[bondarchuk]

Sensory appearance not being equivalent to reality does not have any relevance to the question of AI and humans ultimately being the same kind of information-processing system. Just handwaving "that's X philosophical position and it has problems" does not strike me as a good argument either unless you manage to explain how these problems pertain to the question at hand.

[keiferski]

Unless AI becomes indistinguishable from human beings on a cellular level, yes, it’s entirely relevant and is the single most relevant thing. A lot of people seem to think that if an AI can simulate the appearance of a human being, that makes them equivalent to one. It might introduce some problems WRT to determining if an entity is human or not, but this doesn’t somehow prove they humans are just a “parlor trick.”

This is a positivistic argument and as I pointed out, positivism has a lot of issues. The best counter argument IMO being that it’s needlessly reductive. This is all covered pretty clearly in the link.

[ben_w]

> Unless AI becomes indistinguishable from human beings on a cellular level, yes, it’s entirely relevant and is the single most relevant thing.

I disagree.

Thought experiment: design a circuit which has as many inputs and outputs as a biological neurone, such that it always maps inputs to outputs in the same way (including the observation that this isn't a static map but one which changes over time), then connect them as neurons are in one of us.

While clearly nothing like an natural brain on a cellular level, I believe this is a sufficient similarity to be "the same parlour tricks".

The question then is: how close does the design actually need to be, while not losing anything of importance?

Perceptrons were only ever a toy model, so they may well be insufficient; but on the other hand, for a sense of scale, GPT-3 is about the complexity of a rodent brain rather than a human brain — and that suggests that humans could learn to be simultaneous experts in many dozens of fields and languages with a mere tenth of a percentage point of our brains if only we lived long enough to read the entire internet.

Which matters most — neurons, connective structure, learning environment, or something else — is, I think, still an open question. But even between all the differences, AI collectively are general purpose enough to at least suspect these things have got a lot of similarities where it matters.

[bondarchuk]

>A lot of people seem to think that if an AI can simulate the appearance of a human being, that makes them equivalent to one.

That is not what BoiledCabbage was saying. He was saying: "And what do you feel when we understand it well enough to realize we're the same type of parlor tricks?"

>This is a positivistic argument and as I pointed out, positivism has a lot of issues. The best counter argument IMO being that it’s needlessly reductive. This is all covered pretty clearly in the link.

You're not really making any specific claim about what is wrong with BoiledCabbage's speculation, and why this specific thing is wrong. "That's wrong because positivism, it's all in this 5k word wikipedia article!" just doesn't prove anything.

[keiferski]

If you haven’t done the reading, I can’t explain it to you in a HN comment. I’m not trying to be snarky about it, but I genuinely don’t know what else to tell you. This is a pretty foundational ideal in the philosophy of science.

What’s wrong with the speculation is that it’s a positivistic argument that is needlessly reductive. It’s reductive because it assumes that appearing human-like is equivalent to being human.

The fact that we can understand how “AI” works as a parlor trick yet appears human-like in no way implies that human beings are nothing more than the same parlor trick processes. To argue that it does is to make a positivistic argument that doesn't take in account a whole host of other things. As noted in the Criticism section of the article (which is hardly 5,000 words) there are many issues with this approach.

[bondarchuk]

>It’s reductive because it assumes that appearing human-like is equivalent to being human.

I don't read that assumption into BoiledCabbage's statement at all: "[..] when we understand it well enough to realize we're the same type of parlor tricks?" This clearly implies a (hypothetical) deeper understanding of processes in the brain and their specific qualities, rather than (as you seem to be implying) a mere comparison of the outputs.

Edit: anyway, the criticism section opens like this:

>Historically, positivism has been criticized for its reductionism, i.e., for contending that all "processes are reducible to physiological, physical or chemical events," "social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals," and that "biological organisms are reducible to physical systems."

This (at least the 1st and 3rd quoted item, while I think the 2nd one is just out of scope) is exemplary of the kind of things that are obviously true for anyone but a subset of philosophers clinging to magical and unprovable beliefs about the human mind. I asked you to elaborate your argument precisely because if it all boils down to simply rejecting physicalism (in philosophy of mind terms) there's nothing new to argue about. The recurring discussion about "AI can never be like humans" is only interesting when the participants do a little bit more than just staking out their own position in idealism vs dualism vs physicalism terms and regurgitating all the known debates between these camps.

[keiferski]

I don't read this statement as hypothetical at all.

And what do you feel when we understand it well enough to realize we're the same type of parlor tricks?

It seems pretty clearly when and not if. Not sure what you're reading there.

[bondarchuk]

"When" is in the future so I don't get your issue. Unless your point is that we can in principle never hope to understand certain things about it.