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by Animats
1584 days ago
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Maybe we should just say "Shut up and program", similar to how some physicists say, "Shut up and calculate", when the philosophical wrangling gets out of hand. Copenhagen interpretation vs. many-worlds? Does it matter? Is there any way to find out? If not, back to work. My comment on this for several decades has been that we don't know enough to address consciousness. We need to get common sense right first. Common sense, in this context, is getting through the next 30 seconds without screwing up. Automatic driving is the most active area there. Robot manipulation in unstructured environments is a closely related problem. Neither works well yet. Large neural nets are not particularly good at either of these problems. We're missing something important. Something that all the mammals have. People have been arguing whether animals have consciousness for a long time, at least back to Aristotle. Few people claim that animals don't have some degree of common sense. It's essential to survival. Yet AI is terrible at implementing common sense. This is a big problem. |
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And that's still framing it as if philosophizing is something to be avoided, a waste of time. I disagree with that sentiment. In particular, we can't really avoid thinking about consciousness even without an agreed-upon definition, because our beliefs on consciousness influence our actions. In particular, debates about the rights of animals are heavily influenced by our beliefs on their degree of consciousness.
IMO, "shut up and X" is code for "I don't enjoy thinking about the problem you're presenting (and perhaps I resent you a bit for making me think about it)". It's perfectly fine to just come out and say that you don't enjoy working on this particular problem. But that doesn't imply that the problem isn't worth thinking about.