Comment by hardbass
16 hours ago
Many people even here seem very cagey about the fact that human beings and brains are physical systems following physical laws.
16 hours ago
Many people even here seem very cagey about the fact that human beings and brains are physical systems following physical laws.
Possibly, but our knowledge of physical laws is subjective and imperfect. By the time you get to Frauchiger-Renner naive realism starts to look quite threadbare, so I'd be a little more tentative about assuming we have much of a clue about what's going on.
It's just as likely - far more likely IMO - that we're physically incapable of understanding physical laws and physical systems on their own terms.
Evolved systems need no high order understanding of how they work. You have evolution take care of that hard work for you, hence why these models take exaflops of compute and gigawatts of power to train.
Understanding and accidentally creating are different things. If we already understood consciousness and weren't worried about having accidentally created one already, we won't be having this discussion. If we don't know what consciousness is, in my view its more reason to exercise some caution regarding a system that appears to exhibit intelligent thinking, talking, etc.
Most of the world believes in crazy shit. Religion is mostly fantasy. Believing All powerful beings aka gods are crazy in every context and really mental institution level insanity except in the context of religion.
Humans are crazy. Thats just how it is.
Many are ignorant and believe childish things, many are similarly ignorant and live in the same childish framework only to condemn it. Then there are the adults, and they have an idea of what they are talking about.
It is not too different (attempting extra clarity) from people who would say "Oh but many think that AI is intelligent/not intelligent, <sneer>", but have little proper idea of matmul, of cognitive processes etc. (Imperfect simile, but may give an idea.)
The alternative is to believe that the mind, conditioned and optimized by millions of years of evolution for the survival of the organism under constant threat of hostile natural forces, can capably perceive reality as it is.
You do not need to understand reality to survive. Does your pet turtle understand your true nature and the true nature of reality? No. Yet it survives.
Understanding reality is orthogonal to survival. In fact given that MORE people in this world are religious than not, one can argue that delusion. contributes MORE to survival than being a realist.
The reason is the appalling amount of existential dread that follows from accepting that notion.
Why would one feel existential dread? I am the same person as before? The idea of dread could come if one believes there is some 'purer' or 'higher' form of existence in comparison to you, it should not come from realizing you and all other lifeforms are made of the same stuff.
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This isn’t true. Plenty of people aren’t religious. The explanation for why is more mundane.
It’s because of identity. Because people who are religious spent years and years and most of their lives not only studying and believing what they believe but also building community and centering their behavior around it. Abandoning that is the harder thing to give up.
If it were existential dread then we wouldn’t have entire countries like China being mostly atheist.
Nonsense.
> really mental institution level insanity except in the context of religion.
The DSM even has to include an explicit exception to prevent the clinical definition of “delusion” from applying to religious belief. Without that ad hoc exception, religious belief would be classified as clinically delusional.
Still children (the psychiatrists that cannot deal with matters outside their understanding) that have obtained some power and try to exert it over the rest. Scholarization has failed.
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