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Daemon

['Member']Joined: November 24, 2020 at 17:37Last active: October 21, 2023 at 12:414 discussions587 comments

Discussions (4)

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Richard Ngo is a researcher at OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT. He was recently interviewed by the 80,000 Hours podcast. I quote from the int...
April 28, 2023 at 14:25
Hi Joshs, Could you tell me what is meant by "super intelligence"?
April 27, 2023 at 16:34
Don't be silly Glen, we've barely scratched the surface. Of course there's nothing wrong with generalising, but it doesn't make for an interesting phi...
May 23, 2022 at 11:38
You're doing the generalisation thing again. It's not a democratic decision, it doesn't matter how many people believe something. Focus on what indivi...
May 23, 2022 at 09:48
This is something I touched on in a response to Josh's above. I think only living things are entities of the appropriate kind. A single-celled organis...
May 23, 2022 at 09:45
Metals. molecules and mountains are examples of observer-independent phenomena. They are whatever they are and they do whatever they do regardless of ...
May 22, 2022 at 10:43
Do you want to understand? Or do you want to be like this: Celebrating ignorance. We're encouraged to apply the Principle of Charity here. In brief, w...
May 22, 2022 at 08:42
I do think consciousness is a phenomenon some living things have produced. I think that a certain prerequisite for consciousness is present in single-...
May 21, 2022 at 18:39
No, don't lurk, engage with what other people are saying. I'd like for example to continue the discussion about the Computational Theory of Mind and t...
May 21, 2022 at 12:06
I think you need to stop making sweeping statements about what members here believe. We're individuals, we have different beliefs and approaches. You ...
May 21, 2022 at 11:36
Is that the bit where you don't know what it means?
May 21, 2022 at 11:20
Well I thought you were saying quantum computation might cause consciousness, and ?180 Proof seemed to think that neural nets might do it, and as far ...
May 21, 2022 at 00:03
There are those who say we may never understand consciousness, the so-called Mysterians, led by British philosopher Colin McGinn. And David Chalmers i...
May 20, 2022 at 23:55
No, if anything it's the opposite. The argument aims to show that computation can't cause consciousness because computation is an observer-dependent p...
May 20, 2022 at 23:46
Perhaps you would like to elaborate on how you know this? Do you think there's anyone on the forum here who doesn't have awareness of their feelings? ...
May 20, 2022 at 23:00
But it isn't the case that we know NOTHING about what consciousness is, we have gained a vast amount of knowledge about it in my lifetime and that kno...
May 20, 2022 at 22:52
Do they deal with the argument I raised about the observer-dependent nature of digital computation? How?
May 20, 2022 at 22:20
I still think you are misinterpreting the meaning of "observer-dependent" as I'm using it. Money and marriage are observer-dependent phenomena, in tha...
May 20, 2022 at 14:25
What an idiotic remark! Have you actually met and interacted with humans?
May 20, 2022 at 14:00
I think perhaps you are mistaking the status of the "observer" in "observer-relative". None of this is closely related to the (pseudo-) Problem of Oth...
May 20, 2022 at 13:54
That seems to presuppose that neurons operate in this kind of linear fashion. They don't. The idea is scientifically naive.
May 20, 2022 at 13:23
Hm. Well then I don't think you do understand the Chinese Room. What it shows is that semantics is not intrinsic to the computer. Some ten years later...
May 20, 2022 at 13:07
I know that many objections have been raised, but I haven't been convinced by any of them. Searle's argument from the observer-dependent nature of dig...
May 20, 2022 at 10:15
Hi Glen, I don't really like it when people here refer me to some external article, book or paper, but these few pages from the introduction to Searle...
May 20, 2022 at 09:07
And will consciousness then be "eliminated"? Could you give an entirely speculative picture of how that might happen?
May 19, 2022 at 16:41
Why?
April 21, 2022 at 15:55
Why is that not evidence of a photographic memory? Nothing you've said helps answer that question.
April 21, 2022 at 15:19
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel-and-adventure/2017/11/incredible-british-artist-can-draw-whole-city-memory It's said that he draws citysca...
April 21, 2022 at 12:54
Ok, but I am positing the separation of organisms as a prerequisite. But awareness is an aspect of consciousness. The chemical process isn't aware of ...
April 20, 2022 at 12:08
It's very common for programmers not to understand how computers work. It isn't taught, even on university level computation courses. That's a very mu...
April 20, 2022 at 09:57
The reduction to 0/1 states occurs in our minds, and not in the physics of the machine. You can see and try to understand these words. That exemplifie...
April 19, 2022 at 20:32
My contention is that it is separate from its environment in a particular, crucial way. Non-living things are not separated in the same way. Can you s...
April 16, 2022 at 18:08
It's quite a complicated (and very interesting) business in reality: https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/cargo-cults
April 16, 2022 at 15:28
The Petri dish isn't a boundary of the appropriate type. With single-celled organisms, the boundary is the cell wall. Individual bacteria have non-con...
April 16, 2022 at 10:51
A cargo cult is an indigenist millenarian belief system, in which adherents perform rituals which they believe will cause a more technologically advan...
April 16, 2022 at 10:20
I'm not imagining that a sea sponge is conscious. It has the non-conscious sensory mechanisms from which I think consciousness developed.
April 16, 2022 at 09:08
The discussion so far has prompted a lot of thinking on my part so thanks for that. I've been reading and watching lectures about "What Is Life?". Liv...
April 15, 2022 at 22:30
When you're unconscious Bert1, is it like anything? It isn't for me. I'm pretty sure that's the same for everybody. I have been unconscious when aslee...
April 15, 2022 at 21:33
I've been reading about this the last couple of days, and watching videos. There are many definitions, depending on the focus of the person providing ...
April 13, 2022 at 12:30
The idea I'm contemplating is that the "suddenness" of the onset of conscious experience may be due to the nature of conscious experience, rather than...
April 11, 2022 at 12:04
However, there is ordinary conductivity in place in the material before the superconductivity switches in. Which is similar to the position @Possibili...
April 11, 2022 at 09:43
I've been giving this some thought, and realised that there are such states, they are exemplified by the research I referred to. The mouse senses the ...
April 09, 2022 at 22:54
That's what I'd feared since I first read your post. It's just free-floating fantasy, unmotivated, baseless, worthless, pointless.
April 08, 2022 at 09:06
Where did this idea come from?
April 07, 2022 at 19:51
In an academic paper I would expect to see references. Something to back this up: "Grey matter of dendrites, soma and the interior of axons is darkly ...
April 07, 2022 at 16:44
This in particular seems like fanciful nonsense.
April 07, 2022 at 16:28
It seems like a fantasy.
April 07, 2022 at 16:19
What evidence do you have for this? How would you test the hypothesis?
April 07, 2022 at 15:22
Call it an abstract. What is at the centre of your idea?
April 07, 2022 at 14:25
Can you do a TL:DR?
April 07, 2022 at 14:01