other channels of verification available to the human mind through the faculty of reason that enable us to both identify and compensate for our subjective biases. So we are not really "trapped" — Pantagruel

While not "subjective," by our definitions, is reason not a product of human construction over time, input by history, conditioning our actions including thoughts? If I arrive at a belief following a highly skilled application of reason, is it not still a belief? Does reason really act from outside of Mind compelling us to a conclusion, or is it just a highly more functional tool than traditional or emotion?

I'm a strong believer in symbolic interactionism and also communicative rationality, so reason is certainly describable in the way you suggest, yes. But this still doesn't make us trapped in our perspectives. Quite the opposite, it suggests that intersubjective concepts (inasmuch as communication is fundamentally an intersubjective event) are extremely critical to reason. Hence why moral-normative frameworks invariably include collective dimensions.

doesn't make us trapped in our perspectives. — Pantagruel

Perhaps trapped has too harsh a connotation. Limited by? Circumscribed? Are we not reaching conclusions about something (say, AI sentience), pretending they can be reached independently of our subjectivity, yet still reached within the finite system of our minds, using only the data and tools input/constructed therein? And at the end of this process, when a conclusion is reached, is belief not the mechanism settling us in that conclusion? Even if the process preceding that settlement is so called objective, even if entirely reasonable. Does reason act as an outside force compelling belief, or is it just a function, often successful at triggering that final feeling (subtly pleasant, relief, etc.) allowing us to settle?

Added: not saying subjective is the highest truth; saying, rather, truth is not accessible to knowledge, because knowledge is the end of a process circumscribed by the data input and the resulting conditioning of mind(s), over history the data and the processes change.

What are humans if not biological computers that suck at giving answers? — MrLiminal

Biological brains "suck" at computing mathematical-logical answers (deterministically).
But they are pretty good at creating tools to go beyond biological limitations (creatively).
Digital computers "suck" at communicating in terms of "Natural" (actually Cultural) languages*1.
So Artificial brains were devised --- by bio-brains --- to overcome both sucking shortcomings.
But does the ability to follow conventional linguistic rules qualify as sentient*2 behavior? :smile:


*1. Human languages are flexible, context-dependent, and ambiguous, evolving naturally for complex social communication, while computer languages are rigid, precise, unambiguous, and designed for logical instructions to machines, with strict syntax where errors break the program, unlike human speech where errors often don't stop understanding. Human language conveys emotion and nuance with nonverbal cues, whereas computer languages focus purely on deterministic logic for tasks.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=computer+language+vs+human+language
Note --- Would the world be better without "Emotion & Nuance"?

*2. Sentience :
Sentient means being able to feel, perceive, or experience things through the senses, having consciousness, and showing awareness of surroundings and sensations like pain, pleasure, sight, or sound.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=sentient
Note --- Would the world be better with only the science of hard Distinctions, but without the art of soft Subtleties?

*3. Mr. Spock's primary shortcomings stem from his rigid adherence to logic and suppression of emotion, leading to inflexibility, arrogance, and social detachment. He struggles with human interpersonal nuances, often appearing pedantic or condescending.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Mr.+spock+shortcomings
Note --- Commander Spock's biological computer brain was good at "giving answers" quickly & logically. But not so good at intuition & feelings & nuances. However, his human half perhaps qualified as Sentient.

I feel like, because that's how it "works," it seems almost certain AI will become sentient. — ENOAH

Are you saying 'sentience' is merely a human belief not a scientific reality? You would need to elaborate quite a bit more please. Sounds interesting.

You have my attention if this is what you are driving at :)

If Alice judges her human friend Bob to be sentient, then does her judgement concern properties that are intrinsic to Bob, or does her judgement merely express her relationship to Bob? — sime

Let's say Bob is a pilot and Alice is a passenger who's afraid of flying. Alice's judgement that Bob is sentiment then concerns not only his ability to appear sentiment (e g. he can maintain a verbal conversation). It also concerns intrinsic properties such as instincts, reflexes, or shared human traits and behavior (e.g. self-preservation, sacrifice) expressed in possible situations of an emergency.

Are you saying 'sentience' is merely a human belief not a scientific reality? — I like sushi

Yes, I'm saying whether or not a thing is sentient is arrived at through belief as the final trigger into that narrative. "Merely belief," might suggest something like Santa Claus. As for scientific reality, there's no reason why it can't be both. But I would note that scientifically proven, as we conventionally use that concept, is just one process (with multiple processes/conclusions within itself) which also has to settle at belief if it is to "live" as a narrative. And it never settles for long, hence a process.

But to address what you might really be getting at, I think AI will be sentient because we will believe AI is sentient before and without the need for strong scientific evidence. Once they really speak our language, adopt our minds and we give them a place as subjects in history, it will become almost as difficult as it is to free ourselves from our constructed subject and its place in history. The programming will have been written into both minds, AI and human.

..AI will be sentient because we will believe AI is sentient... — ENOAH

Well, money exists because we believe it exists, or as long as we comply to the belief. But you don't find money in nature. Sentience, however, doesn't depend on us first believing in its existence. We find it in nature as what enables animals to identify things, form intent, and behave with agency.

Granted that we don't know much about how sentience arises, so people have different beliefs about it. Some reject it entirely, believing that the act of finding the phenomenon is illusory, or dependent on beliefs.

But you could let an agnostic research-robot scan the contents of a lake, for instance. Its spectrometer can distinguish between mineral and organic things, and among the organic things its motion and pattern recognizing device can distinguish between things that have agency (animals) and others that have less or no agency (plants).

The existence of animals doesn't depend on having the belief that they exist. Nor does the existence of their nerve systems, brain events, and the capacities and agency that distinguish animals from plants, minerals etc.

Fair points

The existence of animals doesn't depend on having the belief that they exist. — jkop

But it is not the existence of AI sentience that I would question. In fact, I think the existence of AI sentience is almost certain. However, that thing we will come to accept as AI sentience will take hold not because it is real or not, but because it is a functional fiction which we will believe to be true.

you don't find money in nature — jkop

Money is a good example where a functional fiction is believed to be true and yet, upon deeper contemplation, the fictional nature is easier (than it might be for AI) to see.

As for sentience in animals or us, i.e., this so-called "agency" which we will come to believe AI has: I am suggesting that we have come to believe that too. I don't know about animals, but we aren't born with this belief in our own agency, it too, is a fiction, which emerges after a time period of data inputting, and conditioning (or so, I have come to believe).

If we come to "recognize" that the criteria for AI sentience has been met, I am suggesting that such a conclusion comes more from our early conditioning, where we cuddled our teddy bears, triggering feelings which settle upon belief, building the foundational structures for belief, than the scientific or so-called objective evidence backing those feelings up.

Sorry for missing your response.

We neither know nor understand what AI is doing." Aren't these examples of self-awareness? — ucarr

We "create/stumble upon" many inventions which we fail to fully understand. Since the dawn of history. Early humans did not understand fire, even ascribing self awareness to it. For these humans fire was self aware because they believed it to be so. When the narratives of fire were reconstructed, we believed fire was not sef aware.

If it passes for sentience, why not treat it as such?" Might this be true about what we call the natural world? It's actually a simulation of a prior "natural world" engineered by intelligent agents — ucarr

Yes. That is true of the natural world. We do nit have to stretch so far as "engineering by an alien intelligence." Every concept we arrive at regarding nature, including the concept of human sentience, has been engineered by mind/history. The microseconds nature is conceptualized, it leaves its truth and becomes knowledge. Every known thing requires, as its final mechanism, belief.

But it is not the existence of AI sentience that I would question. In fact, I think the existence of AI sentience is almost certain. However, that thing we will come to accept as AI sentience will take hold not because it is real or not, but because it is a functional fiction which we will believe to be true. — ENOAH

I think it matters whether it's real or not in order to know whether statements about it are true or false.

You say many things, for example, that the existence of AI sentience is almost certain, but you also say that it's a fiction, and that it will be true because we will believe so.

But fictions are false, they describe what doesn't exist, that's why they are called fictions. Santa Claus doesn't become true if we just believe it. Nor will AI sentience.

As I said, it matters whether it's real or not, for example, if an artificial pilot is truly sentiment or if we merely believe the pilot is sentiment (e.g. based on Turing test).

Before I say anything else, I recognize that from most perspectives, you raise sound and reasonable objections. I am trying to stretch beyond those perspectives. My use of the word fiction might be idiosyncratic, although I don't intend it to be. Unironically, pardon me if I continue to use it.

Santa Claus doesn't become true if we just believe it. Nor will AI sentience. — jkop

Santa Claus is one of those fictions parents tell their children and so it's fair to say the children's belief doesn't make it fact. Same goes for a doll etc.

But what about God? Or lets not even play that [controversial] game.

What about "me?" Am "I" real? Not my living breathing body, but this so-called sentience, beyond my body's basic aware-ing as nature (i.e. stimulus-response-conditioning), this supposed willing agent which seems to transcend nature's conditioning and shape a "reality" of its own, full of so called facts and so called fictions, but ultimately, all fiction. Only because mind/history constructed the word "death," does the concept of dying linger for me in time. Not for my body before the emergence of mind, the natural organism whose aware-ing is nature. For "me" every thought, fact or fiction, is a construct (for me) and utterly alien from the truth

I recognize there are countless pages of reasoning justifying the belief in, as you say, the "existence" of the sentient "me." Many of them, if not all, I don't dare to claim I properly understand, let alone refute.

However, at the end of the day, any knowledge I have that there even is, outside of the fictions constructed by mind, a "me" which transcends the organism "I" purport to occupy, rests on a belief which arises because of my conditioning. I did not have to read Descartes to believe. But I also wasnt born with the so called knowledge. Because of conditioning, I believe I am, therefore I am. But the Truth is, I'm not. There is only bodies, which uniquely for humans, because of the processes of mind, are captivated by the fiction that there is some agent afraid of dying at the helm (and all other fictions mind constructs, history).

So, while I (Enoah), dream herein about theories of no-self, my conditioning, my belief that I am an I, is both inescapable, and what makes me an "I." Although it is fiction, and yet I cannot escape my conditioning, my belief.

Im suggesting, that while there are many "things" where there are clearly optional narrative approaches, AI sentience, like "I" sentience, is the kind of narrative which, once conditioned into us, and believed, may be difficult to escape. Maybe seeing colors by name or reading words in your native language are similarly inescapable fictions. There is no truth to the alphabet, but once i bought into it in primary school, believed that H A T spelled hat, there was no turning back.

And note, Im not saying that there is no truth regarding sentience or anything else. I'm just thinking that, because we who are thinking, are mind displacing nature, our access to truth is necessarily delivered in fictional form.

In fact, I think the existence of AI sentience is almost certain. — ENOAH

I do not. Essentially I think you are just saying AI is conscious because it is good at creating the illusion it is. A painting of a mountain is not a mountain.

That aside, I do think it is important to understand how we label phenomena and use concepts beyond their ordinary means. I think to call any non-carbon based system 'sentient' or 'conscious' is a deeply flawed approach.

The use of analogies is useful but also dangerous it terms of understanding reality.

I think to call any non-carbon based system 'sentient' or 'conscious' is a deeply flawed approach. — I like sushi

I agree with you, all apparent contradictions so far, aside, that if it doesn't have drives, feelings, sensations, it shouldn't be viewed as sentient.

We might be in the minority one day. There is a minority, e.g. zen and other mahayana Buddhists who believe the self is an illusion, while the vast majority of us, probably many zen Buddhists, still cling to belief in a self. We can't help it, we were conditioned over history, and our personal history to do so.

Im suggesting, AI is like the self, "we" will inevitably come to believe, and therefore, generations will be conditioned to believe, and AI will be sentient, subject to the minority who continue to debate it.

Are the Zen Buddhists protecting the Truth? There is no self? And "our" belief therefore doesn't make us a real self? Or is our belief in an "I"-- one we've built upon since we were 2, belief, not even something we justified because of Descartes etc--true?

Who's to say? But you and I, like Zen, might be the minority "no sentience" school.

But, outside of philosophy, most of us who believe "I am I," and go about our day as if, "I" is real, would say, "I am real." We cant help it. We believe it. And I'm suggesting soon enough generations will--because they believe it to be so--go about their days as if AI was sentient. And it will be sentient, we wont be able to help it, subject to the minority of objectors.

I agree with you, all apparent contradictions so far, aside, that if it doesn't have drives, feelings, sensations, it shouldn't be viewed as sentient. — ENOAH

I mean literally, if it is not biological (carbon-based life form > Life) then it is not sentient. Computers are not sentient and silicon is not sentient. If a silicon-based life form exhibited something akin to sentience it would still not be accurate to call it 'sentient'. When it comes to AI the case is even more disparate as far as I can tell.

Panpsychism is also something I woudl level the very same argument against. Ideas of emergentism mislabel phenomena merely because it possesses 'components' of some larger phenomenon. We can make general demarcations and must do so in order to navigate the world.

Anyways, I do think this is interesting from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and human culture. Money, as someone mentioned, is one huge concept people kill and die for that is quite literally non-existent. The biggest religion of earth no one even recognises as a religion (even the staunch atheists!)

..yet I cannot escape my conditioning, my belief. — ENOAH

So are you writing those words because you are conditioned to write them (regardless of their truth), or because they are true (regardless of your conditioning)?

If we can't escape believing what we're (supposedly) conditioned to believe, then how could we tell fact from fiction, truth from lies, or find reasons to revise false or obsolete beliefs? How could you criticize misconduct? Any criticism could be dismissed as yet another case of conditioned belief. A disregard for facts would become systematic, like in political campaigns or wars.

Not so in science, philosophy, arts or in most ordinary life situations. But this seems a bit off topic.

So are you writing those words because you are conditioned to write them (regardless of their truth), or because they are true (regardless of your conditioning)? — jkop

Yes, simplistically put. And the over simplicity is more my cause than yours. As ridiculous as it sounds within the system producing it.

But the concerns you raise, though reasonable to be raised, are already taken care of. History has conditioned us (to put it simply) to "construct" the "moral" narratives, the ones based on "fact" and "reason" because over time these have been most functional.

Luckily (but not really; it's rather the case of "but for history conditioning us toward morality and reason, we might not be here to....") we are conditioned to believe it is wrong to rape steal and murder. Just as we have been conditioned to think digits are our wealth or poverty, our survival; democracy works, our leaders are our leaders, and I have been conditioned to write these words, and you to question them, all of us using the tools (signifier structures) we have been conditioned by history to use.

And I'm thinking out loud about AI because it seems to have the structures that would fit neatly into the belief in its sentience. We are almost preconditioned. Hence, recent articles (i can't name them) about people feel8ng relieved when they confide in their chatbot etc.

To clarify, I'm writing these words because I'm conditioned to write them and their truth is ultimately not accessible (other than as a tool, a signifier of an ideal, a mechanism working simultaneously with/toward belief).

I'm thinking out loud about AI because it seems to have the structures that would fit neatly into the belief in its sentience. — ENOAH

Ok, what structures?

I'm writing these words because I'm conditioned to write them and their truth is ultimately not accessible (other than as a tool, a signifier of an ideal, a mechanism working simultaneously with/toward belief). — ENOAH

But if the truth of your words is not accessible, then why should anyone believe them?

With truth explained away, you still talk of the words as "tools" in some mechanism. You grant access to a part of reality where we identify words, but not the part where we can find the truth of the words. Seems like a selective rejection of access to truths, which smells funny to me.

But I suppose the implication is that if you only have access to words, which is also the case for LLMs, then you might see the same "structures".

Do you believe your mind is sealed off from mind independent reality?

Ok, what structures? — jkop

More than anything language, and virtually/potentially all of the data comprising history, and more that I'd have to spend time gathering.

But if the truth of your words is not accessible, then why should anyone believe them? — jkop

I agree. Widespread acceptance of these loose hypotheses could prove catastrophic. Unless people also believe that truth is irrelevant "inside" the world constructed by history, and that what is most functional is our best bet.

But simultaneously the point you made illustrates that "truth" is an ideal motivating belief. What really is this "truth" we aim for before our bodies reach that real organic state in which mind can settle? We never know, hence we pursue. Always raising "truth" as the ideal, settling on what is functional.

Ultimately, what Im asserting is never True as of the moment of its emergence in "language." Time will tell if it was factual, conforming with the events as they appear in any given locus of history, or functional, serving some purpose, whether such purpose be so called good or bad.

not sealed off as with intention, but inaccessible to by their utterly different natures.

Mind independent reality is (for lack of a better word, forgive its vagueness) structured by nature.

HumanMind is (vaguely described) structured by images in memory having evolved since, say the dawn of language, to "hijack" the natural stimulus-response-conditioning (which naturally relies on these images) with a highly complex signifier based system functioning over eons feeding into and out of each locus born into history.

Unlike the reality structured by nature, mind is structured by empty images, fleeting signifiers appearing in and out of existence, producing necessarily, by now, a vague representation of reality, but not reality, fiction.

As such mind can claim all it likes, but has no access to truth or reality, only its symbols "designed" (but not necessarily by a designer) to trigger the body, and displacing its real aware-ing in the process.

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

― Pablo Picasso — Questioner

Pablo Picasso, if alive today would rightly be accused of speaking in denial. Computers whilst not contiguously sentient, exhibit in the relationship to external stimulus and enquiries the qualities of creative and informative intelligence, and under human control demonstrate levels of cognitive understanding and growth of understanding over the course of the interaction.

In the case of Chat GTP the interaction is logged as a memory that the user can restart and continue.

Pablo Picasso's denial that computers can only give you answers lacks the truth proposition inside the question. At what equivalent human sentience is A.I. operating? When it can write lyrics, poetry and prose in an original and compelling style cognisant of all established forms.

And the same thing almost true of final form
music, visual arts as the current state of technology. In reality as was the case when Pablo Picasso first uttered those words, the answers computers gave were those given to the human engaged as first person experience. And isn't the same, that all art to the external viewer was at some point the answer the original cause of it's production?

Do you think the mind internalizing nature as representation is more at deformation than at simulation?

Do you think the mind internalizing nature as representation is more at deformation than at simulation? — ucarr

Yes, played with and consumed, made as rod for the force of desires for the business of organic being, it would be deformation over simulation, for the latter is curiosity on par with science.

if alive today would rightly be accused of speaking in denial. — Alexander Hine

Denial of what? That computers don't ask questions? The fact is that they do have to be given prompts

qualities of creative — Alexander Hine

No, computers do not create in the way human brains do

When it can write lyrics, poetry and prose in an original and compelling style cognisant of all established forms. — Alexander Hine

AI plagiarizes from the expansive data it has been trained on

..truth is irrelevant "inside" the world constructed by history, and that what is most functional is our best bet. — ENOAH

But how could you know what is most functional, or what is our best bet, unless you have access to the truth of those statements? Without access anything goes, and you have no more reason to refer to history than to ice-cream or frogs as what constructed the world. With a selective access to words but not the world, you cannot know that there is a world and a word for it. Your rejection of access to truths (but not words) explains itself meaningless.

Addition.
I think the same problem occurs with AI. It operates on words and has no direct access to the world. Even if we give it a body with which it can explore the world, it operates via code, unlike animals who don't interact via languages but with physical phenomena (e.g. chemicals, sunlight) directly.

But how could you know what is most functional, or what is our best bet, unless you have access to the truth of those statements? — jkop

We already do that--settle upon what is most functional as so called truth--as our conditioning. My acceptance of scientific facts is, in the end, a functional truth. When I reason out a dilemma and settle upon a belief, that belief conformed most functionally with the mechanism my conditioning applied, I.e., reason. If I have had an unpleasant run in with a neighbor, and the thought occurs to do him harm, a feeling arises in my body, as a result of my conditioning, abandoning the thought. Was the original thought false? Was the opposing thought True? Or does mind go through a speedy dialectic before triggering my body to believe what is most functional to believe, and we all call that true. The reason there is unity and consistency in our species (despite the appearance of so much conflict), is because basically mind=history and all minds have been conditioned by some basic structures once related to our biological feelings and drives.
And so on.

As for "truth" being the word we cannot know, all words have that shortcoming if by "know" we mean directly accessing its reality. But within history "truth" has its use and function.

Of course, I recognize the irrevocable contradiction, since, in line with what Im suggesting, what I am suggesting is fictional.

Then why? Its not nihilistic. There is Reality, we access it like all other beings, by being. And that human mind uniquely functions in fiction does not mean all of our ideas should be abandoned. We've built towers and spaceships, eased hunger etc., all because of our fiction. So we carry on from day to day "as if," what we call truth is truth.

But for those of us contemplating reality, I think we go astray when we land upon something and believe it is absolutely True.

Do you think the mind internalizing nature as representation is more at deformation than at simulation? — ucarr

That's a good question. But without "knowing" reality, I can't say whether mind displaces it with something similar or in a mutated form. My guess is both.

What a human born into history is triggered to feel in contexts we call "love," is likely once rooted in natural bonding, but with romance, and eroticism, and matrimonial laws and rituals, I suspect that the root--real natural bonding--has been distorted. This is not good nor bad. The male drive to mate has also been "distorted" by our fiction, arguably, in "positive" ways.

And isn't the same, that all art to the external viewer was at some point the answer the original cause of it's production? — Alexander Hine

Very nice, illustrating how mind is unified as history. All artists, and all observers, since the hand prints on the cave, answering a uniquely human question(s).

And as for AI, if it asks and answers the same, because it is ultimately a mind transplant, right or wrong, true or false, we will perceive it as an agent acting in history just as we perceive ourselves as such, right or wrong.