they are determined not to. They'd be similarly forced to accept a believer believes because he must. — Hanover

The believer believes as he does at present, because he must due to the history that shaped the way he believes at present. However we can contribute to what will be the history that shaped the way the believer believes in the future, by interacting with the believer now.

If that's the case, we argue not to persuade or effectuate our opponents to choose our way of thinking, but because we simply must argue and bend as programmed. — Hanover

That we can change each others thinking isn't particularly problematic on a determinist view.

Does anyone else here feel that determinism, in its full intricacy, actually leaves room for more mystery rather than less? Or do you see it differently? — Matripsa

I largely agree with you, although I wouldn't use "predetermined" and instead I would use something like "interactively determined". I don't have any clear picture of how one might quantify mystery though.

As you point out the complexity of causal interactions results in plenty of mystery, particularly with respect to the functioning of our minds/brains.

A friend of mine drew my attention on a conversation Richard Dawkins has had with ChatGPT on the topic of AI consciousness. — Pierre-Normand

I heard about Dawkins' article through Jerry Coyne's website:

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/02/18/richard-dawkins-chats-with-ai-about-consciousness/

I left a comment there, referring readers of Coyne's website to a couple of your threads here. (No idea whether anyone from there might have followed the links, but Dawkins himself made several comments there.)

You didn't reply to me but since you attacked me and my knowledge then I challenge you! — MoK

I'm not surprised that you interpreted my comments as an attack, but no one can be an expert on everything. So I'd say it is more like I pointed out that you are human and your misconceptions are understandable.

Couldn't you wonder that it could be you who doesn't have the proper knowledge to comprehend the MoK's argument? — MoK

Sure I can wonder, but you demonstrate throughout this thread that you don't have much understanding of phyisical causality. I, on the other hand, am a 62 year old electrical engineer making my living on the basis of my expertise in understanding physical causality.

Can you provide any reason for me to think that your intuitions regarding this topic are better than mine?

The reality is that you simply can't imagine how physicalism could account for awareness and m-experience. You're committing the fallacy argument from incredulity, also referred to as "argument from lack of imagination". — Relativist

It seem worth noting that a scientifically informed physicalism explains MoK's incredulity.

With the understanding that MoK's intuitions are a function of the training of the neural networks in MoK's brain, and that MoK clearly hasn't done any deep investigation into physical causality, it is unsurprising that MoK's intutions result in incredulity as they do.

Humans cannot make objective judgments, and subjective judgements are meaninglesss — RussellA

It seems to me that subjective human judgements can be quite meaningful to humans. For example if someone's society judges them to not be fit to participate in that society and subsequently banishes or imprisons that person, I'd expect that person to find society's judgement to be meaningful.

So I'm not sure what you mean by "meaningless" in the quote above.

P2) Experience is due to the existence of physical and the change in the state of physical is due to the existence of an experience — MoK

Why think that all physical changes are due to experience? Consider the possibility that astronomers today observe a supernova which occurred a billion years ago in a distant galaxy. What role did experience play in causing the supernova?

You bolded that portion yourself in your
, I simply formatted the quote in order to respect that. Because unlike you, I am indeed being charitable towards your intentions. e I will sense the
— previous comment — Arcane Sandwich

I don't know what you are trying to say there, or who you are suggesting that you were quoting.

By assuming ignorance on my part, you're not willing to give me a fair reading as your interlocutor. — Arcane Sandwich

I provided you with an opportunity to show that you weren't ignorant in relevant ways with my first response to you. Unfortunately it seems that you weren't able to take advantage of the opportunity.

If you accuse me of strawmannig, then you're accusing me of charlatanry, hence sophistry, and therefore you are assuming ill intent on my behalf... — Arcane Sandwich

No I'm not assuming ill intent. Ignorance on your part seems a simple enough explanation.

False. You do not sense the force of attraction in that case, you simply feel an increasingly solid sensation, in a tactile sense. — Arcane Sandwich

The bolded portion seems an odd way of expressing whatever you may be trying to express. Have you actually done the experiment?

In any case, yes I have a tactile sensation of the attraction between the magnet and the iron.

It seems to me it would be more productive for you to actually address my points than to whine to the moderators, but whatever floats your boat.

(AE1) If Empiricism is true, then magnetism can be perceived by human beings. — Arcane Sandwich

1. You seem to be attacking an archaic/straw version of empiricism, by stipulating that some sort of 'direct sensing' of properties must be available to humans for empiricism to stand up to scrutiny.

2. I have many ways of detecting the presence of a magnetic field. A simple one is just to hold a magnet near a piece of iron, in which case I will sense the force of attraction between the magnet and the iron.

The thread became entangled in animal intelligence, a garden path, to my eye.
— Banno
Yes. There are those who cannot conceive of a non-human animal that truly shares any concepts with human beings and those who are quite sure that all animals in this world share that world, to a greater or lesser extent. Never the twain shall meet. Looks like two incommensurable conceptual schemes to me. — Ludwig V

To further entangle the thread with animal intelligence...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/02/250203163756.htm

To get treats, apes eagerly pointed them out to humans who didn't know where they were, a seemingly simple experiment that demonstrated for the first time that apes will communicate unknown information in the name of teamwork. The study also provides the clearest evidence to date that apes can intuit another's ignorance, an ability thought to be uniquely human.

It appears bonobos are capable of sharing our ability to conceive of others as knowledgeable or ignorant of some fact.

Thanks for all your posts. Will come back with more of my replies on the rest of your posts in due course. — Corvus

"in due course"?

At a later time?

If any of these conversations were posted 10 years ago, people would have agreed without hesitation that any hypothetical AI which has achieved conversation in this level represented AGI. Now that it has been achieved pop my it seems the goal posts have shifted. — hypericin

:up:

Don't scientists subscribe to a massive metaphysical commitment, that reality can be understood? — Tom Storm

Is that a massive commitment? It seems to me a matter of rather routine observations.

Another critical point of AI's responses is that, they are predictable within the technological limitations and preprogramming specs. To the new users, they may appear to be intelligent and creative, but from the developers point of view, the whole thing is pre-planned and predicted debugging and simulations. — Corvus

Corvus, you are pretending to understand modern AI when you clearly don't.

See here:

Despite trying to expect surprises, I’m surprised at the things these models can do,” said Ethan Dyer, a computer scientist at Google Research who helped organize the test. It’s surprising because these models supposedly have one directive: to accept a string of text as input and predict what comes next, over and over, based purely on statistics. Computer scientists anticipated that scaling up would boost performance on known tasks, but they didn’t expect the models to suddenly handle so many new, unpredictable ones.

Recent investigations like the one Dyer worked on have revealed that LLMs can produce hundreds of “emergent” abilities — tasks that big models can complete that smaller models can’t, many of which seem to have little to do with analyzing text. They range from multiplication to generating executable computer code to, apparently, decoding movies based on emojis. New analyses suggest that for some tasks and some models, there’s a threshold of complexity beyond which the functionality of the model skyrockets. (They also suggest a dark flip side: As they increase in complexity, some models reveal new biases and inaccuracies in their responses.)

2. **Synchronous Gradient Sharing:**
- After all replicas finish processing their respective mini-batches for the current training step, they share their computed gradients with one another.
- These gradients are **averaged (or summed)** across all replicas. This ensures that the weight update reflects the collective learning from all mini-batches processed during that step. — Pierre-Normand

This is a very interesting aspect of the logistics of LLM training that I was unaware of. It suggests that a move from digital to analog artificial neural nets (for reduced power consumption) may not be forthcoming as soon as I was anticipating.

This is because of the need for all replicas to be functionally identical in order to take advantage of this possibility of training multiple replicas in parallel. While analog hardware could be more energy efficient, analog 'replicas' might not be able to be made sufficiently identical to take advantage of such batch learning.

As always, fascinating conversation.

:100: :up:

Taiwan is not important enough to US national interests to risk going to war there. — T Clark

Taiwan produces around 90% of the world's most advanced ICs. It is very much in the iinterest of the US and other countries that such manufacturing capabilities are not taken over by China.

Nature is natural, machines are artificial, and never the twain shall meet — ENOAH

That sounds like dogma. Do you have any reasonining to back it up?

I've never seen my own brain. How do I know that I have one? Maybe there is a machine inside my skull, that has mechanical gears and Steampunk technology in general. — Arcane Sandwich

Well, there are substances you might ingest, which would have results on your thinking which don't seem too consistent with what one would expect the substance to have on a steam and gear mechanism.

I.e. you could conduct experiments.

A.I. changes itself according to principles that we program into it, in relation to norms that belong to us. — Joshs

The same will be true of this new system as the old. It will never be or do anything that exceeds the conceptual limitations of its design. — Joshs

This seems rather naive when it comes to neural net based AI.

Consider this excerpt from a recent Science Daily article:

What is more, the AI behind the new system has produced strange new designs featuring unusual patterns of circuitry. Kaushik Sengupta, the lead researcher, said the designs were unintuitive and unlikely to be developed by a human mind. But they frequently offer marked improvements over even the best standard chips.

"We are coming up with structures that are complex and looks random shaped and when connected with circuits, they create previously unachievable performance. Humans cannot really understand them, but they can work better," said Sengupta, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-director of NextG, Princeton's industry partnership program to develop next-generation communications.

Measure the length of a sundial's shadow at noon at different latitudes.

Shoot a laser horizontally across a large still lake to measure the curvature of the lake's surface. There was a documentary on flat earthers (I think on Netflix) where this was done, but the flat earthers dismissed the results falsifying a flat earth.

At what measure of mass density, does the recording device effect that which the device is suppose to record, synonymous with the quantum “observer problem”? — Mww

:up:

At what point in 'sensoring up' a human, have you created something that is no longer a human.

Do you think it's possible to record the individual human experience?

By that I mean, what each of us go through every second of our lives? The inputs to our senses, the thoughts that pass by, the emotions we feel? — Ayush Jain

If you had stopped at "inputs to our senses" you'd have something somewhat technologically feasible (if not very practical). However, with thoughts and emotions you would be talking about highly invasive measurement of a huge amount of activity occurring in people's brains. It's not at all technologically feasible to measure and record the data that would be needed.

C.S. Lewis - The Discarded Image
— Count Timothy von Icarus

I went back and read this section in its entirety. It is an excellent summary of the difference between intellection and ratiocination, as well as the decline of intellection since the modern period. :up: — Leontiskos

It is interesting to consider the relevance of Kahneman's distinction between fast and slow thinking to Lewis' discussion of intellectus and ratiocination.

Kahneman's work suggests that Lewis' claim that intellection (fast thinking) is higher, is rather questionable.

FYI, for those interested in such...

Gene expression in the human brain: cell types become more specialized, not just more numerous