When a person lost all his/her memories, the idea of self would have gone too. — Corvus

Amnesia is the destruction of self? And also, if I lose 90% of my memories, am I 90% less a self?

It's the cumulative effect of that electronic switching that is intelligence — Harry Hindu

Let's explore this. Suppose there's a parallel world where computers work without software. Whenever a user wants the computer to do something, they turn the computer on, and all the electronic switches that make up the computer just randomly open and close in ways that produce the output the user wants. It just all happens by fantastic coincidence.

For example, in this parallel world, there are computers that have hardly any circuits that are capable of passing BAR exams, and solving complex math problems, and passing Turing Tests, and acting as therapists because they all just accidentally always give the right output. If the multiverse is sufficiently large and varied enough, this kind of world actually exists. So, are the computers in that world intelligent?

Not really. It's just that humans have viewed themselves as special creations for most of our existence, or that creation itself is centered around us, so it is difficult in giving up these notions that we are somehow special and that intelligence cannot be attributed to things that are not human, or even organic. — Harry Hindu

Well, we know personally that we are special because we know we have minds. We then assume other humans and high-order animals have them too. But machines, that's a totally different beast.

Any computer is at heart a collection of electronic switch-flipping, correct? How is turning switches on and off any kind of intelligence?

So what you're saying is that you need a mind to be intelligent? What exactly is a mind? You say you have one, but what is it, and what magic does organic matter have that inorganic matter does not to associate minds with the former but not the latter?

Is it your mind that allows you to come up with responses to me, or your intelligence, or both? — Harry Hindu

These are extremely weighty questions that have been asked for a very long time, with no good answers given (I lean towards idealism, by the way). This is why I think Ai is going to have profound impacts on society. We're not at all ready to determine whether these machines have minds, yet we are intimately familiar with our own minds and how we use them to make decisions.

No. They seem to me unrelated capabilities. — 180 Proof

But doesn't it seem to you that your mind is an integral part of your intelligence "apparatus"? You consider ideas, you mentally weigh the pro's and con's of things, when it comes to acting intelligently in a relationship, you try to empathize with how your actions will feel to another person, etc. Do you think that's all an illusion? That there's some rules-based architecture "under the hood" that's really calling all the shots?

Intelligence is a unclear concept. HarryHindu asked me, if AI blokes are intelligent. Before answering the question, I need to know what intelligence means. — Corvus

Is mind a necessary condition for intelligence?

But where does this doubt stem from if not a bias that humans are intelligent and not machines? There is no logical reason to think this without a definition of intelligence. — Harry Hindu

But I know I have a mind and my mind is what I use to come up with responses to you (that I hope are perceived as intelligent!). We assume we all have minds because we're all built the same way. But with a machine, you don't know if there's a mind there, so this question of intelligence keeps cropping up.

Please define intelligence. — Corvus

Aren't we going to end up in the Chinese Room? No matter how the Ai is programmed, it's following a rules-based system that produces output we perceive as intelligent answers. Even if Ai's start solving outstanding problems in science and logic and mathematics, aren't there still going to be doubts about their intelligence?

Netanyahu is corrupt as the day is long. He's also a Jew leading his country in a time of war, so of course he's "wanted for crimes against humanity". Whenever Israel does anything beyond harsh language, it's a crime against humanity.

When Jews are defending themselves, the "genocide" dial gets turned up to 11.

When everything is genocide, nothing is genocide.

Yes, keep up the good work of genocide apologetics. — Mikie

We killed more Japanese in one night of firebombing than Israel's done in a year. They're not very good at genocide, are they?

So let's pretend you're a woman and you can be dropped down into a random Muslim-majority country or Israel. Which would you pick?

"Israel’s standing in the world has shrunk considerably— so that’s a good thing at least."

I beg to disagree. With Trump's victory, Israel's standing is the highest its been in a long time.

The data we can collect is the brain activity but not Qualia itself. I think it is feasible in the future to tell what sort of experience a person has from this data but we cannot possibly collect Qualia. — MoK

I agree. And how do you get around the inverted spectrum problem? Suppose brain activity xyz feels like qualia xyz to me. I can never know what that qualia will be like to you, so when I record brain activity xyz and someone uploads it into their brain, I can never be sure what kind of experience they're having.

That's a brutal question, and it's more or less the same question that arises in the paradox of material constitution (i.e., the case of a piece of clay and the clay statue that it constitutes). — Arcane Sandwich

I don't know. There are two "things" involved in the paradox (I'm using "thing" very loosely), the piece of clay and the clay statue. Are there two "things" in the brain replacement scenario? If my brain is slowly replaced while I'm conscious the whole time, do I "become" some other person at some point? (the way the lump "becomes" the statue) Or is there only just "me": me at the beginning of the process and me at the end.

Here is Bunge's take on that, and I happen to agree with him on this specific point: a brain transplant, by definition, is impossible. You can have someone else's kidney transplanted into your body. You cannot have someone's brain transplanted into your own body, even if the technology to do such a thing were to exist. Why not? Because if you receive someone else's brain, what has happened is that the other person's brain has received a body. You, on the other hand, exist wherever your brain exists. So, if you receive a brain transplant, what happens to you is that you have become disembodied. Someone else has occupied your body. You now only exist as a disembodied brain. If they put you into someone else's body, then you have received a new body. A brain transplant, therefore, is impossible by definition, even if the technology for it were to exist. — Arcane Sandwich

What if you do it slowly? Suppose that 1% of my brain is replaced with someone else's and I'm awake for the whole thing. And then another percent...At what point do I stop being me?

to settle my emotions about AI art — AlienVareient

write a poem to settle my emotions about AI art

ChatGPT said:

Here’s a poem to help you reflect on your feelings about AI art:

Between Code and Canvas

What stirs the brush to kiss the page,
A timeless dance, an artist’s stage?
A pulse of thought, a tender spark,
Or circuits humming in the dark?

Does art reside in hands that ache,
In sleepless nights for beauty's sake?
Or in the code, precise and clean,
Where forms emerge from lines unseen?

The human heart, a restless muse,
Breathes meaning into hues we choose.
But can machines not dream, in part,
And whisper shadows into art?

Each pixel born from logic’s womb,
Yet blooms with echoes of the room
Where artists sit, revise, refine—
Is their intent not intertwined?

Does value stem from toil alone,
From hands that shape and seeds they've sown?
Or is it found in what we feel,
No matter how the art turns real?

The critic’s voice, a callous storm,
May question what defines the form.
But art's a mirror, vast and wide,
Reflecting what we hold inside.

The painter, sculptor, coder too,
All chase a vision, seek what's true.
For every stroke, each line of code,
Is laden with the paths they've strode.

Yet fear arises, silent, stark—
Will machines outshine the human spark?
Do algorithms steal the soul,
Or simply play a different role?

Must we lament what might be lost,
Ignoring gains without a cost?
For AI is no thief, no foe—
It only follows where we go.

Perhaps it’s not a choice we face,
To pit the human in a race,
But rather see how both combine
To craft a future more divine.

So let your doubts dissolve in air,
The art we make is ours to share.
Each brushstroke—human, code, or blend—
Expands the story, finds no end.

For art is boundless, vast, and free,
A testament to what could be.
And whether born of hands or steel,
Its purpose stays to make us feel.

May this offer peace as you navigate your emotions about AI art.

God, this is a fascinating time to be alive. Well, everyone in the last 500 years has probably thought that.

If the terrorists stopped terrorizing, why would we keep conducting counterterrorism? Islam is not another evil empire coming to get us. — T Clark

That's a big if. Islam isn't an evil empire, and the Islamic holy book itself isn't any worse than the Bible or Torah, but for whatever reason, many Muslims have an archaic worldview where women are little more than property, violence against LGBTQ folk is justified, democracy is shunned, corrupt strongmen rule, and jihad against infidels is applauded. That's not going to change if we stop supporting Israel and wash our hands of the region. We would still be viewed as the Great Satan.

Those are the only people that can use force in a legitimate way, and only under certain conditions (i.e., proportionality, circumstance, level of threat, etc.). — Arcane Sandwich

And the military and special agents.

Right. I should have caught that. I was skimming the thread.

I take it that "religious tolerance" means tolerating religiously motivated acts. So if you do not tolerate the punch in question, then you are not practicing religious tolerance. You are being intolerant of a religion.

I think the only alternative is to say, "I am tolerating religiously motivated acts by prohibiting or censuring religiously motivated acts," which is contradictory. — Leontiskos

I wouldn't expect any country to blanketly tolerate all religious tenets. The tenets that infringe on other's rights of non-interference will not be tolerated and should not be.

The problem may or may not go away, but it will stop being our problem. — T Clark

I doubt it. In anycase, even if all support for Israel vanished and all troops were pulled out of the region, there's been such a history of terrorism against the U.S., the U.S. would still conduct counterterrorism operations, and those operations alone would provide justification for the jihadists to attack the U.S. and it's allies. It's an insolvable problem until the jihadists vanish.

5. Religious tolerance applies to religious tenets. — Leontiskos

It applies to some religious tenets. If your religion requires you to punch nonbelievers in the face, that shouldn't be tolerated.

It's even scarier if you consider I'm actually an advanced experimental Ai.

:grin:

Yeah, I know. It sounded cool at the time. lolz

The solution here, apparently, in this OP to the hard problem of consciousness is to radically deny the existence of consciousness in the first place; which, I for one, cannot muster up the faith to accept when it is readily available to me introspectively that it does exist. — Bob Ross

I agree. Does anyone here actually think they're consciousless p-zombies? Any argument that begins with the denial of consciousness and/or subjective experience is DOA. Nobody except for cranks and contrarians believes it.

I am predicting that we are going to reinvent slavery with AI; since it is feasible that, although they are not conscious, these sophisticated AIs will be sufficiently rational and free in their willing to constitute persons, and I don't think humanity is going to accept that they thereby have rights. — Bob Ross

I think about this all the time. There's a news article I read (probably 20 years ago) about some military official watching a bomb-clearing robot work it's way through a practice field. After watching the robot get blown up repeatedly and then crawling pathetically toward the next bomb, he said to stop the test. He couldn't stand to watch it anymore. Fast forward ten years from now and we have lifelike robots as intelligent as we are. What are we going to think when someone uploads a video of themself torturing/raping some childlike robot while it begs him to stop? I think we'll have laws protecting them.

:100:

These are my favorites:

Operation Mindcrime
Painkiller
Rust in Peace
Seventh Son
Dirt (Alice in Chains)

Mindcrime never gets the credit it deserves

Our galaxy alone has over 100 billion stars and now we know planets are very common. Even if there were no reported UFO sightings at all, there would be rampant speculation about whether we've ever been visited or are currently being watched. With over a trillion planets in the galaxy, how could there not be speculation? Nor is that speculation epistemoligically unsound.

In a similar way this response happened already with 9/11 in the US and the global war on terror. Somehow the laws that have governed covert actions and things like the attitude towards torture changed. — ssu

To paraphrase Mike Tyson, "Every country has a plan until they get punched in the face." It's easy to be against torture, until you have a captured nuclear bomb maker who won't tell you how to disarm the bomb that's about to go off. Do you start pulling fingernails and breaking fingers? Yes. That scenario is extremely implausible, but so what? It only takes one exception to invalidate a blanket policy like "no torture".

And when it came to WW2, people like "Bomber" Harris well knew that he would be facing war crimes tribunal if the allies lost. — ssu

If the Axis had won, Churchill and Roosevelt would have been hanged for war crimes, so what the Axis would have done to Allied leaders is neither here nor there.

Did Harris go overboard? Maybe. I like this quote from him, though:

"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them.

At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation.

They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

He's absolutely right. War is not fought by Queensbury rules. If your opponent is gleefully committing war crimes, like raping women to death, they're going to reap the whirlwind.

We = the Allies. Israel's crime then is not following the 1949 conventions that nobody else follows either, except for the Falklands?

Did we commit war crimes in World War 2?

You haven't demonstrated anything but a complete lack of understanding of the subject of moral philosophy. I recommend reading any introductory ethics textbook. — Dan

:roll:

Is it possible other health insurance executives in the industry might reevaluate their companies' denials of coverage policies in light of the murder? If one thinks that every denial of coverage could result in one's murder, wouldn't that be an incentive to reduce those denials a bit?

You're not ready for it yet, grasshopper

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VrvhUU7Kok

Welcome to the forum!

Assad's in Moscow. He used chemical weapons on his people, so why not hang out in Russia?