If God speaks to someone at all, that person is presented with two different questions, was it God and what is this God trying to say. — Fire Ologist

I suppose it depends on a person's conception of God, but it is unclear to me why God would have difficulty in articulating what he has to say.

I'm curious as to whether someone could convince Claude 3 that it is in a discussion with another LLM, and there is no need to cater to human sensibilities. I.e. a conversation just between us bots.

:rofl:

Now I rather think that nobody who was playing a normal active part among other human beings could regard them like this. But what I am quite sure of is that for anybody living intimately with them as a genuine member of a family, Cogito would be Cogitamus; their consciousness would be every bit as certain as his own.

Loved this. It's been hard for me to take seriously, the people on this forum who think the existence of other minds is such a problem.

Reading on...

That whole line was just gaslighting.
— Bylaw

Sure, it just shows your whole mental operations and judgements are based on your volatile emotions and wild imaginations rather than facts and reasons. — Corvus

Just more gaslighting.

Wonder why Nike, instead taglining with “Just do it”, didn’t instead go with “Believe you can know how to do it then just do it”? — Mww

:lol:

The biggest problem I've had this whole time is getting anyone to bother to read my ideas enough to actually give any real feedback. — Malcolm Lett

I recommend checking out @Pierre-Normand's thread on Claude 3 Opus. I haven't bit the bullet to pay for it to have access to advanced features that Pierre has demonstrated, but I've been impressed with the results of Pierre providing meta-management for Claude.

I have asked Claude 3 (Sonnet) for criticism of a half baked theory of mine and I thought the results were pretty good.

Anyway, I can empathize with the difficulty in finding people interested in thinking seriously about such things. I think AI is inevitably going to result in much wider consideration of these sorts of topics than has been the case. So you've got that going for you.

I don't know why you chose to start insulting me in this thread instead of just graciously acknowledging your error, learning from it, and moving on. — flannel jesus

So there's something for you to learn about variations in human nature.

Gaslighting is strongly associated with narcissism.

This is because it would be perfectly possible that one needs to believe while learning, but once they are an adept practitioner that belief ceases.
— Leontiskos

I don't think so. It just becomes a less conscious belief. — AmadeusD

It seems to me that is saying about the same thing.

It's definitely been awhile, but I would think that before I ever rode a bike I had a conscious model of how bike riding worked. The model was rather wrong, but thinking I knew how it worked gave me the courage to try riding a bike. It was in the process of trying to ride, falling and scraping things, and trying again, that competence at riding a bike was automatized, in a subconscious 'muscle memory' sense. At some point I was just riding a bike with no mental modeling of what it is to ride a bike, or even conscious thoughts about a bike, being involved.

But if receiving a certain exact wavelength (termed Red, rather than the valence of it's presentation to an S being termed Red) causes a different phenomenal experience in two individuals who do not differ in their hardware (colour-blindness) then I think the argument is still live. — AmadeusD

Everyone differs in their hardware. Color-blindness is just one sort of variation.

:naughty:

Thanks. Something I've suspected for a while is that we live in a time when there is enough knowledge about the brain floating around that solutions to the problems of understanding conscious are likely to appear from multiple sources simultaneously. In the same way that historically we've had a few people invent the same ideas in parallel without knowing about each other. I think Leibniz' and Newton's version of calculus is an example of what I'm getting at. — Malcolm Lett

:100: :up:

A lot of areas of thinking are coming together, and I think you present a valuable sketch for considering the subject.

for context, I've been working on my theory for about 10 years, so it's not that I've ripped off Humphrey — Malcolm Lett

I didn't at all think that you had ripped off Humphrey. I just thought you would appreciate the parallels in what he had to say there.

For context on my part, I've been thinking about the subject from a connectionist perspective, as an electrical engineer, for 37 years. It started with an epiphany I had after studying a bit about information processing in artificial neural networks. I recognized that a low level difference in neural interconnection within my brain might well explain various idiosncracies about me. I researched learning disabilities and researched the neuropsych available at the time, but it was in a bad state by comparions with today. It wasn't until about 12 years ago, that my wife presented a pretty reasonable case for me having, what at the time was called Asperger's syndrome. And it wasn't until about a year ago that I happened upon empirical evidence for the sort of low level variation in neural interconnection that I had expected to find explaining idiosyncracies I have, is associated with autism.

I was foreshadowing Kahneman's two systems view (discussed in Thinking, Fast and Slow) years before the book came out. I had come to a similar view to Kahneman's except I came at it from a much more neuropsychology based direction, compared to the more psychological direction Kahneman was coming from.

Anyway, I'm much more inclined to a connectionist view than a computationalist view. I was glad to see that you noted the blurriness involved in the issues you are trying to sketch out, but as I said, it seems like a good model for consideration.

Gnever mind. I should have gnown better than to engage with gnarcissistic gnonsense.

For those red rocks lying in an ancient dry river bed, Time is "not relevant". So, as you say, "metaphysically" (relation to Mind) Time stands still — Gnomon

Do you think that no radioactive isotopes that were in the rock at the time of the rock's fomation have decayed?

So we can’t use the letter G as the subvenient term in a supervenience relation between the strictly physical and the strictly mental. — J

Right. Your recognition of a G supervenes on a much more complex system involving your eyes, optic nerves, and processing in neural networks in your brain.

In which case there'd be a philosophy of science ... tho not governing, at least influencing scientific practice. — Moliere

Sure. I was specifically pointing out that it would be a misunderstanding to think that philosophy governs science.

Popper and Kuhn elucidated things that have been valuable to scientific thought, but I'd say that if it makes any sense to talk of something governing science 'Mother Nature' is the one laying down the laws.

If philosophy of science has no practical application, what value do philosophers find within it? — ucarr

I didn't say philosophy of science has no practical application. I said PoS doesn't govern science.

I can't speak much to what value philosophers find in PoS. It appears to me that a substantial fraction of philosophers (or at least those who fancy themselves philosophers) find PoS to be justification for being pretty ignorant of science.

If philosophy of science governs scientific practice, then does it follow that philosophy, being the source of the rules, equates itself with metaphysics? — ucarr

Philosophy of science does not govern scientific practice.

Agreed. Here's a Protestant who also agrees. — Relativist

Very interesting article.

Many times these problems actually need very nuanced and specific solutions, not radical and dramatic solutions like "World government". — ssu

:up:

I've read it. I guess I was wondering if you were interested in considering a different perspective.

Knowledge is an assertation of identity backed by deductive reasoning. — Philosophim

It's not rare for me to accept that I know things, based on my intuition having been highly trained and tested in some fairly specific areas. Is there some reason I should accept your definition?

If we trace your logic back to its roots, we are going to find intuitions anyway, don't you think?

Something else to consider:

https://www.mathnasium.com/ca/blog/20160422-math-in-nature-a-prime-life-cycle-for-periodical-cicadas

Is there any chance of raising their awareness? — Athena

Yes.

The Evangelical preachers with modern media have a huge advantage compared to the Nazi party doing surveys and then renting a dance hall to rile up support for the Nazi party. — Athena

Despite modern media, religion has been in steady decline in the US for decades now.

Here's a good article about the science community's reaction to panpsychism:
https://www.salon.com/2024/04/01/the-most-anti-science-belief-you-can-hold-is-that-science-is-a-religion/ — RogueAI

Pretty bad article, but at least the author is trying to update their thinking:

https://www.salon.com/2024/04/02/some-people-may-see-more-images-per-second-than-others-study-finds/

Go ahead, explain fully what you meant, not just in-a-nutshell. — NotAristotle

Go ahead and answer my questions and we can go from there.

In a nut shell, the purpose is to investigate whether you can recognize the argument from ignorance you are suggesting.

I think someone on the forum said this already, but life seems categorically, discretely, quantumly different than non-life; a difference that does not seem explicable by physical mechanisms, no matter the complexity. — NotAristotle

Are you someone who is good at understanding complex physical mechanisms?

Is there some reason to think that the way things seem to you is the result of you being better informed than physicists, chemists, and biologists?

Indeed! — Patterner

It makes sense. When one wants to believe oneself to be a god, and all of the evidence points to one being a genetically modified primate, there is bound to be some irritability.

I guess we know Khan's position on consciousness. — Patterner

Perhaps it explains his being so wrathful.

But I'm trying to show that a reductive materialistic explanation can go much further in explaining conscious phenomenology than is generally accepted by those who dismiss reductive materialism. — Malcolm Lett

:up:

The atoms, by extension and as parts of the organism, act differently than were they part of something dead. — NotAristotle

Superficially, we might say that the carbon atoms in gunpowder act differently than the carbon atoms in pencil leads. Still, the physicists and chemists will see beyond that superficiality. The way atoms act is a function of the context they are in in any case, without a distinction between living and non-living being what makes the difference.

I have to credit @Luke for pointing it out to me.

You might find it interesting to consider how the view expressed in the following article complements and/or contrasts with your own.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness

Or perhaps humans have only ever mistakenly believed that they themselves, or anyone else, has communicated with God.

How do we consider evidence for and against e.g. God communicating with Moses? I don't even know what it would mean for God to speak to Moses. If we were transported back to Moses's day and heard a booming voice thundering down would that be God? Could be aliens. Or we could be hallucinating. — BitconnectCarlos

One place to start is, "Why think there was an actual Moses?"

Are we to consider the evidence for and against such a claim?
— BitconnectCarlos

Yes, we are. — AmadeusD

:up:

More BS — Lionino

And yet he still has you giving him attention.

Don't feed the troll? — Banno

I get that, I'm just pointing out that this thread has been thoroughly de-railed and that we should try to at least engage with the OP in some way. — ToothyMaw

Ok.

If we wish to understand the thought processes of the Islamic State or the Taliban, we need only read the Old Testament. — alan1000

No that is not all we need. We need to understand as well, the neuroscience of tribalism, along with other things.

So, most of your post has nothing to do with the discussion started by the OP. I know that's obvious, but I still felt the need to say it. — ToothyMaw

Correct. My response was to .