Sam Iglesias pfp
Sam Iglesias
@sam
nah https://i.imgur.com/xgoO1Nd.jpg
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Connor McCormick ☀️ pfp
Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
I'm down for defaulting to treating AI like it's conscious. Historically, we've made way more mistakes by defaulting to dehumanization.
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Sam Iglesias pfp
Sam Iglesias
@sam
Suffice it to say IMO it’s likelier that assuming consciousness in AI will lead to more mistakes (and more harm) than not.
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Connor McCormick ☀️ pfp
Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
ooh interesting. Can you give the tldr?
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Sam Iglesias pfp
Sam Iglesias
@sam
I can try. Consciousness names a biological process like digestion or photosynthesis. Anything seeking to produce consciousness would have to duplicate its causal mechanisms, which are poorly understood. An artificial heart needs to pump blood. A flying machine needs to operate with drag and lift.
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Connor McCormick ☀️ pfp
Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
So you're defining consciousness as biological? Couldn't you do the same thing for flight? "Flight is something that birds do so you can't have a machine do it." Ok that's fine, what do you want to call it when a machine does the thing which we call flight when it's a bird? What about the thing we call consciousness?
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Sam Iglesias pfp
Sam Iglesias
@sam
I didn’t say it is biological, I said it needs to duplicate the causal mechanisms. Artificial hearts and wings don’t use biological tissue, but they are implemented using an understanding of the physics of the phenomenon.
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Connor McCormick ☀️ pfp
Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
Ah ok. I think I would have understood this better if you said that it needed to duplicate its causal effects not its mechanisms. So, do you think we won't engineer consciousness by accident because we don't understand what it is?
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Sam Iglesias pfp
Sam Iglesias
@sam
You’d have to be committed, for example, to the position that a system of water pipes that implemented a program passing the Turing test using mechanical energy, *must* be conscious. I personally find that implausible.
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Connor McCormick ☀️ pfp
Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
why in the world is that implausible?
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Sam Iglesias pfp
Sam Iglesias
@sam
Ok, what about a system of beer cans? A pack of well trained dogs running the program? The population of china? A program is just a set of formal instructions. Get it out of a box of silicon. Consciousness as a phenomenon would have to be the only thing in the universe with this special functional property.
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Connor McCormick ☀️ pfp
Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
Yes. I'm saying that consciousness is fundamentally computational, and so could come to have a sense of self whether it emerged as a pattern of earthquakes on a volcanic planet, a system of reflective crystals in a photosensitive gel, a scurry of neutrinos on a neutron star, or a pile of amino acids on earth.
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Sam Iglesias pfp
Sam Iglesias
@sam
What’s your justification for asserting that consciousness is fundamentally computational? If biological brains cause consciousness and cause minds, how do you get from there to stating that programs and Turing machines do the same thing?
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Connor McCormick ☀️ pfp
Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
The same way you can know I'm conscious without once asking me to distinguish whether I run on neurons or transistors.
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Sam Iglesias pfp
Sam Iglesias
@sam
I infer your consciousness on the basis of shared biology and behavior, roughly, as a background assumption. if you ended up being a bot or a fictional invention of multiple people I would simply take it that I was mistaken. That inference as far as I can tell has nothing to do with computation.
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Connor McCormick ☀️ pfp
Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
Then ultimately you've defined consciousness as biological. Which is fine. What name would you like to use for the thing that looks and acts like consciousness in non-biological systems?
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