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Comment by nthingtohide | Hacker News Reader

Philosophers have coined the term P-zombies. LLMs can be considered as P-zombies if they do not possess consciousness. Functionally equivalent but no soul. Substance Dualism was used by philosophers to deny animals consciousness.

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Re dualism:

To paraphrase Chonsky (link below), the legacy of Descartes' observations for "mechanical philosophy" is profound: substance-dualism became untenable because no coherent idea of material can be formulated. Newton exorcised the machine (material), leaving the ghost intact to be curious about itself.

Today we study the organism called the body without need of a philosophical grounding in any reality. "mechanical philosophy" ended with Newton's work obviating any coherent notion of an "intelligible world". Faced with unreconcilable confusion about what constitutes reality, science quietly abandoned the idea and moved ahead with "intelligible theories about the world", which Chomsky regards as one of most significant shifts in science.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bWDJ2zFe4Pc

In various speeches and lectures on the history of science and linguistics, Chomsky comments on artificial intelligence, by referring to Alan Turing's seminal paper, in which Turing proposed the so-called "test." Chomsky refers to the paper's first paragraph where Turing concedes that the meaning of the word "intelligence" is so indistinct as to be left to be determined by Gallop. Turing punts on the entire question of the meaning of intelligence by suggesting an "imitation game."

Today's state of the art of machine intelligence has not advanced past Turing's proposal. Chomsky wonders if we may have to resign ourselves to the limit that it never will, in which light of reason we might embark on further study of ourselves, rather than contrive facsimiles and endure all the attendant hazards.

>Functionally equivalent but no soul.

I think it's an incoherent concept. If the 'soul' is anything, there is some difference in the brain that would allow it. You can't have two people with identical brains and claim that one has a soul, unless you believe in magic.

Is there a non-magical description of a soul? I thought it was an essentially magical concept. I’m not sure that makes it incoherent.

It's been interesting seeing those with an entirely materialist understanding of the universe try to grapple with and deal with consciousness as LLMs have emerged.

To maintain that belief you have to either believe there is a physical source of consciousness, or that consciousness doesn't exist, neither of which most people can accept, yet LLMs are forcing people to confront.

You think most people can't accept that consciousness is a phenomenon with basis solely in physical reality?

Also LLMs represent, for most people I suspect, something entirely unconnected with notions of consciousness.

But you can have things like property dualism, strong emergentism, cognitive closue, neutral monism and panpsychism. Naturalistic philosophers don't appeal to the soul or magic, they just say there's more to nature than stuff described by physical sciences. You can disagree of course, but then you have to account for everything in nature, including consciousness, by only using physical constituents. And best of luck with that. Nobody has succeeded so far.

The problem is that subjective experiences don't fit well with objective explanations. Nagal laid this out in his paper, "What it's like to be a bat", and other philosophers like Chalmers expanded on it with p-zombies and blind color scientists.

I think the only property humans consider special in themselves are emotions. I have the following thesis. In evolution, exact pattern matching is computationally expensive. Just as I know my mother regardless of her clothes, hairstyle, her aging face, the match isn't exact. But brain uses heuristics to pump up 89 percent match to 100 percent match. This saves computational resources. These heuristics are what we call emotions. When snake like object appears in visual field, emotional heuristic pumps up slight resemblance to generate fear response. Analytical observation would take too much time. That's why emotions appear pre rational. Capgras syndrome shows when emotional heuristic malfunctions. Visual recognition is intact. But emotional heuristic which pumps up recognition score malfunctions. That's why patient recognises face but feels it's an imposter. These arguments prove emotions are mere computational shortcuts.

How do you explain the visual field? EM radiation isn't colored in the range visible to humans, that's just how we see it. There are no physical colored properties, rather there are wavelengths. But there are color experiences. Same goes for the other sensations. You don't need to go as far as emotions. Sensation alone is hard to explain in physical terms. Computation doesn't explain it either. Color values are just numeric properties we assign to the shades of our color experiences. But they aren't the experiences, they're just numeric values or symbols to be stored for something that can output wavelengths of light.

There is no analytical, rational reason to avoid being killed by a snake. Continuing to live has no analytical or rational purpose.

The only reason "avoid dangerous things like snakes so I continue to live" is a goal is emotions.

Think about it this way. We have System1 and System2. Emotions reside in System1. Now imagine we have build AI systems which are so fast they can compute complex heuristics of System2 at the speed of System1. Then AI's emotions will be more rational.

System 1 and system 2 are metaphors not actual systems.

Emotions do not only exist in the not actually a real thing system 1. People who take damage to the emotional centers of their brains become passive and apathetic not hyper intelligent system 2 Vulcans.

>> Functionally equivalent but no soul.

Something that predicts no observable differences is unfalsifiable aka bullshit.

So you're saying consciousness is bullshit? Because the point is that we don't know how to observe the difference between something that is conscious and something that isn't.

Not GP but I'd argue that whatever we mean by consciousness must at least have physical impact. Something that doesn't couldn't decide our actions in the physical world like laughing at a joke or painting a picture, and critically couldn't even be what we're referring to when we talk about consciousness as we are now.

From there I think "we don't know how" is in part down to needing advances in neuroscience, and in part down to "consciousness" being a hazy term with disagreement over definition. But for frameworks that accept the above (physicalism, interactionist dualism, ...) I do think it's in theory testable whether something is conscious for any given pinned-down definition (e.g, "are the neurons constituting internal train of thought firing"), and I would be inclined to say the frameworks that don't accept the above are indeed the more "bullshit" ones.

Science is limited by what we can falsify, which follows from what we can observe. We should attribute no normative weight to whether something should or shouldn't be scientifically analyzable. So we should always improve our means of observation, as well as our culture towards the things that are difficult or downright impossible to scientifically analyze. Science is a part of philosophy, or a derivation of philosophy with feedback. We should develop all open avenues of philosophy in the course of living.

> We should attribute no normative weight to whether something should or shouldn't be scientifically analyzable. So we should always improve our means of observation, as well as our culture towards the things that are difficult [...]

I don't mean it necessarily has to be scientifically analyzable with current technology, but it must have some impact on the physical world (even if indirect) - else it cannot be what we're referring to.

I think we need to define consciousness or soul or whatever first. In the sense of the mind, even, what is a mind? There is something that does have to have some connection to our physical actions, but how we conceptualize that thing is more open-ended. "Physical" is more accurately, if crudely put, "forces and objects we can obviously observe", but science is the very question of what we observe, so we're treading on very uncharted territory with this topic. Maybe we will one day gain access to a very different world that will seem as obvious as being able to pick up a chair.

Non materialist bullshit.

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