That’s why fully grammatical and propositional language made such a quick difference when Homo sapiens took over the world from the Neanderthals, Denisovans and other hominids around 60,000 years ago. — apokrisis

According to Chris Stringer, there are multiple theories about what happened to Homo sapiens 60,000 years ago. Whether sophisticated speech caused the change or was a result of the change is unknown. There isn't any strong reason to believe it was the former. Neanderthals had all the anatomy for speech, they were tool users. Stringer's own theory is that it was an accident. Environmental factors allowed the population growth that ended up protecting against the loss of skills during calamities. Instead of building technology only to lose it, which had been happening for millennia, humans finally had the ability to build on skills over time. That further increased the population, and here we are.

I personally think it's likely that abstract speech got a huge boost from agriculture, which involves a lot of delayed gratification. Obviously, that happened much later than the shift that took place 50-60,000 years ago.

A sense of self is even overtaking our material environment. We used to look at a chair and see how it was exactly meant for us. Soon we will expect our self driving cars to chat to us intelligently as they whiz us off to work. — apokrisis

I think that tendency to see or project ourselves on the environment is in our firmware. At an irrational level, we engage the world as if it is alive and able to talk to us. I think that's basically what a proposition is: what we expect the world to say.

It's when we began to separate ourselves from the world that the idea of an inner realm of ideas appeared. Before, all our ideas were cast across the landscape, the storm was angry, invisible gods made us heroic or petty. The journey to enlightened thinking has struggled against this baseline feature every step of the way: calling it superstition. But maybe the unenlightened mind was right all along. Maybe the mind is inextricable from the world we engage. A real theory of embeddedness would take that possibility seriously.

As for LLMs, we actually created computers to mimic our minds, not to spew words, but to add and subtract: for the banking system. A computer isn't a mirror. It's performing tasks that we could do, but we aren't. And now it's better that we are at games like chess and Go. To beat a human at Go requires quite a bit more than a TV broadcast. You're overlooking the fact that computers are not passive.

I was not arguing that this was impossible. I was sort of cataloguing all of the different ways in which the organism and its natural and social environment need being tightly integrated (and the subsystems themselves need being integrated together) in order that meanginful and contentful sapience and sentience emerge. — Pierre-Normand

I don't think it's as simple as the coupling of organism to environment. If that's the only requirement, all living things ought to be sapient. I'm holding out for something quantum or panpsychically exotic.

In their book The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (that has no less then five chapters on consciousness!), Peter Hacker and Maxwell Bennett (though it's mainly Hacker who wrote those parts) argue that philosophical inquiry into mentalistic concepts must come before their scientific investigation. My view is a bit less extreme but I think both can go hand in hand. Our being able to duplicate some aspects of cognition in LLMs furnishes another tool for inquiry. — Pierre-Normand

I agree. I would be skeptical of philosophical inquiry that appears to complete the job, though. That provides nothing more than personal bias. Everybody has one of those.

By means of interoception and homeostatic regulation, the organism is continuously estimating and correcting its distance from viable conditions of life. — Pierre-Normand

In electronics we call them negative and positive feedback loops. They existed before digital technology. Robots use them extensively.

This set of integrated regulative systems does not just furnish "emotional" experiences but also shapes what counts for us as a reason, what feels urgent, and which affordances even show up for us as intelligible in our environment. — Pierre-Normand

By the same token, you can ramp up your sympathetic nervous system by choosing to think of something scary. It goes both ways. Why couldn't a computer be fitted out with similar environmental shenanigans?

So, yes, you can add cameras, microphones, pressure sensors, and a mechanical body, and you get richer sensorimotor loops. But without a comparable system of interoceptive feedback and bodily stakes, where regulation of a living body constrains what matters to the system, the result is at best a proficient controller (like a tireless hyperfocused clothes-folding Optimus robot), not human-like sapience/sentience. — Pierre-Normand

I disagree with this assessment. Not only is it possible to create a system that is intimately responding and organizing its environment, we've long since accomplished that in telephony, which is governed by computers. If that kind of connection to the environment creates human-like sapience, we did it in the 1960s.

Is mind a necessary condition for meaning? — RogueAI

Maybe not?. For instance, the earth's electromagnetic field means that the earth's core is an electromagnetic dynamo. According to realism, there wouldn't need to be any recognition of this meaning for it to exist.

Recognition of the meaning, on the other hand, requires awareness, and the idea of truth. Maybe we could add the recognition of the idea of being also. I don't think we have to get specific about what a mind is, whether concepts of inner and outer are pertinent, just that there's awareness of certain concepts.

:razz:

Gobbledegook — Banno

I had a similar description, with more obscenities.

It simply a living body embedded in a natural and social niche. — Pierre-Normand

Even with our embeddedness taken into consideration, we still don't have a working theory of consciousness which we could use to assess AI's. Do we forge ahead using philosophical attitudes instead?

Second question: analog-to-digital technology is relatively advanced at this time. If a system included both LLM, sight, hearing, pressure sensing, some robotic capability, and someone to talk to, do the you think it would then be more likely to develop human-like sapience?

My brother is a software engineer and has long conveyed to me in animated terms the ways that C++ mimics the way humans think. I have some background in hardware, like using a compiler to create and download machine language to a PROM. I know basically how a microprocessor works, so I'm interested in the hardware/software divide and how that might figure in human consciousness. I think a big factor in the LLM consciousness debate is not so much about an anthropocentric view, but that we know in detail how an LLM works. We don't know how the human mind works. Is there something special about the human hardware, something quantum for instance, that is key to consciousness? Or is it all in the organic "software"?

So how do we examine the question with a large chunk of information missing? How do you look at it?

I'm pretty sure they identify as non-binary. — Pierre-Normand

:gasp:

Can you articulate your understanding? — Janus

No.

Do you understand truth? — Janus

Yes.

In Wittgenstein's terms, it can't (yet) participate in the "form of life". In Searle's terms, it doesn't share in the "background". — Banno

It would have to understand truth, and it doesn't. All it has is rule following.

So she's getting rigorous about the problem of induction?

To me that seems to be the way you get to the idea of an immaterial, eternal and transcendental realm, because universals are a-temporal and immaterial. — ChatteringMonkey

:up:

Maybe so, they certainly had a concept of the divine in general, and 'divine knowledge' for instance. But the Gods generally don't seem to have come from another realm, but were part of and interacting with this world... they lived on mount Olympus. — ChatteringMonkey

Right. In Dante's Inferno, Hell is underground. They thought volcanoes are evidence of it. When Dante and Virgil go all the way to the bottom of Hell, they're at the center of the earth. Dante learns from Virgil that the earth is a sphere because instead of exiting by going back the way they came, they continue forward, and Dante realizes they're no longer going down, but up. Dante's Inferno is basically science fiction: popularizing the idea that the earth is a sphere.

Likewise, they thought the sky is heaven: that's why they called it the firmament: they thought it was like a shell that God and angels walk around on.

Nevertheless, Virgil is a disembodied spirit. He doesn't belong to some other realm, but he's personality with no body.

I don't know how you're seeing divine knowledge as a component of dualism. How does that work?

The Greeks believed in reincarnation, and in a realm of the dead ruled by Hades, and most Jews in the proto-Christian world were pretty thoroughly hellenized, so it's more likely that soul/body dualism is just part of the Greek worldview, inherited by both Jews and Christians.

But the oldest known literature, from the Sumerians, has images of an underworld where the dead dwell. So some kind of dualism probably goes back to before recorded history. There's no telling how it originated, or if it only originated in one place.

When I call him a "bum", I'm putting it extremely lightly. — Tzeentch

Anybody who can become a central figure in Western Civilization while walking in bumhood is a freaking genius.

:grimace:

Could you please start running your posts through an AI so they make sense? :grin:

Just do an experiment where all the OP's and comments are AI generated in one forum, and another forum where everything is hand-written by mere mortals. See which one gets the most traffic.

Davidson would say they have to understand truth to have beliefs. I don't think present AIs do. Maybe future ones will.

Generally, agreement is counterproductive to philosophy. — Metaphysician Undercover

There is no disagreement without agreement, and neither can encompass the experience of a living being.

I'm aware that all appearance of agreement on your part is accidental.

Existentialism imitates "substantive content", to the point where the untrained eye might not even see the difference, but it isn't substantive content. Then the trained eye would grasp the existential proposal as a pure invariant form, even though the intent of the proposition is that it be apprehended as pure content. — Metaphysician Undercover

Pretty much, yes. You're agreeing with Adorno. I disagree that his critique hits home, but that would be for some other thread.

@Metaphysician Undercover

Explain why Adorno isn't a nominalist. It relates to existentialism.

This is my take, shoot it down as you will:

Existentialism says existence is prior to essence. It has a root in Kierkegaard, who emphasized direct experience over form. He noted that there are no words to describe 'that quality of being that comes to rest in the sanctuary of the form.' But once that quality of being becomes the primary topic, the effect of rationality and speech creep in: we end up removed from direct experience because we beat the hell out of it with words.

I think this is what he means by:

The schools which take derivatives of the Latin existere [Latin:
to exist] as their device, would like to summon up the reality of
corporeal experience against the alienated particular science. Out of
fear of reification they shrink back from what has substantive content.
It turns unwittingly into an example.

He's talking about the forced separation between direct experience (which contains no form, no names, no recognition of ideation) and form itself, which is a key component of knowledge (scientia, science). And it just occurred to me that no one is reading this or likely to respond to what I just said, so if I want to discuss it, I need to go to reddit. I don't know which subreddit, though. I don't think they have an Adorno subreddit. I could start one.

:up:

We ought not conflate the two things. I personally embrace AI for research and have had conversations amounting to hundreds of thousands of words with it, which have been very helpful. That's different from letting it write my posts for me. — Baden

I suppose so. I don't have any opinion one way or the other. :smile:

I don't know. It's kind of like saying that you can steal 40% of the bank's money, but no more. — Baden

I guess in an educational setting that makes sense, but if AI cures cancer, we'll all own AI as an extension of human creativity.

Once it becomes that kind of tool, won't universities embrace it?

This anecdote might help my case: At another department of the university where I work, the department heads in their efforts to "keep up with the times" are now allowing Master's students to use AI to directly write up to 40% of their theses. — Baden

How do they police that?

Is this thread geared toward philosophy students? Amateur philosophers just spend their lives struggling to understand the world, ping off a few cool philosophers, and spout what they may. Right?

:up:

By 2100, the average temperature in Jerusalem will be 14-16 degrees hotter than it is now. The whole area will be well into irreversible desertification. There just won't be any water. The flora and fauna will become desert forms. Unless the human population turns into Fremen, no one will live there.

Content is logically prior, — Metaphysician Undercover

Logically prior. That doesn't compute.

I'll give you an example. I was walking through a park with a forestry student who was learning the latin names for trees. As we walked along, he would name off them. I realized eventually that listening to him do that had put me in a weird frame of mind in which I couldn't even see the trees anymore. All I saw was the species and genus names, not the individual leaves and unique shapes as I was used to. I struggled to get back to my homebase because I didn't like seeing the trees as Latin names.

So you might think that this is a case where form and content are completely isolated from one another. The more immersed in the form, the less I can even see the content. You might think that content preceded form, because I saw the individual trees as just trees before I knew their species names.

But I don't think so. There was no point where, like Sartre staring at the root, I lost consciousness of form. I didn't know species names, but I knew "leaves" and "branches." That idea of formless content is a little bit of a myth, I think. If you could enter that state, where you don't name anything, you wouldn't be able to remember what happened. We use concepts and names, which figure in webs of belief, to mark out any experience at all. Do you agree with that?

"The pre-eminence of content reveals itself as the necessary insufficiency of the method." — Metaphysician Undercover

I read through that again, and I really don't know what he means by this. But pre-eminence doesn't mean "prior to."

But that issue aside, when you say content can precede form, are you thinking about existence preceding essence?

But that's the mistake of dialectical identity thinking which Adorno is exposing with negative dialectics. The two are not properly dialectically opposed, in reality, so we cannot say that each one implies the other. If one (content) extends beyond the other (form), then in the way explained by Aristotle, the former (content) is logically prior to the latter (form). Then, mention of the latter (form) necessarily implies the former (content), but not vise versa. Mention of content does not necessarily imply form. This is the reason for "the remainder", "the pre-eminence of content". — Metaphysician Undercover

I think it's like this: the score of a symphony is like what Adorno means by form. A particular production of the symphony, alive in time, is part of the content. The remainder he's talking about is the unique aspects of a particular performance, like the way the first violinist connected some notes and kept others separate, or the tempo the conductor set. Haven't you ever gone looking for the perfect performance if Mozart's Requiem? You're looking for details don't appear in the score. Yet every performance you come across is OF that one score. The score is like something holy and separate from the world. The content is made of sweat and tears.

I think I get what you're saying. Could you point me to where he talks about the "pre-eminence" of content? If it's not too much trouble?

Trending for Halloween!!

ok.

Maybe. If someone uses AI to create a fascinating post, could you engage with it?
— frank

Sure, why not? I would be more impressed if someone created a fascinating post by themselves, though. — Janus

You're the only one who cares how impressed you are. A fascinating post is a fascinating post.