massive amounts of information — schopenhauer1
Do you now wish to add this to your definition of consciousness? — Banno
I see where you are going — schopenhauer1
1) Consciousness means something like emergent properties that go off script from programming (ChatGPT or its successors perhaps)
2) Consciousness is something with degrees of freedom (slugs have more degrees of freedom than an air conditioner)
3) Consciousness is something with goal-seeking behavior. It wanted something, got it, and did some more things to get that thing. — schopenhauer1
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. — Banno
This:What exactly are you saying, I guess? — schopenhauer1
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. — Banno
Since this isn't getting anywhere, might best just leave it. — Banno
I don't see how that is contradicting rather than supporting what I am saying.
Are you saying that the definition has thus changed because it is being used thus in a language community (pace Wittgenstein)?
Are you saying that the new definition thus encompassing things like air conditioners and ChatGPT is breaking the normal boundaries?
Are you saying something really self-referential to Wittgenstein like, we can't use "phenomenology" of consciousness because it is private and cannot be shared?
What exactly are you saying, I guess? I have not figured out the rules of your language game here so I can play. — schopenhauer1
I'm just noting that you expresses some agreement with the phenomenological approach to defining consciousness, — Banno
and then I showed why it is not much help, using a reductio argument: we agree that air conditioners are not conscious, yet the phenomenological approach cannot show that this is so. — Banno
Are you saying something really self-referential to Wittgenstein like, we can't use "phenomenology" of consciousness because it is private and cannot be shared? — schopenhauer1
So how is it, then, that something like ChatGPT can get as far as it does with language? The basic answer, I think, is that language is at a fundamental level somehow simpler than it seems. And this means that ChatGPT—even with its ultimately straightforward neural net structure—is successfully able to “capture the essence” of human language and the thinking behind it. And moreover, in its training, ChatGPT has somehow “implicitly discovered” whatever regularities in language (and thinking) make this possible.
The success of ChatGPT is, I think, giving us evidence of a fundamental and important piece of science: it’s suggesting that we can expect there to be major new “laws of language”—and effectively “laws of thought”—out there to discover. In ChatGPT—built as it is as a neural net—those laws are at best implicit. But if we could somehow make the laws explicit, there’s the potential to do the kinds of things ChatGPT does in vastly more direct, efficient—and transparent—ways.
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