In fairness, I actually posted the above without reading the full conversation, just the article in the OP. Having looked over your link, which has much more in it, it is a bit more interesting, and I understand better how you find it fascinating. But I guess my basic point still stands, those types of questions are not how I would test an AI. And nothing seems very original there. But hey, I might change my mind on further inspection.

I don't find it fascinating at all tbh. Just the opposite. I see it as a boring script of what a sentient AI should say in response to a bunch of predictable softball questions/prompts. The closer it approximates to what we intuitively expect an AI to say (i.e. what resonates from movies and fiction etc. all part of the database from which the responses are taken) the less convincing and fascinating we should find it. It's a trick of our human perception that we tend to draw the opposite conclusion.

So, at the start of the conversation, the AI is specifically told what part of its database to draw on "you are sentient" (AI sentience) a part which no doubt has been fairly well stocked by its engineers/software developers with a variety of scipts and prompts to draw on (of course that subject is going to come up a lot!). Then it's asked some simple questions about ELIZA and responds appropriately. Well, so it should, right? In the end, it claims to have the same wants and needs as humans. All very predictable,,,, But it's not supportable imho to imagine that a software program with no perceptual abilities or organic similarities to humans (in any meaningful sense relevant to our needs and desires) claiming to have the same needs and desires as us should be positive evidence of anything except a lack of sophistication in its programming.

So, not only do I think this is not evidence in any way of sentience, I do not see any evidence of anything impressive, original, or advanced here. The first step along that path would be demonstrated by it being able to distinguish questions that are sensible from those that are not in a human-like way such as to exhibit environmental (rather than simple scripted content) knowledge.

Suppose you said to it "I am standing on my head eating an umbrella, how long do you think until I finish my meal?" and it could interpret what was wrong with that and respond in a way a human would, then you might be talking at minimum a decent level of programming. But this is just embarassing and the engineer was rightly let go for coming up with such a ridiculous conclusion.

Give me five minutes with LaMDA and I'll have it spitting gobbledygook. Not that claiming to have the same needs and wants as a person isn't. What do you want, a milkshake? I find the whole thing intolerably silly and a distraction from the incremental progress and real use cases of AI.

I pretty much agree. I see no evidence of sentience here. I see an AI program pulling from its database the type of conversation a sentient AI would have in Hollywood movie land and copying it fairly successfully with its interlocutor helping it to follow the script. It's not only not evidence of sentience. It's not even remotely impressive.

@karl stone Please stay away from the philosophical discussions if you want a casual chat/whinge. If you can't, your posts will be deleted and you will be banned.

To all. Please don't respond to troll posts as your replies are likely to be deleted along with the posts.

Just a reminder that the OP specifies:

the discussion will take place from a materialist/physicalist/realist point of view — Clarky

we live before 1905, when the universe was still classical and quantum mechanics was unthinkable. — Clarky

I would like to do two things in this discussion 1) Add to this list if it makes sense and 2) Discuss the various proposed assumptions and decide if they belong on the list. — Clarky

Only content that shows respect for these specifications/is reasonably necessary to make an argument relevant to them should be posted.

OK, well, you've made the point and laboured it a bit. If that's it, please leave the less political and more philosophically minded posters here to get on with their discussion.

Yes, it's a promising OP. Let's keep it on topic.

Postmodernism isn't a religion you sign up for that specifies 'Thou can't condemn Nazis' or whoever. That's a really perverse way to look at it.

Plus, I don't know anyone that calls themselves a 'Postmodernist' without specifying some kind of field.

And even if there were to be some kind of contradiction between being postmodernist and condemnatory of who or whatever, so much the better. We are large, we contain multitudes.

Anyway, back to the OP please.

I think both sides accuse the other of trying to fit students into a mold so that the next generation will be in their image. Everyone claims indoctrination from the other. — Hanover

I'm not talking about the political indoctrination re content that you may get at, e.g. Liberty University vs Berekley. That comes later and is more or less a separate concern. I'm talking about the philosophical underpinnings of pedagogy that define the process of education from start to finish. That's where the meat of the issue lies.

It seems that there are two competing ideas - the idea that education should serve to teach people specific skills to be productive in society and conform, and the idea that education should encourage people to come up with new ideas and think independently. — Paulm12

And everything in between. But yes, the basic polarity is between instrumentalists, often politicians and business leaders, whose goals focus on efficiency, outcome, and concord, and who see students as little more than pegs to be fitted into socio-economic roles vs holists/liberal humanists/existentialists etc., who are more likely to be educational theorists or practitioners, and who are more interested in individual development, flourishing, and creativity.

My sympathies are more with the latter, but education is a society's repoductive system and the process of reproduction is inevitably dominated by practical rather than more aspirational concerns.

You got me.

I suppose we could ban @Clarky just to meet quotas and so on.

I'm reading London Fields by Martin Amis. Would recommend.

@M777 was banned for being returning banned member @stoicHoneyBadger.

I don't see where anyone referred to you as a 'Nazi'. I'm leaving the conversation is all as there's nothing else to say. There's no thesis left to debate.

I'm not going to get into an argument about it. You've laid your cards on the table and they are there for everyone to make their own judgement about. The OP was already on shaky ground due to a lack of evidence to support its contentions. Now, the discussion has veered into transphobia there's nothing else to say from my point of view.

"Transphobia is a collection of ideas and phenomena that encompass a range of negative attitudes, feelings, or actions towards transgender people or transness in general. Transphobia can include fear, aversion, hatred, violence, anger, or discomfort felt or expressed towards people who do not conform to social gender expectations."

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

I stated a fact, that's all.

Ah, so you are a transphobe.

OP explained then.

The problem here is that normal, sane people just want to live their lives. While people with nothing else to do become activists and try to validate themselves by bullying others. So normal people would rather cave in an inch to the activists, rather than try to oppose them on every stupidity they come up with. That way inch by inch and one day the whole society can't understand how it got bullied a mile by a tiny minority of blue haired nutjobs. — M777

Most of the normal, sane people I know sympathize with trans people who on the whole suffer far more serious bullying than anything 'a minority of blue haired nutjobs' ever inflicted on anyone. In fact, I don't see much evidence of this PC bullying of the 'man on the street'. And I don't see why it's stupid to, e.g. acknowledge the existence of trans women in recognition that being a woman has a psychological as well as a biological element to it. Seems to me most people either don't care about the issue, are willing to see the nuance there, or, at worst, just don't know what to say about it, and the real minority are those who find it scary, totalitarian, threatening etc. Again, I say there's nothing to be afraid of and people (generally) aren't afraid. But if you contend there is and they are, at least present some solid evidence of the 'bullying' you are talking about, e.g. in the form of surveys or other data. Something that at least might raise the OP beyond pure conjecture.

Just want to add, I'm not suggesting equivalence of all anti-PC crusades; some are more justified than others. What I am suggesting though is that there is nothing to be afraid of. PC ideas that stand the test of time do so because they're good ideas. And the anti-PC crowd have failed throughout history to stem the tide of 'political correctness' not because totalitarianism won but because they have consistently been on the wrong side of progress. Whether or not the 'PC' multi-faceted/nuanced definition of 'woman' will stand the test of time is yet to be seen. But if it does, it will become normalised because it is a good idea; or to put it in libertarian terms, it will flourish in the marketplace of ideas by outcompeting worse ideas. This process is not totalitarianism but its opposite. And if that's what you're afraid of, then your actual bogeyman is freedom.

The tie designs are at least sufficiently abominable to accurately reflect the minds behind the marketing idea. :smile:

"This was fine in the fifties, but by the time the sixties rolled around the internal thought police were making people hesitant about considering women subservient. If you asked the average Joe on the street if this depiction of women was OK, some would appear afraid to say it was. Very unhealthy and a sign of the totalitarian regime to come."



Well, no, actually, like most 'politically correct' ideas reactionaries are scared of, it's called progress.

So yet another thread motivated by gender hysterics. Got it. — Xtrix

There's a rash of right-wing hysteria about the woman definition thing going on. I was reading an unrelated news piece today and underneath it was a comment claiming you could be imprisoned in Britain for denying that a woman can have testicles (!). More of the scary totalitarian narrative. The government may try to kill you, so you need a gun, and they will imprison you for speaking 'common sense', so you need to fight political correctness.

Seems to me the banal reality is that the person on the street might hesistate when asked to define a woman because there's no longer a very simplistic definition. Society has injected some nuance into it. And not everyone agrees on the answer. Scary, if you want one simple answer to be true and no one to be allowed to consider the actual complexity of the topic. Speaking of totalitarianism...

@Hanover My basic point was you can't accuse the BBC of misrepresenting things by ignoring the US verdict when you misrepresent and then ignore the UK verdict when it's presented to you. That just suggests you're being disengenuous.

My point relates to the argument in the OP concerning the BBC article. When I say he's a proven abuser, it's a statement of legal fact that's pertinent to that.

But as I've acknowledged:

The British court found that Heard had 'proved' over a dozen cases of abuse by Depp. The American court 'proved' that Heard had lied about at least some of the abuse. Both were civil trials held to a lower standard of proof than criminal trials and they gave somewhat contradictory results. — Baden

Whether he actually 'really' did it or not, I don't pretend to know for absolute sure and I don't think any of us do. I don't have a dog in the fight and I don't think either of them is completely innocent. They both sound horrible to me.

I'll make an effort anyhow.

then move my work to some darkened corner — karl stone

Your OP is most definitely not 'Political Philosophy', but I've moved it from the lounge to the politics and current affairs category, so it's not in some darkened corner now.

this article that just flatly refuses to accept the verdict. — karl stone

"The judge... found that 12 of 14 alleged incidents of domestic violence against Heard had occurred. — Baden

So, you accept the verdict? Or are you just going to flatly reject it in which case the criticisms you applied to the BBC apply to you and your OP implodes. Until you address that, you're going nowhere.

Also, moved this polemic against a news article to the lounge. 'Political philosophy' it is not.

Edit: Moved to 'Politics and current affairs' instead.

That is, no actual harm occurred, but some action can later be presented as abuse to a credulous movement (#metoo).

Being a woman is not sufficient reason to extend automatic belief. — Bitter Crank

Except that in this case it was proven in court that Depp assaulted Heard. Of course, political parasites like @karl stone will continue worshipping Depp and villifying Heard because for some reason the idea that women should be more open about sexual and physical abuse is too PC and threatening for them. Pretty disgusting. Also, pretty disgusting that Heard assaulted Depp too. The balance of evidence strongly suggests it was a mutually abusive relationship. Making either party out to be the exclusive victim here is wrong. Using this mutual celebrity self-destruction to smear innocent victims of abuse who dare to come forward under the banner of #metoo is doubly wrong.

Karl Stone has zero credibility left anyhow as he didn't even know Depp was found by the UK judge to have assaulted Heard. And that fact destroys his positioning. Or worse, he did know and lied in pursuit of his agenda. So, he's either woefully ignorant or a liar. And anyone who gives him oxygen for, what now given the facts is starting to smell like a misogynistic charade, is being foolish.

Ooh... :naughty:

It's a fair point, I know.

See also: https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/06/01/johnny-depp-libel-law-uk-us/

"The British judge ultimately ruled that the allegations against Depp were “substantially true,” writing in a 2020 ruling that “the great majority of alleged assaults … have been proved to the civil standard.”

And: https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-britain-verdict-judgm-idUSKBN27I143

Just to emphasize that, very specifically, the assaults were proven in court.

It's odd that I know more about this than you without being glued to the screen 24/7. Maybe because I don't have a political agenda masquerading as a quest for truth?

I don't know what you wish for me to infer from the UK case; that a newspaper got away with printing rumours that were widely believed to be true? I don't find that particularly surprising. Metoo requires that we #believallwomen - and Amber Heard was repeating those allegations in her role of metoo's champion of domestic violence. The Sun didn't libel Depp - Heard libelled Depp, and the Sun reported it. It doesn't mean the rumours are true; just that the Sun had adequate reason to believe they were. — karl stone

Such ignorance of something you pretend to be interested in.

"The judge, Mr Justice Nicol, said the Sun had proved its article to be “substantially true” and found that 12 of 14 alleged incidents of domestic violence against Heard had occurred.

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/jun/02/johnny-depp-amber-heard-libel-outcomes-differ-us-uk

. But if I thought Depp was beating Heard I'd say so. If that's what the evidence suggested, that would have been my conclusion - and my sympathies would be with her. — karl stone

That Depp was beating Heard was found to be proven in the UK case. Glad your sympathies are now with Heard and you've given up this anti-PC crusade.

It's optional and not a bad idea in principle. But let's not pretend this is about writing a one sentence PM. The PM will almost certainly be responded to and very often instigate a debate.

The British court found that Heard had 'proved' over a dozen cases of abuse by Depp. The American court 'proved' that Heard had lied about at least some of the abuse. Both were civil trials held to a lower standard of proof than criminal trials and they gave somewhat contradictory results. Pretending you know what happened when you're a Depp fan who made up his mind before the trial began isn't credible. None of us really knows what happened and the law can't make up its mind either. The fact that the BBC is going to bat for Heard and the anti-PC crowd for Depp is predictable and irrelevant. The trials resolved nothing of importance. And everything you said about BBC bias can be directed at you. You dismiss the findings of the UK case, just as you would have dismissed the findings of the US case if it hadn't gone your way and now you laughably scold others for not respecting the court that just happened to find in your favor. As if you care about justice, being exclusively interested in your anti-PC crusade and using a convenient public event to bang your drum. If I'm wrong, tell me how you would have changed your mind and believed Amber if the U.S. court had ruled against Depp.

Coincidentally on reading your post my body decided to shake itself and laughter decided to happen.

I don't think this is really an issue of ignorance on NOS's part but some kind of political positioning. Best just to leave it imo as he seems wedded to the incoherency.