[mjburgess]

This matches my prejudices. Namely that 'thinking about god' is similar to the Eliza effect, ie., a kind of projection of consciousness onto the world.

Animals solve 'the problem of other minds' by assuming that everything is like them, ie., conscious. And then walking back from this presumption upon evidence to the contrary.

This kinda mild 'default schizophrenia' is something I've always been allergic to. (I imagine my defaults are lower than most, which no doubt runs the risk of under-valuing the actually conscious).

Nevertheless, it's one of the things that makes me most concerned about the hype around AI: I see nothing more in it than a nascent secular religion. Born "from the ground up", as all religions are, by immediate experience 'of the divine'. Ie., of that impulse to analogise the world to one's own mind.

[tinco]

You're starting to sound a little like Terry yourself towards the end there. How do you see a religion in enthusiasm around AI, and worse nothing else at all?

I think you're stretching the word religion very far from its meaning. No one is deriving any meaning or analogy to the world from AI beyond the answers to technical questions. Certainly no one attributes moral authority to AI?

The hype is about its applied value, not some new insight into the world.

[ChatGTP]

Have you ever watched an interview with Ray Kurzweil, it’s about as religious as it gets?

[tinco]

Well not recently, but isn't Kurzweil all about a hypothetical future superhuman intelligence? That's an interesting thought experiment but that's not what the current AI hype is about. LLM's by themselves are many things, but they're not intelligence, let alone superhuman intelligence.

Combined with well designed software LLM's can be used to create intelligent agents, but that's still not what Kurzweil envisions.

[ajani]

Thinking itself is a projection of consciousness. Thinking is "learned" behavior.