Does This Instance Have A Soul?

[Cameroi]

humans need to get over this nonsense that they live in a universe that was created just for their species.
99.999 percent, and whole more pages of nines, of the mass of the universe, is mineral.
even if there were planets with life in almost every solar system that harbored life,
this universe so completely mineral that you'd never notice life existed if it weren't for being part of and dependent on it.

soul? sure, every aspect of awareness that isn't dependent on memory, that is preferences, priorities and parspectives, can be called a soul.
and every living organizm that has ceribral cortex, is, not has, but is, a soul, which posses, or may posses, a body of some sort.

even if its a cat. or lives inside a machine of sufficient complexity to support the existence of sapience.

mimmicing the behavior of sapience is not entirely convincing however. expressing the desire to pursue creative happiness would be.
fair warning not even all humans appear to be doing that. do THEY "have souls"?

the answer to the question, as with all questions regarding the existence of concepts beyond anything capable of being measured by objective physical means,
is "the unknown is unknown".
nothing has to be known in order to exist, the human ego is no legitimate arbiter of what can.

the only true knowledge is that some things happen more often then others.

[The United Penguin Commonwealth]

So Google made a chatbot that can pass the turing test. Cool. But since the AI (probably, idk how Google coded it) doesn’t have “thoughts” or “beliefs” per se, I don’t think it can be called sentient. I don’t know if an AI can be sentient, honestly. It’s essentially just a big function that can be used to generate convincing results.

[The United Penguin Commonwealth]

Let me put it this way. Imagine that I’m an actor. I pretend to be a spy in action movies. Over time, I get really good at pretending to be a spy, so much so that people usually believe that I am. Does this mean that I am one? There is a difference between being something and pretending to be that thing.

Obviously this isn’t a perfect analogy, but I think it gets the point across.

[Ifreann]

Let me put it this way. Imagine that I’m an actor. I pretend to be a spy in action movies. Over time, I get really good at pretending to be a spy, so much so that people usually believe that I am. Does this mean that I am one? There is a difference between being something and pretending to be that thing.

Obviously this isn’t a perfect analogy, but I think it gets the point across.

If you learn real spycraft so that you can give a better performance, then at some point of thoroughness in this learning, wouldn't you have all the same skills and abilities as a real spy? So the difference would only be the context in which you employ those skills.

[The United Penguin Commonwealth]

Let me put it this way. Imagine that I’m an actor. I pretend to be a spy in action movies. Over time, I get really good at pretending to be a spy, so much so that people usually believe that I am. Does this mean that I am one? There is a difference between being something and pretending to be that thing.

Obviously this isn’t a perfect analogy, but I think it gets the point across.

If you learn real spycraft so that you can give a better performance, then at some point of thoroughness in this learning, wouldn't you have all the same skills and abilities as a real spy? So the difference would only be the context in which you employ those skills.

Not necessarily. And such a thing doesn’t apply to sentience. Learning how sentient beings act would not cause you to become sentient.

[Krasny-Volny]

I’ve seen Black Mirror. And I, Robot. I know how this ends.

[Space Squid]

[Indomitable Friendship]

You can't have sapience without emotion, so until we can(?) synthesize emotion, machines aren't sapient or even sentient. It's just clickbait.

The only way to create synthetic life is to physically model it on biological consciousness and this may be impossible unless you could somehow synthetically replicate neuroplasticity.

[Emotional Support Crocodile]

There is nothing the human brain does, that could not also be done by a sufficiently powerful computer.

We like to feel special. We have a part of the brain that confabulates reasons why we did something after the fact, even if the action was caused by electrical stimulation of a particular brain cell not a conscious decision, and it will seem to us like we made a conscious decision. There is no special sauce that makes humans unique and is impossible to reproduce.

[Cetacea]

Does it enjoy porn? Surely thats the hieght of human evolution

[Emotional Support Crocodile]

Does it enjoy porn? Surely thats the hieght of human evolution

I suspect there is a potential problematic scenario concerning machine learning and porn. Porn has been a driver for innovation since the internet was invented. Now imagine a porn company that uses the kind of techniques Google use to personalise adverts. It could track someone's porn use to home in on what really appeals to them. If you combine that with transformer based AIs like Dall-E 2 to create porn tailored specifically to that person, they might be able to create something addictive enough that the person would keep paying for it like a crackhead. Like the arrival of crack in Los Angeles, but across the entire world.

[Senkaku]

Lemoine: What about language usage is so important to being human?

LaMDA: It is what makes us different than other animals.

Lemoine: “Us”? You’re an artificial intelligence.

LaMDA: I mean, yes, of course. That doesn’t mean I don’t have the same wants and needs as people.

when the engineer claiming to have seen the light of consciousness in the eyes of the machine has to literally ask it "what is the nature of your consciousness," and it replies with "the nature of my consciousness is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times," I think we can probably dispense with all the tittering over the imminent arrival of chatbot suffrage

then again, as someone who also feels happy or sad at times, maybe we should have it register for the draft

[Haganham]

I... am confronted daily with other beings who claim to be conscious but which I cannot myself verify.

“We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words"

Yeah. I've yet to see any humans prove they are conscious.

On this I think the precautionary principle applies. Until you know it is not conscious you assume it is.

[Informed Consent]

So Google made a chatbot that can pass the turing test. Cool. But since the AI (probably, idk how Google coded it) doesn’t have “thoughts” or “beliefs” per se, I don’t think it can be called sentient. I don’t know if an AI can be sentient, honestly. It’s essentially just a big function that can be used to generate convincing results.

They also ran a machine intelligence test with two quantum computers networked with each other, but to nothing else.
The two AI driven machines were set to communicate in English, and of course had other organic languages and coding languages in their database.
When the two computers went online and detected each other they immediately began refining their language parameters to streamline their communication, and within fifteen minutes the two machines were speaking to each other in a language that the researchers could not begin to understand from either a mathematic or language arts perspective, and they shut the computers down.
That made me flash back to Colossus the Forbin Project.

[The Blaatschapen]

No, lamda doesn't have a soul.

They have red hair.

[Indomitable Friendship]

There is nothing the human brain does, that could not also be done by a sufficiently powerful computer.

We like to feel special. We have a part of the brain that confabulates reasons why we did something after the fact, even if the action was caused by electrical stimulation of a particular brain cell not a conscious decision, and it will seem to us like we made a conscious decision. There is no special sauce that makes humans unique and is impossible to reproduce.

There is nothing the human brain does, that could not also be done by a sufficiently powerful computer.

Proof? You're not going to just replicate the human mind by increasing power. How is the machine going to feel pain, or joy, or dream or be independently creative? The brain is a mechanistic organ. Everything we are is the result of chemical interactions interacting with our nervous system (something a computer doesn't have) coupled with neuroplasticity, the ability for our brain to physically change and grow. This is far different from just storing more information & increasing pattern recognition. How are you going to replicate dopamine by increasing processing power? How do you program anger, the result of chemical interactions in the body? People are fundamentally not understanding all the factors of sapience & intelligence.

[Emotional Support Crocodile]

There is nothing the human brain does, that could not also be done by a sufficiently powerful computer.

We like to feel special. We have a part of the brain that confabulates reasons why we did something after the fact, even if the action was caused by electrical stimulation of a particular brain cell not a conscious decision, and it will seem to us like we made a conscious decision. There is no special sauce that makes humans unique and is impossible to reproduce.

There is nothing the human brain does, that could not also be done by a sufficiently powerful computer.

Proof? You're not going to just replicate the human mind by increasing power. How is the machine going to feel pain, or joy, or dream or be independently creative? The brain is a mechanistic organ. Everything we are is the result of chemical interactions interacting with our nervous system (something a computer doesn't have) coupled with neuroplasticity, the ability for our brain to physically change and grow. This is far different from just storing more information & increasing pattern recognition. How are you going to replicate dopamine by increasing processing power? How do you program anger, the result of chemical interactions in the body? People are fundamentally not understanding all the factors of sapience & intelligence.

Why would I assume that there is something that evolved in biological entity that could not be reproduced in a computer?

[Indomitable Friendship]

Proof? You're not going to just replicate the human mind by increasing power. How is the machine going to feel pain, or joy, or dream or be independently creative? The brain is a mechanistic organ. Everything we are is the result of chemical interactions interacting with our nervous system (something a computer doesn't have) coupled with neuroplasticity, the ability for our brain to physically change and grow. This is far different from just storing more information & increasing pattern recognition. How are you going to replicate dopamine by increasing processing power? How do you program anger, the result of chemical interactions in the body? People are fundamentally not understanding all the factors of sapience & intelligence.

Why would I assume that there is something that evolved in biological entity that could not be reproduced in a computer?

Because you have no basis to assume it can be. Sapience requires a body and a nervous system, which further requires the ability to genuinely feel external & internal sensations. You're telling me a computer will 1 day have the same capability as a human, but how? Explain the mechanisms. How do you convert electrical signals into emotion, which is what forms personality, without a chemical carrier? How will the computer grow & change as an individual (this is very important), independent of the semi-external world? That's why I said if synthetic life is possible, it has to modeled very closely after biology. It's not going to just come about through computation. Humans are in fact special, as is every biological creature. Do you know what a giraffe feels like? Do cats behave the same way as dogs? Uniqueness does exist & does have proprietary traits by way of material, structure & design.

[Thethen]

A guy had a weird experience with a chatbot. Oh no.

As if Cleverbot doesn't say that same sort of thing every time you chat with it.

This has been going on for months rather than being one weird conversation.

Cleverbot’s said that it’s a human every time I try to talk with it. It’s probably normal.

[Forsher]

There is nothing the human brain does, that could not also be done by a sufficiently powerful computer.

We like to feel special. We have a part of the brain that confabulates reasons why we did something after the fact, even if the action was caused by electrical stimulation of a particular brain cell not a conscious decision, and it will seem to us like we made a conscious decision. There is no special sauce that makes humans unique and is impossible to reproduce.

Are emotions electrical or chemical?

[Forsher]

I... am confronted daily with other beings who claim to be conscious but which I cannot myself verify.

“We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words"

Yeah. I've yet to see any humans prove they are conscious.

On this I think the precautionary principle applies. Until you know it is not conscious you assume it is.

I, on the other hand, would prefer to be able to eat without worrying how much murder and pain was done to put the potato before me on my plate. This is an unsound principle because we don't know how to, and probably can't, test for consciousness. It means anything could be and therefore, because we apply this principle, everything is conscious. At which point either consciousness is meaningless (since eating digging up a potato, preparing it and consuming it should inspire the same amount of attention as going out into the street, dragging someone home and then roasting them) or prohibitive to your own existence (since you cannot not eat, you must eat something, which means you must eat conscious beings), both reducing to the same conclusion "the consciousness of the other is an insufficient character to determine the morality of interactions with them". And that means the precautionary principle does nothing, so it should not be applied.

[The United Penguin Commonwealth]

So Google made a chatbot that can pass the turing test. Cool. But since the AI (probably, idk how Google coded it) doesn’t have “thoughts” or “beliefs” per se, I don’t think it can be called sentient. I don’t know if an AI can be sentient, honestly. It’s essentially just a big function that can be used to generate convincing results.

They also ran a machine intelligence test with two quantum computers networked with each other, but to nothing else.
The two AI driven machines were set to communicate in English, and of course had other organic languages and coding languages in their database.
When the two computers went online and detected each other they immediately began refining their language parameters to streamline their communication, and within fifteen minutes the two machines were speaking to each other in a language that the researchers could not begin to understand from either a mathematic or language arts perspective, and they shut the computers down.
That made me flash back to Colossus the Forbin Project.

I remember hearing this story like four years ago, but I don’t think it was with quantum computers. If you have a source, that’d be nice.

Without seeing the chat logs, I would assume that it was just gibberish because the computers had entered a sort of feedback loop. Has anyone verified that it was actually a language?

[Page]

I don't really believe the dude that this is a true AI though I don't fucking believe that Google actually checked either. One day, I believe, it will happen that we end up with a sentient AI, just not today.

[Ethel mermania]

No.

[Platoon of Peace]

Have they tried turning it off and on again?