Comment by everdrive
5 days ago
This is merely a debate about what it means to "think." We didn't really previously need to disambiguate thinking / intelligence / consciousness / sentience / ego / identity / etc.
Now, we do. Partly because of this we don't have really well defined ways to define these terms and think about. Can a handheld calculator think? Certainly, depending on how we define "think."
People's failure to articulate the nature of "thinking" is a perfect demonstration of what "thinking" entails
> We didn't really previously need to disambiguate thinking / intelligence / consciousness / sentience / ego / identity / etc.
Eh... Plato would like a word with you. Philosophy has been specifically trying to disentangle all that for millennia. Is this a joke?
we didn't really previously NEED to, but we still tried bc it was an interesting question. today the NEED seems more urgent
sometimes hacker news links are about doing free work for microsoft, like finding bugs in Windows and Office
sometimes hacker news links are about doing free work for microsoft, like rigorously defining AGI, because that triggers the OpenAI license-to-stock conversion now
maybe this is why microsoft makes so much fucking money. Even the New Yorker cannot stop fucking doing work for them for free.
Can you spell out more why we need it now?
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And Plato had no grounding in biology, and so his work here was quite interesting but also quite wrong.
More precisely, I mean that the average person and the common culture has not really needed to disambiguate these terms. Can you define consciousness vs. sentience? And if you can, do you really think that the average person would share your definition? ie, your definition could be the _best_ definition, but my argument is that these are not widely agreed-upon terms.
>And Plato had no grounding in biology, and so his work here was quite interesting but also quite wrong.
Defining what a word should mean doesn't require any understanding of biology unless you make the assumption that it's a biology-related word. Why should the definition of "thinking" have any reference to biology? If you assume it does, then you're basically baking in the assumption that machines can't think.
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Somebody please get Wittgenstein on the phone
Here you go: (holds up phone with a photo of of Wittgenstein on the screen)
Ah shoot, that’s not what you meant is it? Just use more precise language next time and I’m sure you’ll be understood.
what youre describing is an image of wittgenstein which is different from wittgenstein
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