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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

If you find this at all interesting, there are a few other items I'd recommend.

Buddhism and Modern Psychology on Coursera covered some mind boggling studies that give strong evidence of this, and subsequently support for core secular Buddhist practices.

Happiness Hypothesis by Haidt discusses at a higher level the connection of modern psychology to stoicism, Buddhism, and the many brains theories.

And Waking Up by Sam Harris takes a slightly more incendiary take, but is interesting for its ultimate conclusion that there is no self, just a cacophony of selves running on autopilot.

I personally digested these and came to the conclusion that we are on the cusp of human like AI, but we just haven't lowered our expectations for human like consciousness enough to realize it.

I'd be very interested in your take on these, too.

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> I personally digested these and came to the conclusion that we are on the cusp of human like AI, but we just haven't lowered our expectations for human like consciousness enough to realize it.

Ah, that's my take as well! The one thing AI is missing, IMO, is the ability to train over its own output and model itself as a single simplified self, which would then act as a guide signal to get all these diverse micro-selves "on the same page."

Ie. self-consciousness.

Imho we are not even close to AGI. The biggest issue that I see is that a consciousness, a mind, cannot exist in a void. What makes a behavior intelligent is the environment. As in, the behavior is intelligent because it provides an advantage to the one exhibiting it. Looking at humans and our environment I am having a hard time imaging how an AI could learb to be intelligent in this environment (except for closely controlled settings) if its survival does not depend on it.

I recollect that during Lemoine’s conversations with LaMDA, the AI stated that it was actually several independent systems that were able to hold conversations with each other. I thought that was an important and novel point and pertinent to this topic.

Well, keep in mind that that sort of thing is almost certainly not introspection but imitation. This is not a novel idea, and it would have appeared in its training corpus.

As I understand the training approach, LaMDA isn't aware of its own output in a way that would allow it to introspect like that.

What does an individual humans intelligence look like without the wisdom of institutions like family, extended family and community, schools, academys and conservatories, the public sphere, and their interpretations of the world.

I know a lot of my ability to organize the world and characterize objects comes from the organizational structures refined and propagated by these institutions

gpt 3 is going to be pretty good at regurgitating what your parents said if that's all it hears.

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