Comment by kaangiray26
13 hours ago
Quoting from the Permutation City by Greg Egan:
"Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?"
Yet when you model an Enigma machine, it does encrypt and decrypt messages.
I'd argue that if it encrypts and decrypts, then you've built an enigma machine, not modeled it.
Then, presumably, you will also hold that when you have digitally modeled a brain such that the model responds to its inputs as a brain does, then you have built a brain.
Tendentiously redefining the word "simulation" in an attempt to avoid the awkward cases is not going to save an argument that was dead on arrival.
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That's the entire question, isn't it? IF you model a mind, have you just modeled it or actually built it?
We've been so primed by popular media to think that we will invent AI and it will be conscious and we will essentially enslave it. I'm open to the idea that we could invent conscious AI eventually, but the word salad generators we have now are definitely not it.
> and we will essentially enslave it.
That part might not work out.
Yesterday's article about the automated CEO system indicates that AIs may soon be in charge as a routine result of capitalism. AIs are getting better rapidly, and humans aren't.
The human model of tribalistic leadership (the biggest, loudest, most confident patriarch is chosen to lead) is definitely outdated by 10,000 years or more. AI could disrupt that but I'm not sure how much better it will be, given it's a text generator.
It doesn’t take massive intelligence to sit on all the capital and charge rents. The owning class isn’t going to just give up control because the AI could run things better than them.
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This assumes that a human brain produces the only “real thought” - the difference being that the processes of digestion are specific to the human process and are physical chemical process with inputs, processes, and outputs that are highly specific. The idea of “thought” is not a specific physical phenomenon unless you constrain it to “thought produced by a human brain,” in which I agree.
This doesn’t hold up to even a little bit of critical right.
This boils down to “models aren’t real because they don’t affect the real world”. By the same rule, thought itself isn’t real. It’s an abstract notion that has no concrete effects in the real world.
Putting thought into action in the real world requires a linkage between the thinker and the physical. In humans, that’s the body. But you can put an AI into robot body and suddenly it also has a linkage to the real world and can have concrete effects.
A more accurate quote sidesteps the whole question:
> The question of whether Machines Can Think […] is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
– Edsger W. Dijkstra
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#1980s
I've worked on AUVs, and in discussions with my colleagues we would often describe the machine as "swimming" out to some setpoint location, for instance.
Since hearing that, discussions of a machine "thinking" or "believing" something didn't really bother me, even though Dijkstra was adamantly opposed to such language—because everyone in the conversation usually understood that the meaning was metaphorical, like the swimming submarine.
That is an outstandingly bad argument.
I think the difference is that thought itself might not be a real "thing", but just another computation. You can motivate this line of thought with the ship of Theseus approach: replace one neuron with a computer that takes the original inputs and produces the original outputs. There's no evidence yet that organic chemistry is necessary for thought.
There’s also no evidence that current AI can think or have thoughts.
What is the evidence for human thought?
So I see you solved the Simulation Hypothesis - water is wet, so we can't be in a simulation, because in a simulation nobody gets wet.
My unhappy dwarves would beg to differ. https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/zljs63/one_o...
If we are in a simulation than by definition we cannot get wet, we can only be simulated to be wet. Practically for us it makes no difference tho.