| > So why we call it subjective experience then? Probably it is irrelevant, and the reasons are purely historic... or maybe not. How about the idea of computers experiencing things, just not "subjectively" but rather "digitally"? Or choose any other adjective you like. You are arguing against assumptions, but why you just accept the idea of experience with the assumption that human way to experience things is the only possible way? We call it subjective because is 'we, ourselves' and not the objects we perceive there in the world, where the 'experience' is manifested, as perception. We do not always codify dichotomies in language. > No sane AI researcher would stop researching AI to get PhD in linguistics to build a bridge between AI research and linguistics. Probably in an ideal world this shouldn't happen, maybe it is short-sighted behavior of a system, but it is just how things work in our real world. In the real world, anyone doing a serious PhD thesis will read whatever is necessary to build a proper, sound theory or body of work. This dismissal just makes me think that you don't know how a PhD thesis is done. > BTW it is a good example of what happens with all the philosophy when shit hits the fan. When possibility of empirical studies arrives, no one bothers themselves with philosophy of things. From what I see, you never took philosophy seriously. I don´t know how you can then seriously engage in a conversation about philosophy. > I studied psychology, I've read some linguists (cognitive ones, because they are in an adjacent field), and you see, I don't have trust in either. They do their research, they find some interesting facts and devise interesting theories, but it is all looks more like a chemistry in the first half of a XIX century, than a chemistry after periodic table was created. They can't find their building blocks to create a sound theory. This is true, cognitive linguistics do not represent a unified theory. Not yet, at least, and maybe it will not come to that. The same happens in psychology, but nobody is dismissing psychology all at once just because of that. > No, I'm not implying "modeling a thinking process". We don't know what thinking process is. What we observe in our minds is not thinking by itself, it is some kind of a mirror process in our consciousness. The real thinking is hidden from us, but it creates echoes in our consciousness we can observe. If we don't know how thinking works, we can't model it. BTW the reverse is also true: if we can't model thinking, we don't know how it works. This is exactly what the assumptions I challenge are about. The AI space already declared that they 'know' how such processes work. Or at least, they pretend they do. > I'm defining thinking more in terms of a problem solving ability. Like psychologists do. Science still doesn't have a good enough definition for thinking, but it has some definitions that a) operational; b) good enough for some limited tasks. "Operational" means that they are defined in terms how to measure what you define, not in terms of modeling some process. You would agree that 'problem solving' is just a small portion of what 'thinking' constitutes. > You see, until philosophy methods successfully proved that something is conscious despite it was deemed unconscious before, we can't really know that their methods really work. Maybe they work, or maybe they just mirror our biases and heuristics. You talk about philosophy as if argumentative biases were completely strange to philosophers. Not the case, and a great deal of XX century philosophy is exactly about that. But if you read the sources on AI research through its own history, you will see how the AI research space is full of such biases and assumptions. Again, my original argument is about that. > I hadn't read books you mentioned, but in your words I see nothing that can hint that those books have something I don't considered already. So maybe I'll read them in a future, but I wouldn't postpone my engagement in the conversation till I read them. You don't have to trust me. Just pick them up and think for yourself, do some research. Regarding postponing the conversation, I really appreciate that, but it is really difficult to argue about books you haven't read, especially if they are complex ones. Unfortunately I don't have that much time to explain the books in detail. |
You are repeating it in different forms all the time, so it seems really important to you. I should state, that I don't believe that AI research has some special insights into human nature or into what agency is. I'm sure that they have some biases and assumptions, and maybe it is full of them. You don't need to prove it to me, but if you want to, you could list some of them. It would be interesting to read.
OTOH I really like what AI research does right now. I believe it is beneficial for science and philosophy. "Throw away all that garbage from XX century and build something new." It will be something new, because they are creating things, not just daydreaming philosophically. It may be that the result of their research would be laughable, but it doesn't matter in the long term. It would be another way to look at things, which is the very important for pushing human knowledge forward. I expect AI research would create a heap of knowledge that would be mined for decades then to be incorporated into existing knowledge frameworks. The existing frameworks would break and people would create new ones. And it is an unhappy path, assuming that AI research will not stumble onto a good enough framework to consume all (or some of) others.
Ah... There is one more assumption in there. The assumption that AI wouldn't change the world enough for my intuition of how things go becomes wrong, because it was trained on data from the old world where there was no AI.
> We call it subjective because is 'we, ourselves' and not the objects we perceive there in the world, where the 'experience' is manifested, as perception. We do not always codify dichotomies in language.
So you assume that this naming normalized due to stupid historic reasons, and reject the possibility that it reflects something deeper? Well, I don't. I'm consciously keep myself in an uncertain state, in other words I keep my mind wide open. Psychology teaches us to keep an eye on the exact phrasing, it reflects the real thinking process. It may be hard or even impossible to decipher these cues, but we should try at least.
> In the real world, anyone doing a serious PhD thesis will read whatever is necessary to build a proper, sound theory or body of work. This dismissal just makes me think that you don't know how a PhD thesis is done.
You are talking about about an established science, AI research regarding LLMs is not an established science. Things happens too fast for science to be established. If they slow down, then would be the great time to learn linguistics and to build bridges.
> From what I see, you never took philosophy seriously. I don´t know how you can then seriously engage in a conversation about philosophy.
I took it seriously enough to go from standard philosophic meta level to meta-meta level. I'm seeing not just what philosophy says it is doing, I see what it is really doing de facto. It is like POSIWID principle: the system purpose is what it does.
> The AI space already declared that they 'know' how such processes work. Or at least, they pretend they do.
I'd ask "did they really declared that", but you phrasing suggests that they didn't. I do not exactly on the topic, I do not read all they say, so I may be wrong, but I suppose what they really say, is more like "our machines can think". It is not the same "we know how thinking processes work" in general. They claim that they created some thinking processes. Am I right?
> You would agree that 'problem solving' is just a small portion of what 'thinking' constitutes.
I'm not sure really. You see, I don't know how thinking works. Especially I don't know how human thinking works. It may be that it involves more than just problem solving, or may be not. I can agree that when I reflect my own thinking it looks like something more than just problem solving. Or maybe something less: I have a strong suspicion that human thinking is tuned evolutionary to solve a specific kind of problems. Cultural training repurpose it for some other kinds, but it is like to drive in screws with a hammer, or to hammer nails with a screwdriver. And yes, it is the reasons I do not trust philosophers and scientists to judge if AI has agency already. The space of possible answers includes very scary ones, and in such cases human thinking strongly prefers safe options and creates very strong arguments in favor of them.
Wow. I really glad I spent time arguing with you. I don't know if it was beneficial for you in some way, but it was for me, so thank you for your time. I've just found that I doubt that human thinking is up to the problem. Yeah... Probably the problem will be solved in a chaotic way, when society would just picks some "random" opinion after the dust settles. Yes! It is very likely outcome, we'll end with "they're made out of weights", so the text is prophetic.
> You don't have to trust me. Just pick them up and think for yourself
I'd like to, but you failed to spark a real interest in those books in me. I still do not see what fundamental shifts in my beliefs they may bring. They look like reiteration of thoughts and ideas I know already. Or maybe I know these ideas from reiterations of these books, which are the original sources for the ideas.
I took notice of them, and I'll try to read them. But not right now.