Comment by gizajob
5 hours ago
Haha hilarious. Heraclitus might be old school but Wittgenstein and Heidegger not so much. The state of the art in what might meaningly be said, proved or metaphysically challenged has changed little since their time.
At no point in my post did I mention artificial beings or LLMs. I made a counter claim about the need for proof towards the subjectivity of others.
But while I’m here, LLMs do not “display and output the same subjectivity” as human beings. They might produce similar textual outputs as those produced when human beings are forced to use computers to produce textual outputs, but that is only an tiny part of our way of being and way of potentially expressing subjectivity. It’s the totality of how those LLMs can express their subjectivity though.
One of the main failures of the Turing test (and why it is “old school” and invalid), and Turing’s consideration of humans, is that it forces us to demonstrate the totality of our subjectivity on the only playing field where a computer might possibly match us or win. This fails to capture much of our subjectivity in how it is intersubjectively attuned to others in ways more fundamental than textual outputs.
How so? If a person were confined to text only (a la Hawkins), does that qualify us to dismiss their subjectivity on the basis of the medium? Also, why can training not be at least analogized to the attunement to the popular intersubjective perception?
> At no point in my post did I mention artificial beings or LLMs. I made a counter claim about the need for proof towards the subjectivity of others.
You don’t need to mention this. The context is LLMs I am saying your claim is pointless in context. The subjectivity of others is completely relevant because it is the topic of subjectivity itself that is in question. Get it? You didn’t counter my own counter and instead you moved onto side topics.
> But while I’m here, LLMs do not “display and output the same subjectivity” as human beings.
Again… you are side tracking here and not really responding to me.
The argument solely is within the confines of text. That’s obvious. No need to take it beyond that. You assume I am conscious because of the text your reading from me and I assume the same from you and it is within that same frame we are evaluating the LLM. Nothing beyond that. You can’t in actuality know my experience goes beyond text because that information is not open to you. But it is obvious you assume I’m conscious and not a rock because you are responding to me. So the question is why are you not engaging in a similar debate with the LLM?
> One of the main failures of the Turing test (and why it is “old school” and invalid), and Turing’s consideration of humans, is that it forces us to demonstrate the totality of our subjectivity on the only playing field where a computer might possibly match us or win.
It’s not a failure. It was the point. They want to remove superfluous features and gun for the most narrow definition of agi.
You like philosophy and you read texts on the topic. That means you obviously find the subjectivity in those texts relevant and produced by a high intelligence. But that’s all through only text. You evaluate my statements and the statements of your idolized philosophers solely from text and that is all you’ve ever used. So YOU yourself find validation from text as do many humans and that is sufficient evidence in determining whether a thing is conscious and your own behavior validates this logically even though your mouth is constantly moving the goal posts whenever AI jumps over a new hurdle.
That is what the Turing test is gunning for. It used to be that intelligence was just the ability to think and understand now it has expanded to encompass the totality of human sensation because people are refusing to face the reality of impending agi.
When I called your philosophers obsolete is that not the same as you calling the Turing test out dated? We both do it when convenient. Fine… the Turing test is outdated, let’s move the threshold… the new test is when AI is used in our daily lives to do actual tasks only humans could previously do. How long will that new “Turing test” last before more idiots decide we need to move the goal posts again? Let’s jump ahead of that and change the threshold too: when AI discovers new proofs in mathematics. Not good enough? I guess now you can see why it will never be good enough.
Come and read your post in twenty years time.
Who you’re describing as idiots are the mass of humanity constantly standing outside and beyond the Turing test. It’s another deficiency in that test that Turing overlooked - it requires that better and better machine outputs are met with humans nailed in place before the machine came along. It’s a valid fail of the Turing test for a human interrogator to say “yeah but it’s just ChatGPT” and fail the machine when two weeks earlier the same outputs would have been sufficient for the same human to pass the machine. As fast as machines move, we move quicker. It’s not that we move the goal posts, it’s that we find that they were in the wrong place to begin with. And they’ll always be in the wrong place because abstract state machines running on silicon don’t possess consciousness in the same way we know a rock doesn’t. And the definition of generality can be shrunk down until AI evangelists can proclaim AGI has been reached but the mass of everyone else will still find that all of a sudden, intelligence is linked to things like suffering and desiring and passion and the machine still isn’t general enough to warrant any kind of description as a sentient, subjective being.
Technology changes much quicker. The physical substrate of what a computer does and what artificial intelligence is.. is going through constant metamorphosis. Right now we use EUV technology to etch transistors on silicon… the next generation involves self assembly and even photonic based signalling… all within your life time.
Not to mention the algorithmic structure of computer intelligence also fundamentally changes at a rapid pace. Deep learning and new techniques continually augment and change the software stack on a daily basis.
For humans nothing is changing. The physical substrate changes via evolution and that change happens per generation via random mutations and is basically imperceptible in several human life times. Any meaningful change likely only becomes actualized over tens of thousands of years and even that change is small.
Additionally, the changes via natural selection don’t optimize for greater intelligence it optimizes for survival which can in actuality favor lower intelligence. We don’t actually know if that is the case but we do know it’s a possibility which is in sharp contrast to AI where clearly the industry is optimizing improvement based off of benchmarks for measuring raw intelligence.
Additionally software in humans is random and uncontrolled. It depends on how a child is raised and none of this is really changing to optimize for greater intelligence. It’s just random based on culture and circumstance. There is cultural evolution here but it is slow and technology is changing so fast it is influencing culture much faster than ever before. TikTok Brain rot for example is affecting the software of human brains and this happened within the last decade.
So draw the trendline… what does that mean for humanity? When I called those people idiots, I am not contradicting anything. Human intelligence is NOT scaling at the rate of machine intelligence and the trendlines point to a future where humans are idiots when compared to their AI counterparts. The cold hard truth of the future role of humanity according to the moving trendlines we see today is bleak but it is the most likely future.
Rationality should be applied universally even when that rationality points to a negative outcome for humanity. This is something many people, including you, are unable to do. Face reality.