Comment by javier123454321
13 hours ago
> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :)
I can't tell if you're being facetious. But being an embodied consciousness with the ability to create is as divine as it gets. We'd do well to remember.
> being an embodied consciousness with the ability to create is as divine as it gets
This is a very, very weak criterion for divinity. If this is truly it, we should prepare with great haste for the arrival of our artificial gods.
Because by this (IMO silly) metric it seems they will be more divine than us.
Yeah id argue that all existence is equally sacred. But consciousness is where that is manifest most visibly.
It legitimately scares me that so many proponents of AI don't hold being a living, breathing real-life entity as being important.
Not understanding how consciousness is created doesn't make it divine. Do you think it's an impossible task or just one we need more time to figure out?
Being alive is divine. It doesn't matter if you understand it or not. It's a beautiful thing to have a consciousness in this world, and to have the ability to create, to love. It takes a huge intellectual effort to try to trick yourself out of believing something so intuitive as that.
There are many examples when scientists strongly believed something to be obviously impossible and yet being wrong - Poisson spot or heavier-than-air flight machines coming to mind. So what you believe might be intuitive - that doesn't preclude it from potentially being wrong, unless you proved the impossibility.
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What is intuitive to you, may not be to others. Might you be engaging in intellectual self trickery?
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Physicalists say consciousness emerges from matter. The other camp says matter comes from consciousness. Federico Faggin, inventor of the microprocessor, says consciousness cannot emerge from matter because matter is inert and not self-conscious, so it cannot produce consciousness. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Time will tell. But it is also wrong to claim that consciousness emerges from matter until it is proven (aka the “hard problem of consciousness.”)
> But it is also wrong to claim that consciousness emerges from matter until it is proven
How would you prove if it did? What kind of proof would you accept?
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I mean, the nature of subjectivity prevents you from knowing anything but your own experience. There is not any objective evidence that could truly distinguish solipsism from panpsychism, so philosophically you need to ask a different question to hope to get a useful answer.
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So some kind of ether conscious energy animated cells to fight entropy?
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I think we could understand consciousness perfectly and still find it divine. In fact, I think however it arises is probably so beautiful that it would be wrong not to call it divine. Of course not in a literal, theological sense, but I think the true deep complexity of the human brain and consciousness is worth the title.
Exactly
> Not understanding how consciousness is created doesn't make it divine.
It's not divine, just expensive, and has to pay its costs. That little thing - cost - powers evolution. Cost defines what can exist and shaped us into our current form, it is the recursive runway of life.
Given that this is the one problem that neither scientists nor philosophers have made any progress on in 3000 years, we don't have the tools to begin tackling it and nobody is making serious attempts, it may very well be impossible.
We can't know if consciousness emerges but does it actually matter ?
These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate.
For now they need legs and arms to interact with the physical world but I am certain that 100 years from now they will be an integral part of the society.
I already see today LLMs slowly taking actual legal decisions for example, having real world impact.
Once they get physical, perhaps it will be acceptable to become friend with a robot and go to adventure with it. Even, getting robosexual ?
We are not that far away. If I can have my buddy to carry my backpack and drive for me I'll take it. Already today. Not tomorrow.
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Humanity made no meaningful progress in getting "to the stars" for thousands of years too, then in the space of a few decades we did.