Personally, the more I learn about the intelligence of myself and others, the less I believe that we are more than a bunch of pattern recognition layers.
It used to haunt me. I have come to acceptance. Of course I could be wrong, but that’s my intuition at this point.
Consciousness feels like it may at least partially be our fancy word for “soul” in the 21st century.
Measures of basic intelligence appear to us in crazy places in the animal kingdom. We will find it is not special at all.
I believe we are nothing but of a bunch of chemical states, the patterns and flow of which could be replicated in another system, natural or artificial.
On this planet, we just have the fastest, most complex and efficient processor going at this time.
Edit: I should add there may be more to human intelligence than “just” patter recognition, but that seems to do the bulk of the work.
Not neccesarily. We haven't really figured out how to benchmark other species' brains properly and I wouldn't be surprised if something like individual bottle-nosed dolphins or elephants couldn't rival at least some individual humans.
Depending on application. For arithmetic operations we're hopelessly outclassed even by pocket calculators.
I am as unconcerned about the hard problem as I am about elan vital, because there is just as much "compelling" evidence for either.
You can take the position that qualia are direct evidence and so our body of knowledge is mistaken, or you can take the position that qualia are likely deceptive and so cannot be taken as direct evidence, just like all of our other perceptions.
I'm constantly amazed how many people think the former position is more plausible.
In fact we do have the beginnings of viable neuroscientific theories of consciousness, including qualia [1], thus showing that the claims of a hard problem were just the same old smoke and mirrors we've seen time and time again in claims to human specialness, just like with vitalism.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
> and you are saying that our understanding of the world implies that magic doesn’t exist and so I must be mistaken about the magic of my legs and probably their existence as well.
Nah, our only disagreement is over the magic. I don't deny the perceptions of qualia, simply their special, "ineffable", "experiential" character that you implicitly conclude they must have. That's the magic that doesn't fit into our body of knowledge and that's the only "hard problem" of consciousness, a problem that doesn't really exist because it's based on erroneous assumptions, as described in the paper above.
Just like placing a pencil in a glass of water gives the illusion that the water has broken the pencil, so your introspective perceptions trick you into erroneous conclusions about your awareness.
That is the erroneous conclusion. "Qualia", whatever they are, fits squarely into physicalism and there exists literally no evidence that anything more is required. The paper I linked is proof that qualia can be accounted for within science as it exists. Again, you're asserting a god of the gaps.
> It clearly exists widely and many people report having it.
People report perceiving phenomenal experience in the same way that they report seeing water breaking pencils: https://scienceathomekids.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/IMG...
That doesn't mean that water actually breaks pencils. The meaning of any observation is always interpreted within a consistent body of knowledge. The problem is that people really want to take the perception of their experience as a direct observation of reality that doesn't need to go through that interpretation step, and that's simply incorrect.
What AI doesn't have is access to this world. Instead it has a fixed training set. The world is a much richer, dynamic training set. So AI would need an android body and to become part of human society to experience the real world as we do.
My recent tangent on this…
If the corpus of human creativity is the training set, then the prevalence of the AI overlords is recursive, isn’t it?