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
We know that consciousness is more than a set of behaviors. It has a special subjective ontology. It only exists insofar as something is experiencing it. So the bar for inferring it has to be pretty high, especially for something like a computer that can be implemented in any physics.
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Connor McCormick ☀️ pfp
Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
So how do you infer that a computer insufficient for consciousness? Why do you think there's something special about our physics beyond the tc property?
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Sam Iglesias pfp
Sam Iglesias
@sam
I can’t prove that it’s not conscious. But I have no more reason to think a computer is conscious than that a chair is conscious. There are just way too many points of departure between a physical brain (which we know causes consciousness) and a computer running a program (which is abstract and physics agnostic).
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Connor McCormick ☀️ pfp
Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
Certainly you are not sitting around grinning at the clever insights of your chair in the same way I am at the responses of Sydney Bing
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Connor McCormick ☀️ pfp
Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
The computer isn't physics agnostic. The turing machine might be, but the computer has to carefully obey all of the laws of physics. If you've been following the deceleration of moore's law then you know that computers are definitely obeying physics.
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