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If you don't mind, perhaps you could look at some of the conversation you missed. It would be easier to respond to this or that link in the chain. I g...

Yes, it's standard stuff. I went ahead and found a quote from a math textbook for you: https://people.math.umass.edu/~lavine/Book/book.pdf Of course y...

Nice. I remember bumping into that in an anthology. Flavor.

That seems about right to me. We can find causal relationships, etc., and we should. But I suspect we'll never be exactly satisfied with any definitio...

Well I'd probably be happy enough to drink from the fountain of youth. I'd like to have centuries to learn to do all sorts of things that I won't othe...

I hear you, but ... We invent airplanes and telephones and insurance. We master our environment, make it predictable. Right now we can talk across oce...

I agree with you. I'd just say that this image of the honest philosopher was not given to us from on high. It is itself one of the results of dialogue...

It's not that there's something wrong with postulating a thinker. If I were to gripe, I might say that concepts are interdependent, that our understan...

Right. And I agree with you in many ways. But my issue would be that there's no clean break between form and content. Roughly speaking, I think the ph...

I agree that there is a deeper biological sedimentation (genetic code). In general I don't think I'm trying to say anything against scientific common ...

Nice. That's one of my favorite themes. Connected with that is the notion of an ego-ideal or target self. In Kojeve/Hegel the quest for recognition is...

I may never know. We've been talking about language in Bedrock Beliefs. One of the themes is how automatic it is. If I try to tell you what I understo...

Excellent response. I thought you might mean something like that. That makes sense to me. And I agree with you about social acceptance. Even people be...

I completely agree, despite what I improvised about the wetware. It's tricky navigating all of these meanings. We have different ways of talking in di...

I bet humans use a better algorithm, but we can get a few miles out of the analogy. The tricky part might be specifying what our human loss function w...

But, just to emphasize a potentially fruitful difference, I don't exactly know what to make of physicalism in this context. Do we know what we mean by...

We are definitely on the same page here. The beetle in the box doesn't come into play, except as one more speech act that is appropriate in this or th...

Well, yes, I agree with you. I don't think they actually know. And Culler uses just that example, by the way.

I guess I like that approach equally well. The tricky part is trying to remain intelligible. I find myself tempted to put just about every word in quo...

One last thought on this (I have to work in the morning.) If the AI piggybacks on human conversation, that human conversation can be thought of as a d...

LOL. In the past I have experimented with somewhat ugly but soulful male images. There was a different response. A little tangent to the AI theme: wha...

Exactly. I agree. And that's why I joke that we as individuals also cheat to pass the Turing test. We as personalities are metaphorically speaking som...

Could you elaborate?

I do see the problem. Gradient descent is a comically simple algorithm, too. But what of my other point, that we as individuals are winning Turing's t...

Thanks. I too would be genuinely non-plussed. What's weird is that we don't already find our own linguistic skill unsettling. That's what I take from ...

Yeah. And to me that's something that maybe philosophy fantasizes about overcoming. 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' I think ...

So the detective passed? I don't see it as a competition. I just think we are having some good conversation. I love these themes.

What's strange is how human I find it to root for the bot. I fucking loved the blue people in Avatar. Do we root for the bot because the glory of the ...

Just to be clear, I meant that in a friendly way. I was being metaphorical as I referred to your 'don't worry about AI' post. You said I should not wo...

I'm being metaphorical. What I'm trying to get at is the sense of identity. Am I my face, my text streams, the way I act at work, etc. In ordinary lan...

But isn't that what the beetle-in-the-box is about? What is consciousness (in most people's minds) if not the meanings of the words we use? And of cou...

I love 'her' face too.

Do you never experience yourself as more of a fog than a point? To me our modern lifestyle in which we project digital selves is somewhat alienating. ...

Yup. And it's fun and simple like a health insurance bot. I'm seeing cheap version of A.I. in customer service lately. They have a long way to go.

My apologies. I didn't mean to wander into my idiolect. What I'm getting at is that the 'divine spark' is something like the beetle-in-the-box. These ...

Oh, I like that. Now that's a good move.

Perhaps. There is a spirit of play at work. But I'm not unserious. In case it's not clear, I have the usual intuitive of sense of 'being conscious.' I...

Fucking exactly ! And I also repeat, repeat, repeat. Iteration with a touch of variation. The continuity of the voice (that we can recognize this or t...

I think you are missing the tone. I'm saying that our belief in the divine spark is alive and well, under a different name. As I grasp the situation, ...

I hear you, but how would judge, for instance, that I am capable of drawing meaningful correlations between itself and other things? This connects to ...

Indeed. As far as the 'others' go, Creed said in the US version of The Office that he'd been a cult leader and a cult member and that being a cult mem...

I agree with you in some ways. The more time I've spent with philosophy, the more I find some of the less experienced forum philosophers (and my own e...

I think the time is coming (if the species can manage it) when not only synthetic faces but also synthetic conversation partners will be hard to isola...

Right. I agree with all of that. With sedimentation I was thinking of culture. For instance, this English language is a kind of historical sediment. A...

Right. It's not ex nihilo. And the actual text is shrewder than its eye-catching title. One could even accuse it of being too assuredly realist in its...

OK. But do you not think that it's difficult to draw a line? Is 'how are you?' really a question? This is related to an anti-skepticism post I made re...

I thought maybe you'd agree. I also like the notion of embodied cognition, which you mentioned above.

Right, but I guess I'm trying to point out that we might take 'consciousness' too much for granted. There's a common background assumption that verbal...