Comment by threethirtytwo
1 hour ago
> 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.