Comment by basilikum
12 hours ago
We don't know a lot of things. That does not make it sensible to just make up unfounded claims about them.
I don't know what you ate today. It would be insane for me to confidently claim that you ate two bananas and a pizza today.
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. That's the basis of empirical research.
Who exactly are these people confidently claiming that stones possess consciousness you are talking about?
I've read a number of panpsychist publications, yet I have yet to encounter an author who asserts with certainty that stones are conscious exactly in the same way human beings are.
The more common panpsychist interpretation, that everything exists on a spectrum of consciousness, with stones at the low end and humans at the high end, seems like a fairly reasonable ontological hypothesis to me.
What's the difference between a computer and a stone?
A lot of answers to this question so it depends which layer you are talking about.
Functionally,I'd say a key difference is that it's probably easier to perform general computation with a computer than to achieve the same goal using a stone.
3 replies →
One is a computer and the other, a stone.
Well those that claim humans are conscious need to come up with a test to demonstrate it empirically. Then we can have LLMs take the same test.
As it is, it would be insane for me to confidently claim you are conscious or even that you're human, as an LLM could have written the same message.
The burden if proof is on you in this case.
The philosophical zombie does not satisfy occams razor because it asserts an unmeasurable property that has no effect on the outcome.
If it acts like it has consciousness, then assuming it to have consciousness is more scientifically rigorous, than assuming for it not to have consciousness, because the former requires one less variable.