Banno

That's pretty generous. Christianity actively demolished the philosophical schools of Athens and Alexandria, destroyed philosophical texts and persecu...

A bit of analysis won't go astray. Forgetting what we might call them, there are a range of levels of belief we might identify. It is also worth flipp...

Have you ever noticed that threads continue well beyond the point at which the conundrum of the OP had been answered? And this without a change of top...

The mysterious Quantum Observer. Source of more hokum than India. :wink: Doubtless that's why @"Clarky" expelled it from this thread, by definition. A...

What's the point. Pedantic nonsense. You can define "essence" as purple egg yoke for all I care.

It's evident you still haven't understood. I am not the one being bullheaded. Cheers.

Seems pretty clear. Do you disagree that the essence of a thing is what is necessary and sufficient for that thing to be that thing? Playing at schola...

No, providing a definition. Kenny is setting out useful distinctions between belief and faith. Your denying them does not make them disappear. Kenny j...

Sure, and an essence sets out both the necessary and the sufficient conditions. So it remains that, in answer to , ethical standing is no the essence ...

Those who changed their mind as to god's residence had a belief that he was in the sky, but not faith in his being in the sky.

Prima facie, that looks contradictory. "It never includes the observer", when post-1905, both relativistic physics and QM explicitly make use of the o...

Sure. Just pointing out that you have changed your approach form saying I misunderstood Kenny to saying Kenny is wrong. So to your argument: This in o...

Hey, Banno, could you elucidate? Well, if @"Baden" doesn't mind. Seems the thread has moved on anyway. It's the difference between looking around to s...

So you have moved on from claiming i misunderstood Kenny to claiming that Kenny is wrong. I'm not seeing anything of value in your posts.

I get to decide which one is right? Or is it that whichever one I choose is right (Relativism)? Or that it doesn't matter whch one I chose? So you agr...

So that's five different systems for a start... Which one is the ‘system of ethics’?

How would that work?

But then you are a late-sipping left-leaning do-gooder from Melbourne.

"Overpowers"? Consider this: I agree with Kenny here, and maintain that "The epitome of faith is unshaken belief in the face of overwhelming evidence ...

Well, yes, conceptual analysis... But I would say that, wouldn't I? You must have noticed by now that philosophy is not of much help in deciding betwe...

No, you don't. That would requirer far more than you seem to be willing to provide. Explain where I misunderstand Kenny. Mere accusation is a nothing.

Compare Midgley's Now we are getting there. These are things beyond the range of any mere chatbot.

Nothing. Or rather, everything. It's not a conclusion, but a choice. That stuff I write about direction of fit, and naturalistic fallacies, and so on....

Here's an oddity. You don't wish to discus it, but you post on it, and in that post claim I have misunderstood it. Presumably, since you do not wish t...

TO get to moral worth as the essence of being human one would need to claim that something is human if and only if it has moral worth. But there are t...

What this discussion shows is that as soon as an observable criteria for consciousness is set out a clever programer will be able to "simulate" it. It...

Ok, I agree that humans have moral worth. But "they have been set aside as holy" does not provide an answer as to why they have moral worth. It simply...

A better approach might be found in Mary Midgley. For her the whole discussion is "worse than a waste of time. It is a damaging self-deception". What ...

the question is how LaMDA is to be treated. The burden is on those who say it is not sentient to demonstrate that it is not sentient. Send in Baden......

There's the question. To invoke the Spartans, "...if..." That's rather the issue: what is it that makes a nervous system capable of suffering, but not...

If there is a chance that LaMDA is suffering (there almost certainly isn't) then the burden of proof must lie in favour of LaMDA, and against Google t...

Again, this looks more like confirmation bias. LeMoine has decided the software is sentient and then asked questions designed to demonstrate his thesi...

:up: I do not think LaMDA is sentient. I am in favour of, if there is reasonable doubt, giving it the benefit thereof. At least for a laugh.

So we go from language use to sentience to personhood to having a soul. There's a few steps between each of these. Bring in the analytic philosophers.

That's pretty much the whole of my comment on your comment about language. It's neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for humanity.

Well, thank you for finally presenting an account of why we might think LaMDA not sentient. It corresponds roughly to a view I expressed earlier. It f...

Sure, all that. But I think it remains that: 1. There are humans who do not use language. Hence the definition leaves out some who should be included....

So I guess the answer to your OP is that, given the goal of working out what we ought to do, asking what is essential to being human is counterproduct...

Presumably Markov blankets make an appearance at some stage in the thousand brains. That's the belief.

So... Hmm. So much for the sacred? Still seems not to help us decide what it is to be human in a way that suits 's project...

Boxed beetles have a place in our language games. We can talk about their colours, form clubs for those who have an orange beetle, persecute those we ...

Yep. I've some sympathy for Searle here, that sentience requires being embodied. But I also have doubts that this definition, like any definition, cou...

The soul is the beetle in the box. Each of us has one, but is directly familiar only with their own. They drop out of the discussion... we can't use b...

In my understanding, and I would be happy to be shown wrong, a neural network can be simulated on a von Neumann machine. A von Neumann machine impleme...

:wink: Why confirmable rather than falsifiable? Given that we might cause suffering if we are wrong, ought we not give LaMDA the benefit of our doubt?

Sweet dreams. I'm not responsible for how folk respond to my posts. I doubt that LaMDA is sentient. My cat is sentient, but not a person. Seems to me ...

Ok, I withdraw. Perhaps we might agree that any categorisation of what it is to be human will fail? Consider Diogenes response to Plato.

So how does that pay out in dismissing LaMDA's claims to personhood? What is it that @"ZzzoneiroCosm" does that LaMDA doesn't?

You claimed LaMDA is "Still just extremely skillful pretence". I asked, can one show that their posts here are not "just extremely skilful pretence"? ...

A linear system. I agree, some reflexivity or recursion is needed. Can we tell for sure that LaMDA is linear? Is anyone here sufficiently familiar wit...