Being is not an ingredient. — Wayfarer

What is it?

Sure, but that's a theory about what people are doing. It's not a description of what they mean. I'm being a bit pedantic, but in the philosophy of consciousness theory gets mixed with definition a lot in a way that matters. — bert1

Yea, I tend to agree. I guess because Hinton has devoted his life to AI and has thought a lot about intelligence, I didn't want to shortchange his argument. I'll try to muster something more plausible to represent him.

Well if you don't, it kind of makes anything you're wanting to say kind of pointless, don't it ;-) — Wayfarer

Is that a bad thing?

But the fact that they can only rehash their training data mitigates against them becoming intelligent in their own right. — Wayfarer

They don't just rehash. Some of them learn and adapt.

What would be the corresponding motivation for a computer system to develop an autonomous will? — Wayfarer

I guess that invites the question: how do humans develop an autonomous will? Do they?

In general people don't usually say they experience things. — bert1

That's probably true, but Hinton's argument is about the times when they do. When a person says "I see pink elephants" per Hinton, they're reporting on what would be in the environment if their perceptual system was working properly.

But supposedly people are fooled into believing they have an internal theatre by speech about seeing elephants. I don't think anyone, including Descartes, has ever believed in an internal theatre. But that's where Hinton's argument starts.

I put this to both ChatGPT and Claude.ai, and they both said, this is eliminative materialism which fails to face up to the indubitably subjective nature of consciousness. FWIW: — Wayfarer

That sounds like a rehash of data they came across rather than an intelligent exploration of the question. Achievement: yes. Intelligence: no.

But that doesn't mean they can't cross over into intelligence, which would be characterized by learning and adapting in order to solve a problem.

Well, during the traditional discussion between the Nobel prize winners, Hinton seemed to hold a grudge against philosophy and the notion of subjectivity. But then he added that ethics is fine, as if to appear less fanatic. — jkop

There's a difference between artificial achievement and artificial intelligence. Some would say AI demonstrates the first, but not the second. I think Hinton is saying there's no difference between the two. Humans don't have what's being called "intelligence" either.

Does morality need intelligence? Or is achievement enough?

I'll post the article that lays out that distinction shortly.

Consciousness is not some special place walled off from
the rest of the functional activity of an organism. It’s merely a higher level of integration. The point is that the basis of the synthetic, unifying activity of what we call consciousness is already present in the simplest unicellular organisms in the functionally unified way in which they behave towards their environment on the basis of normative goal-directness. — Joshs

If I could just get this off my chest before we move on to the good stuff: we do not presently have a theory of consciousness that goes beyond explaining some functions. We do not know what causes it. We do not know how it works. What you've got is one of many interesting ways of speculating about it.

What A.I. lacks is the ability to set its own norms. — Joshs

Animals set their own norms? How?

Both the art artwork and the A.I. are expressions of the state of the art of creative thought of its human creator at a given point in time. A.I. is just a painting with lots of statistically calculated moving parts. — Joshs

And this bears on HInton's criticism of Chomsky. Hinton thinks Chomsky is wrong that language acquisition has an innate basis. He's pretty convinced that his design does the same thing a human does, therefore it must be the same thing. Babies aren't presented with trillions of bits of data though.

The nature of living systems is to change themselves in ways that retain a normative continuity in the face of changing circumstances — Joshs

That's handled by your neuroendocrine system in a way that has no more consciousness than an AI's input. If you actually had to consciously generate homeostasis, you'd die in about 5 minutes.

Cognition is an elaboration of such organismic dynamics. — Joshs

Is there some reason to believe this is so? A reason that isn't about Heidegger?

We mean what we say whereas AI probabilistically estimates that what it says is what you want it to mean. — Benkei

I think Hinton believes that as we speak, we're doing the same thing his AI design is doing. In the spaces between words, we're quickly doing a trial and error process that ends with choosing a successful component of information encoding.

The idea is that intention is a misconception.

That's really not what people generally mean. — bert1

What do people mean?

Ok.

I don't care. — fdrake

But it would mean we made sentient beings. That wouldn't amaze you?

Would you say an AI is sentient?

Truth is a pain in the ass. Let it be banished! — Leontiskos

Did you have an account of truth you wanted to share?

People wouldn’t so much time trying to find themselves if they couldn’t lose themselves. — Joshs

Das Man blinds them. Wherever you go, there you are. :grin:

. As an ethical task, this is one of life’s biggest challenges, since a personality is not stationary but a moving target. — Joshs

As a person moves and changes, it's the same person.

Right, and this shows up most clearly in the realm of ethics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Bringing this back around to the OP, we just take it as self evident that morality starts with treating a person as a subject. We do say there's a "stroke in room 9" but there's a danger in this, that a person is being treated as a piece of meat.

It's moral to remember of the people you consider, whether villains or victims, that it could be you. This is why starting the discussion with a focus on objects and whether they're stationary or just relatively stationary obscures the real issue. People have to be united subjects. The simple but mighty argument for this is: morality.

This was probably covered already, but what about forbearance? I am the drinking of the tea, but am I also the lack of caring about the weather? I mean, do we always have to describe behavior in positive terms? Or can I be the not-remembering of what day it is?

More recent approaches abandon the notions of representation and symbol manipulation in favor of embodied, contextual coping — Joshs

More recent approaches abandon symbol manipulation in favor of quantum mechanics. Doesn't mean we know anymore now than we've ever known about how cognition actually works.

Predicational judgement is one kind of conceptual discernment, and the perception one uses to draw shapes without making use of prior knowledge of objects like trees and tables is another kind of conceptual discernment. — Joshs

But what is the difference?

I don’t see the application of discernment as optional. Since all perception is conceptually driven, expectations guide even the simplest sort of visual perception, ‘filling in’ for and enriching the paucity of data one receives from the visual field. — Joshs

So again, how is this not predication? If you have expectations, you expect that x is y, or some variant of that.

It’s an interesting point, but a thing and its behaviors are one and the same. It’s impossible to take your eye off one in order to observe the other. There does appear to be a sort of being/behavior dualism, perhaps the result of splitting the two into subject/predicate for the purpose of language.
5h — NOS4A2

You're saying language divides objects from their behavior, but this produces a misconception. So if we used language to describe what's really going on, would we be spouting nonsense?

Let's try. Describe how you drank coffee, but do so in a way that I won't become delusional. Is it that:

I am the drinking of the coffee.
The driving of the car drove me to work.
The sitting at the desk typing stupid shit in my phone, typed stupid shit on my phone.
The loving of philosophy has loved the philosophy. This is awesome.

I draw and paint also, so I understand what you’re saying about the shift in stance that is required to ‘paint what we see’ rather than our linguistic concepts. But I beleive that all perception is conceptual, so when I am trying to ‘survey my visual field without judgement about what the objects are’, I am still using a kind of conceptual judgement. — Joshs

How is conceptual judgment different from predication? You said predication was tacked onto perception, but it sounds like you've got them happening simultaneously.

BTW, I know that any description of the visual field will be organized by ideas. My point was that the visual field itself is not driving conclusions about identification. That involves the application of discernment. Call it proto-predication.

My point was that , while figures must emerge from some sort of ground, we wouldn’t be able to see anything at all if either the figure or its ground remained purely unchanging. For instance, our pupils must oscillate continually in order to perceive a constant visual image. As soon as the eye is immobilized the visual field vanishes. Perception seeks to construct relative stabilities, not pure unchaningness. — Joshs

That may be, but as you drive down the road, you're not usually aware that the road is actually moving 1000 miles per hour as the earth turns. That would be something you'd realize via your intellect. It's a pretty sophisticated thought.

But prior to the use of predication, perception handles recognition and likeness. — Joshs

Just to make sure we're on the same page, I'd like to relate a story:

I draw and paint, so I'm used to surveying my visual field without judgement about what the objects are. Those judgments interfere because it's like my brain already knows what a tree looks like, and it wants my hand to draw that stock image instead of what's actually in front of me. I divorce identity from perception and all I see is shapes, light and dark, a cascade of colors.

Once while doing this, it occurred to me to wonder what in my visual field tells me that this is a tree. It was one of the biggest philosophical moments of my life when I realized the answer was: nothing. There is nothing in those sights and sounds that says: "tree." I realized that tree is an organizing idea. It's not something I learned about through sense data. The idea of the tree is like an invisible nucleus with orbiting properties. This is all phenomenology. I'm not explaining how the world really is, but just how I experience it. So all I can say is that I don't recognize, detect likeness, etc. through sensation, but maybe you do? Or did I misunderstand what you meant by "perception"?

I think what you're saying is that we choose a frame of reference and declare a certain spot to be unchanging (like the horizon). I agree that we do this reflexively, but the awareness that fiat is involved is purely intellectual. There's nothing in perception that lets us know that the horizon isn't really stationary.

Is it really the preservation of pure identity over time that we need in order to benefit from a concept of truth, or is it inferential compatibility, the understandability of something on the basis of recognizability, likeness and harmony with respect to something else? — Joshs

Predication handles recognition, likeness, etc. The way predication works is that the potentially transient properties of an object are specified. The object has to be held as unchanging relative to the properties.

For instance when I say the wax has melted, the wax has to be temporally stable. If it's not, then the wax has ceased to exist. Therefore it can't have melted.

Does this question really need an answer? — Apustimelogist

YES DAMMIT! Just kidding. It probably doesn't need an answer.

One of the side issues with seeing entities as aggregates is the way we pick out what it is that "contains' the parts. It could be:

1. innate (since we know navigation capability is innate to some extent, maybe the ability to divide the world up in a certain way is also innate).

2. Socially mediated (for some things maybe)

3. Because Plato was right and we're perceiving particular manifestations of Forms :grimace: )


Other possibilities? @apokrisis is right that this is a thesis, antithesis, synthesis situation.

that is problematic. Again, what might it be for a mind to grasp a number, apart from being able to count to it, add it, or halve it? — Banno

Numbers have significance apart from counting, for instance there are four gospels in the Bible because there were four elements. Four is a symbol of the earth because there are four directions. Most people in my world know what 666 means, and so in.

This doesn't diminish your point, that numbers are used, just that counting isn't all they're used for.

The coherence and unity of the assemblage do not stem from an underlying, intelligible principle but from the regularity in the dispersion of the system of discursive elements themselves. — Number2018

I think that coherence comes first from emotions. You don't grieve the death of an assemblage. It's that unique person you miss.

Yes, it is interesting. Deleuze developed the concept of an open whole. It refers to a dynamic and ever-evolving whole, where the parts are interconnected in a "rhizomatic" manner. The free and continuous interaction of various processes drives the unfolding of their relationships. This approach eliminates the need for an external, transcendent organizing principle, suggesting that the system's organization emerges from within. — Number2018

That's cool. For the mind, the organizing principle is meaning: the need to find it.

There's an interesting idea that the relationship between the parts and whole can be an unfolding evolution, like the way each of the words in this sentence takes on meaning relative to the purpose of the whole, but the sentence rolls on without restrictions beyond the imperative to make some kind of sense, and even the author may not know how it ends until it does. Sentences that are used to try to convey this idea are usually long and drawn out. :grin:

A pre-given whole necessarily subjects all agents and relationships to the effects of its unity. — Number2018

What are the effects of its unity?

Maybe it's just us then.

Now, the deflationist might say: "hey, no worries, we just pragmatically decide where different substances start and end." Now, this might very well be what you do in some cases, based on practical concerns, but this seems pretty weak as a philosophy (not to mention totally at odds with common sense and how science, with all its focus on classifications, is actually done) . For one, it leaves you with no grounds for deciding how the sciences should be organized, because now there is no per se predication and no essential identities. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But this is about how we choose to see the world, right? That's more apparent when we look at the moral dimensions of it. Do we want to identify people by their behavior? Joe is a drug addict. That's all there is to him. That's a common way of seeing people, but it's dehumanizing, which is a reminder that a person is a well of potential.

Well, you can talk about the "behavior" of the species' genes in response to various tests, etc. However, note that such a view will tend to dissolve any notion of species in the first place. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right. I was trying to explain that behavior reflects the way a thing interacts with it's environment. For that reason, it's not good to fuse thing and behavior. It's potentially unhelpful anyway.

But precisely because there can, in some very real sense, be no counterargument to functionalism, no counterexample, there ought to be a niggling doubt, such as I have nursed for a long time. Ralph and Sam, striding through philosophy with their functionalist hammers for years, and one day Ralph says, "Hey Sam. You ever notice that the world is full of nails? That there's nothing but nails? That's funny, isn't it?" — Srap Tasmaner

Say the scientist is talking about convergent evolution where mammals and fish have evolved the same phenotype in response the same conditions (like dolphins and sharks). She needs to be able to easily distinguish mammals from fish in some way other than behavior. The easiest way to distinguish them would be by genetic lineage, which is already handled in the scientific names for the animals. This is not a counter argument. It's just an example of why we don't generally categorize animals by behavior.

We live in a dynamic time. It is not my original thought but I think that rates of change between generations are different for different people in different circumstances. — Paine

Yep

would think so. I remember my grandmother saying that culture no longer made sense to her—she was a fundamentalist Christian born in the 1890s. The moon landing and the hippie movement shook her reality. In the 1980s, my father made a similar observation during the time of glasnost — Tom Storm

Exactly. She must have lived every day feeling like she didn't recognize the world.

Now, I find myself telling young colleagues that I no longer have a clear understanding of where I stand on culture or politics, and I hope they can make sense of it all. I suspect this feeling of disconnection is one of the defining phenomena of modernity. — Tom Storm

I feel the same way. I'm just not engaged with it. I just can't make sense of it.

So true!

If someone were to craft such an argument, that person should be regarded as being very intelligent, and noble. That person should be awarded the logical equivalent to the Fields medal. It would be one of humanity's most resounding moral victories over ignorance and superstition. Something like that would have enormous value. It would be at the level of Beethoven's Ode to Joy. — Arcane Sandwich

But the force of that argument would be logic. The point of the evil demon argument is that it's possible to doubt logic.