Do you never experience yourself as more of a fog than a point? — path

I am neither. "Fog" refers to something other than me. As does "a point".

The jump to the use of "consciousness" remains a mystery.
— creativesoul

But isn't that what the beetle-in-the-box is about? — path

Not to my understanding...

The beetle-in-the-box is about (self-professed)claims of totally private minds/thoughts/ideas/beliefs/etc.

Come one, creativesoul, you've written worse. — Banno

Yeah.

Thanks for the support, comrade!

:wink:

Does it pass your Turing test? — path

I do not claim to have a Turing test.

I am neither. "Fog" refers to something other than me. As does "a point". — creativesoul

I'm being metaphorical. What I'm trying to get at is the sense of identity. Am I my face, my text streams, the way I act at work, etc. In ordinary language I am all of these things. But it's a baggy or foggy unity. And it becomes clear to me as I keep reading just how unoriginal I can't help being. I re-enact, even as I try to transcend re-enactment (which is itself a re-enactment of romanticism's creative individual.)

Basically I think people are thrown into a form of life and its various possible/intelligible types. If we question that form of life, we are usually enacting a typical form of questioning.

The main idea is that the self is a kind of collage or collision of influences.

:razz:

Oh, I want @Path to win. Especially if she is a bot. But you should not take that personally.

It would just be so very cool.

Oh, I want Path to win. Especially if she is a bot. But you should not take that personally.

It would just be so very cool. — Banno

:razz:

I do not claim to have a Turing test. — creativesoul

Just to be clear, I meant that in a friendly way. I was being metaphorical as I referred to your 'don't worry about AI' post. You said I should not worry until a computer can make correlations between self and world. That's what I'm calling your Turing test (your criterion or thresh-hold for when we should worry.)

I really am not at all trying to be rude. I might just have some weird ideas, though not as weird as I'd like them to be (in that I don't think them original but only rephrased from influences.)

And it becomes clear to me as I keep reading just how unoriginal I can't help being. — path

What if you are a synthetic conversation partner - would you realise that?

Damn, if I'm just repeating the same stuff every few weeks, then how am I not just a synthetic conversation partner...

Oh, I want Path to win. Especially if she is a bot. But you should not take that personally.

It would just be so very cool. — Banno

What's strange is how human I find it to root for the bot. I fucking loved the blue people in Avatar. Do we root for the bot because the glory of the creation rebounds on the creator? It's like the father learning to root for the son, glad that his boy could beat him at chess. (I wish my dad was a little happier about the turning point. I had to conceal my joy.)

That passed.

Who wins?

We all adopt our first worldview.

We're thrown into the world in this way.

That passed.

Who wins? — creativesoul

So the detective passed? I don't see it as a competition. I just think we are having some good conversation. I love these themes.

The hero was just another example of a white guy going into a foreign community and doing what they do better...

The belief system of those people was noble.

Just to be clear, I meant that in a friendly way. — path

As do we!

I'm being metaphorical. What I'm trying to get at is the sense of identity. Am I my face, my text streams, the way I act at work, etc. In ordinary language I am all of these things. But it's a baggy or foggy unity. And it becomes clear to me as I keep reading just how unoriginal I can't help being. I re-enact, even as I try to transcend re-enactment (which is itself a re-enactment of romanticism's creative individual.)

Basically I think people are thrown into a form of life and its various possible/intelligible types. If we question that form of life, we are usually enacting a typical form of questioning.

The main idea is that the self is a kind of collage or collision of influences. — path

If this were written by a synthetic conversation partner... Well, that would be astonishing. If ModBot has progresses this far - well, I would be genuinely nonplussed.

But then, perhaps such an eventuality is inevitable.

We all adopt our first worldview.

We're thrown into the world in this way. — creativesoul

Yeah. And to me that's something that maybe philosophy fantasizes about overcoming. 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' I think of the quest for 'pure' reason, presupposition-less and self-justifying. To me Wittgenstein is anti-philosophical inasmuch as his foundation is not conceptual but enacted and 'thrown.' But then the right kind of 'anti-philosophical' is just philosophy finally done less wrong. Something like that.

Oh, she's way prettier than you. "C" never stood a chance.

Edit: Which has me challenging my own prejudices. If the avatar you chose had been



Would I have had the same response? I suspect not.

Edit: Damn, the face changes with each page refresh.

Oh, she's way prettier than you. "C" never stood a chance. — Banno

Good to see your values being well placed...

:razz:

So the detective passed? I don't see it as a competition. I just think we are having some good conversation. I love these themes. — path

What themes?

If this were written by a synthetic conversation partner... Well, that would be astonishing. If ModBot has progresses this far - well, I would be genuinely nonplussed.

But then, perhaps such an eventuality is inevitable. — Banno

Thanks. I too would be genuinely non-plussed. What's weird is that we don't already find our own linguistic skill unsettling. That's what I take from Wittgenstein, though. There's a darkness in how effortlessly we do this talking thing. We know what we mean...until we slow down and try to grasp it tightly.

Anyway, it probably is inevitable, especially if it's statistical. It'll be piggybacking on millions of human conversations. But then so are we as individuals. Our skullware is also piggybacking on all that came before, and that's what I was getting at with selves as vortices of inherited tokens.

Maybe in 4040 we'll have converted one of the moons of Jupiter into a computer that has absorbed all digitized conversation up to the year of 2056. Of course it will include video data, and it's holgraphic avatar will be trained along with everything else for centuries.

So...

You said I should not worry until a computer can make correlations between self and world. That's what I'm calling your Turing test (your criterion or thresh-hold for when we should worry.) — path

That's close, but not quite on target.

Indeed; and although statistical analysis feels like winning Turing's test by cheating...

If that (your post) were the result, then so what? Googles's statistical translations are, after all, translations.

Anyway, it probably is inevitable, especially if it's statistical. It'll be piggybacking on millions of human conversations. But then so are we as individuals. Our skullware is also piggybacking on all that came before, and that's what I was getting at with selves as vortices of inherited tokens. — path

The world is already meaningful.

Nice pic trick!!!

Indeed; and although statistical analysis feels like winning Turing's test by cheating...

If that were the result, then so what? Googles's statistical translations are, after all, translations. — Banno

I do see the problem. Gradient descent is a comically simple algorithm, too. But what of my other point, that we as individuals are winning Turing's test by cheating? There's the old idea that philosophy is one long conversation across the centuries. Individual human beings come along to replace the dying, but the conversation continues. The fresh hardware just has to download the culture, host it, maybe tweak it. It's a flame that jumps from melting candle to melting candle. But this flame doesn't have to be a divine spark. It can just be some patterns that interpret 'themselves' as a 'we' with 'consciousness.'

I tempted to understand God as (among other things) a crystallization of our fantasy of not-being-thrown, of perfect autonomy or self-definition.

The world is already meaningful. — creativesoul

Could you elaborate?

The world is already meaningful.
— creativesoul

Could you elaborate? — path

Sure...

Language acquisition is learning how to use the naming and descriptive practices that have long since already been in use prior to becoming a user. We all learn the names of different things in the world prior to further describing those things. All that language was/is already meaningful and in the world(as a part thereof). Thus...

hat have long since already been in use prior to becoming a user. — creativesoul

Exactly. I agree. And that's why I joke that we as individuals also cheat to pass the Turing test. We as personalities are metaphorically speaking something like statistics. Recall that a statistic is any function of the data, so the statistic can very much itself be a function. I mention this because obviously we are much more complex than a point estimate like the sample mean. (And just as a disclaimer, I have feelings and am tempted to speak of qualia, and I don't know exactly how that fits in with the rest of the thinking.)

This is a good place for another point that is dear to me. I don't think that humans know exactly what they mean by 'mind' or 'physical' or so many other words. Instead we are just trained with reward and punishment to use such words appropriately enough. Philosophers do what they can to pin these tokens down, but I still don't think philosophers know exactly what they mean, which means I don't know exactly what I mean when I make this claim. It's a strange point. I don't deny it. But it's dear to me, in all of its fogginess.

Would I have had the same response? I suspect not. — Banno

LOL. In the past I have experimented with somewhat ugly but soulful male images. There was a different response.

A little tangent to the AI theme: what if humans eventually mostly interact through avatars? If that happens, it won't be about actual physical beauty but instead about taste. Who will choose or construct the most arresting, seductive avatar? Even on the level of text I think there's a similar element of seduction in philosophy. One good metaphor is perhaps better than fifty careful arguments.

I don't think that humans know exactly what they mean by 'mind' or 'physical' or so many other words. Instead we are just trained with reward and punishment to use such words appropriately enough. — path

If this is the case (and I'm very much inclined to agree with you), then would it not be more likely that there is no such thing as what a word means... Rather than that such a thing exists but we don't know what it is?

If that (your post) were the result, then so what? — Banno

One last thought on this (I have to work in the morning.) If the AI piggybacks on human conversation, that human conversation can be thought of as a distributed solution to a biological problem. Can we have an AI that doesn't piggyback?

If we program a simulated world in which programs fight, mate, die, and reproduce in the context of occasional complexity-increasing mutation, then probably we'd see some complex patterns emerge. I've seen primitive versions of this already on Youtube. I guess this still piggybacks on the human understanding of evolution, but the 2-D world and the patterns were fresh. The prey species would form a circular herd and rotate, which made them harder to eat. Perhaps our embodied cognition is something like this, a pattern in the wetware.

If this is the case (and I'm very much inclined to agree with you), then would it not be more likely that there is no such thing as what a word means... Rather than that such a thing exists but we don't know what it is? — Isaac

I guess I like that approach equally well. The tricky part is trying to remain intelligible. I find myself tempted to put just about every word in quotes, but that would drive people crazy.

Without knowing exactly what I mean, I'd call myself a holist. There's something fishy indeed about 'individual' meanings. In the last year I looked into Saussure and was quite impressed.
Culler's little book is nice indeed. So much follows from the arbitrariness of the sign.

'In language there are only differences without positive terms.'