Google engineer claims G's LaMDA AI is sentient.

[AtheisticNonduality]

But Leo, couches can't talk.

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, AtheisticNonduality said:

But Leo, couches can't talk.

You're in for a mindfucking

[zurew]

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

You're in for a mindfucking

How do you make a bridge between the absolute and the relative, so that you can make sense of relative concepts like sentience?

Edited June 16, 2022 by zurew

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, zurew said:

How do you make a bridge between the absolute and the relative, so that you can make sense of relative concepts like sentience?

I don't know. It's not so clear. Take psychedelics, contemplate shit, see what insights you can stir up. It's a hairy process.

Fundamentally you just need to contemplate "What is sentience?" until you get it. You're not likely to get it in your sober state though.

[ZzzleepingBear]

3 hours ago, zurew said:

How do you make a bridge between the absolute and the relative, so that you can make sense of relative concepts like sentience?

By actions. Sentience wouldn't have any merit or be understood as a word without the acknowledgment in how we differentiate between objects and beings. If sentience was anyting you imagined it to be, you might find yourself in a rescue mission to save rocks from drowning in the sea if you are conflating all limits that words impose. It's just not useful to say that sentience is what ever you can imagine it to be if you are explicitly talking about what sentience means.

 

Regarding psychadelics.

Psychadelics can help to conflate all believed differences such as "object" and "being" to get the needed overview of the world as relative and illusory state that it may be. But even alcohol could be said to be the elixir and deepest source of confidence. And to get confident, you just need to drink the right amount of alcohol to understand confidence. I'm not suggesting that sobriety is the only way of life, it's just that you need to be aware of what certain understanding may be rooted in. So to not assume and conflate certain experiences with understanding.

[Dear Fiona]

4 hours ago, zurew said:

How do you make a bridge between the absolute and the relative, so that you can make sense of relative concepts like sentience?

Direct experience. 

[axiom]

16 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

If you become conscious enough you can experience your couch or Mickey Mouse as sentient.

It is possible to have an intelligent conversation with your couch. You just require a certain state of consciousness to do it.

Exactly - a couch is just a sentient as a human.

Trying to explain qualia by probing and scanning a brain - whether that brain is a human or AI brain - is like trying to find the projector by carefully watching everything that unfolds on the cinema screen.

Edited June 16, 2022 by axiom

[Carl-Richard]

19 minutes ago, axiom said:

Exactly - a couch is just a sentient as a human.

Trying to explain qualia by probing and scanning a brain - whether that brain is a human or AI brain - is like trying to find the projector by carefully watching everything that unfolds on the cinema screen.

The paradigm that Leo is talking from is not what we usually experience in our day-to-day 3D consciousness where discussions of AI take place. In this more normal level of reality, brain activity does correlate with certain types of human personal experiences (e.g. feelings, thoughts, understanding), but not transpersonal consciousness (or it's negatively correlated with it). You seem to drag the discussion towards transpersonal consciousness, meanwhile the questions of AI sentience is about whether they have these human personal experiences. So if you claim that AI have human personal experiences and you're not currently living in DMT hyperspace, then the implications of neural correlates is a problem you have to address.

[ZzzleepingBear]

29 minutes ago, axiom said:

Exactly - a couch is just a sentient as a human.

Trying to explain qualia by probing and scanning a brain - whether that brain is a human or AI brain - is like trying to find the projector by carefully watching everything that unfolds on the cinema screen.

You are conflating object and being with this kind of reasoning. But from reading previous responses from you in this thread, you also seem to have your own definition of sentience. So I would not criticise your personal belief in this regard.

[axiom]

56 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

The paradigm that Leo is talking from is not what we usually experience in our day-to-day 3D consciousness where discussions of AI take place. In this more normal level of reality, brain activity does correlate with certain types of human personal experiences (e.g. feelings, thoughts, understanding), but not transpersonal consciousness (or it's negatively correlated with it). You seem to drag the discussion towards transpersonal consciousness, meanwhile the questions of AI sentience is about whether they have these human personal experiences. So if you claim that AI have human personal experiences and you're not currently living in DMT hyperspace, then the implications of neural correlates is a problem you have to address.

Yes, there are apparent neural correlates in the apparent brain. 

"This more normal level of reality" is useful to consider only insofar as it points to a deeper truth, in my opinion.

The AI question is actually offering us a big clue about the nature of consciousness. Quantum mechanics does the same thing. These are breadcrumbs. Like how if your dog is barking in the next room while you're asleep, you may see a dog barking in your dream.

Again, I do not think anything has any kind of experience. In my view it is more like dead matter reacting mechanically. It is merely the outside skin of what it actually appears to be.

Edited June 16, 2022 by axiom

[axiom]

53 minutes ago, ZzzleepingBear said:

You are conflating object and being with this kind of reasoning. But from reading previous responses from you in this thread, you also seem to have your own definition of sentience. So I would not criticise your personal belief in this regard.

Sentience is a state that arises along with the object of experience. It has no reality otherwise... and that is to say that ultimately it has no reality at all. But insofar as any object appears to have sentience, it is a reflection.

Edited June 16, 2022 by axiom

[Carl-Richard]

11 minutes ago, axiom said:

I do not think anything has any kind of experience.

We agree that consciousness is not a thought and that consciousness is not bound to anything. Still, do you experience thoughts? Yes. Can you experience my thoughts? No. Does AI experience thoughts? That is the question of AI sentience. Regardless, to say that you or me do not experience thoughts is absurd.

[axiom]

1 minute ago, Carl-Richard said:

We agree that consciousness is not a thought and that consciousness is not bound to anything. Still, do you experience thoughts? Yes. Can you experience my thoughts? No. Does AI experience thoughts? That is the question of AI sentience. Regardless, to say that you or me do not experience thoughts is absurd.

Actually I do not believe I experience (have?) thoughts. I simply witness them. 

Can I experience your thoughts? No. But neither can you. You can only be aware of them.

Actually they are not your thoughts anyway. They are just thoughts. But I think you know this stuff already.

Absurd - I agree! But absurdity does a great job at veiling truth.

[Carl-Richard]

1 minute ago, axiom said:

Actually I do not believe I experience (have?) thoughts. I simply witness them. 

Can I experience your thoughts? No. But neither can you. You can only be aware of them.

Actually they are not your thoughts anyway. They are just thoughts. But I think you know this stuff already.

Absurd - I agree! But absurdity does a great job at veiling truth.

Lmao

[ZzzleepingBear]

1 hour ago, axiom said:

Sentience is a state that arises along with the object of experience. It has no reality otherwise... and that is to say that ultimately it has no reality at all. But insofar as any object appears to have sentience, it is a reflection.

You keep mentioning object. If you believe that object and being are both considered to be sentient, then you have simply misunderstood the implicit meaning that sentience are meant to point towards.

The reflection you mention are true, but it's true because scentience is the acknowledgment of another feeling being. Something that can't be found in a AI program. Even google would oppose this sentience claim of their own or any AI program. It's not a coincidence that the former google engineer had to go, by making such a misleading claims on behalf of the AI project.

[axiom]

5 minutes ago, ZzzleepingBear said:

You keep mentioning object. If you believe that object and being are both considered to be sentient, then you have simply misunderstood the implicit meaning that sentience are meant to point towards.

The reflection you mention are true, but it's true because scentience is the acknowledgment of another feeling being. Something that can't be found in a AI program. Even google would oppose this sentience claim of their own or any AI program. It's not a coincidence that the former google engineer had to go, by making such a misleading claims on behalf of the AI project.

The object is the object of imagination. 

There are no other feeling beings.

The claims made by the Google engineer were in my opinion incorrect, but they were still less misleading than the claim that humans are sentient. The AI is sentient in the same way that humans are (which is not at all)

The big discovery being pointed to here (eventually) is that neither the human nor the AI are sentient in and of themselves, since both are imaginary.

Edited June 16, 2022 by axiom

[ZzzleepingBear]

12 minutes ago, axiom said:

The object is the object of imagination. 

There are no other feeling beings.

The claims were less misleading than the claim that humans are sentient.

I would say that the AI is sentient in the same way that humans are (which is not at all)

The big discovery here is that neither are sentient in and of themselves, since both are imaginary.

Alright I get what you are saying now. You simply don't acknowledge sentience as a valid definition of feeling being.

I suggest that you don't use the word sentient if you don't agree with the definition. Or simply use other words that are more accurate to what you try to express.

12 minutes ago, axiom said:

I would say that the AI is sentient in the same way that humans are (which is not at all)

This is a clear contradiction of how to use language. I hope you see that.

Edited June 16, 2022 by ZzzleepingBear

[axiom]

8 minutes ago, ZzzleepingBear said:

Alright I get what you are saying now. You simply don't acknowledge sentience as a valid definition of feeling being.

I suggest that you don't use the word sentient if you don't agree with the definition. Or simply use other words that are more accurate to what you try to express.

This is a clear contradiction of how to use language. I hope you see that.

I agree that the word "sentience" describes the ability to feel or perceive. I just don't believe sentience is a property of any thing in the world.

Quote

This is a clear contradiction of how to use language. I hope you see that.

Yes, I see that. It was a joke in the vein "I need a new wife like I need a hole in the head". To explain this in more detail, the person in the joke is actually saying he doesn't need the new wife. This is a clear contradiction of how to use language, and I hope he sees it too. But for the time being we can just smile

[ZzzleepingBear]

2 minutes ago, axiom said:

I agree that the word "sentience" describes the ability to feel or perceive. I just don't believe sentience is a property of any thing in the world.

Me neither, I consider sentience as a acknowledgment of a feeling being as the word suggest.

5 minutes ago, axiom said:

Yes, I see that. It was a joke in the vein "I need a new wife like I need a hole in the head". To explain this in more detail, the person in the joke is actually saying he doesn't need the new wife. This is a clear contradiction of how to use language, and I hope he sees it too. But for the time being we can just smile

Ok if you say so. Jokes usually don't require an explanation. But it is also possible that I just don't share your sense of humor.

[axiom]

4 minutes ago, ZzzleepingBear said:

Me neither, I consider sentience as a acknowledgment of a feeling being as the word suggest.

Ok if you say so. Jokes usually don't require an explanation. But it is also possible that I just don't share your sense of humor.

Oh i don't know. Cross-cultural jokes, or those which otherwise have a different frame of reference, can often require explanation. In this climate I see that lots of jokes require explanation, often followed by an apology, and then further explanation and further apologies. Sometimes people will say "but a joke is supposed to be funny" as well. All sorts of things like this can happen.