Comment by donkeybeer
7 hours ago
No I'd really like to understand. Are people who make this weird argument aware that they believe in souls and ok with it or do they think they don't believe in souls? You tell me which you are.
7 hours ago
No I'd really like to understand. Are people who make this weird argument aware that they believe in souls and ok with it or do they think they don't believe in souls? You tell me which you are.
I don't believe in souls, and it makes me much happier than when I believed in souls as a child.
Though, I have never heard any theist claim that a soul is required for consciousness. Is that what you believe?
I am just asking him to clarify if he things "rocks" can't be conscious simply because they are not human or because he just thinks its not yet at a level but there is no argument against any other physical system being conscious just like the physical system that is a human.
A belief that LLMs are not conscious does not necessitate a belief in souls. The two positions are not mutually exclusive.
I am asking him to clarify whether he believes its simply impossible for anything human to be conscious, or that he thinks current LLM's are not conscious but its quite possible for a physical system to be conscious just like the physical system called Human is conscious.
I might be misunderstanding GP but I take it to mean "rock are conscious" => "silicon is conscious" => "agents are conscious", which might appeal to some uneducated audience, and create fascination around these stochastic parrots. Which is obviously ridiculous because its premises are still rooted in physicalism, which failed hard on its face to account for anything even tangentially related to subjectivity (which has nothing to do with the trivial mainstream conception of "soul").
I looked up physicalism, it sounds perfectly normal? What else exists that isn't physical and why can't we call that a soul or the supernatural? By definition since its supposedly not physical. We haven't yet found anything non physical in the universe, why this strange belief that our brains would be non physical?
Since it's an old debate that a lot of smart people spent a lot of time thinking about, the best short / simple answer you'll see for it is "you might want to read some more about it". A few keywords here are qualia, perception, descartes and the evil deceiver, berkeley and immaterialism, kant and synthetic a-priori, the nature of the reality of mathematical objects and mathematical truth, etc. If you think it's easy, for sure you have not understood the question yet.
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Why not, we are physical systems, computers are physical systems. If not soul, what is this magical non physical special sauce that makes us special and makes it easy to claim silicon is not conscious.
I don't know, you tell me: how do you _exactly_ go from quantities to qualities? Keep in mind that the "physical" is a model of our perception and nothing else.
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