Exactly so you old clanker. Welll expressed.
My Mme was chatting about time machines (as one does) and I pointed out that the planet Earth is a time ferry. Always in the present and the future simultaeniously.
The past only exists as memory….and relics to which we attach memory and stories. We are wedded to the future until our personal journey ends.
You’re quite the time traveller, aren’t you, speeding along at 1209600 seconds per fortnight!
And as replicas of what exactly?
You do realize that you are just shifting the goalposts…
If nobody exists, skepticism cannot even arise. The statement “I might not exist” requires an “I” making the claim. You can imagine a world without you, but you can’t imagine it from a standpoint that doesn’t exist. This is like trying to think a thought without anyone thinking: contradiction.
Just like Trumpism…
Does it need to be a replica? And no, I don’t think that’s moving the goalposts. When/if “we” (i.e. researchers) reach the stage of building a general artificial intelligence and making it operational, will it be conscious?
Replicas of conscious individuals (if we are truly sophisticated computer programs)? Simply posing that hypothetical claim doesn’t answer the question. It just moves it to the next level.
That’s another question it is entirety. A very interesting question, but not one which we are discussing at the present.
(Going to stop writing for now. Want to hear back from the mods as for my rules)
Actually, consciousness is the low bar for AI. It merely requires an awareness of your existence, the environment you exist within and an awareness of your thoughts. There is speculation within the industry that this may only be 10 to 20 years away.
Sentience is the real hurdle. That require all of the above, along with achieving subjective experiences and the old pain\pleasure feelings thing.
This really has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. Sorry for the aside…
Actually not. If a computer programme can be conscious, what prevents our consciousness from being simulations or artificial intelligences?
We can feel pain. Computers\AI can’t do that yet. Sorry, we’re all just analog…
As much as that’s an interesting question to which I understand that there could be a possibility, it doesn’t raise an objection to panpsychism. Simply positing the different topographies of higher level conscious experiences doesn’t negate the fact that they are still part of the same conclusive system.
It doesn’t need to, as panpsychism is not empirically testable, and therefore not falsifiable. As such, panpsychism can at most be elevated to pure speculation and empirically unfounded assertions.
In the simulations we run in the simulation we could be a part of: Yet.
I agree, but the proof still holds.
You falsely equate that which is not empirically testable to pure speculation. Rational inquiry and modal truth are useful tools when the limits of the empirical inquiry run into the wall of our own epistemological boundness.
It is not empirically falsifiable to us due to our epistemological boundness, but it still yet rationally falsifiable due to the essential properties of mathematics which provide the framework for all inquiry.
Even more relevant is that we are embodied consciousnesses. Part of what it is to be sentient involves emotion and pain and bodily sensations. LLMs lack that feedback. We are in the very early days of giving humanoid robots even a rudimentary sense of touch or balance / proprioception and we haven’t begun to wire them up to be in a feedback loop with those inputs that cause them to FEEL anything. My guess is that for created sentience to be remotely human-like, it’s going to be a very long time before we can come even close to how we do it now, which is to have sex, conceive, procreate and nurture the young.
A proof is only as good as its assumptions. If the assumptions are shit, the conclusion is shit. You might as well theorise about the properties of invisible and undetectable unicorns. Shit assumptions in, shit conclusion out, no matter how correct the logical steps in between are. You need empirical data. Data is king.
Mathematics and logic only applies to reality as far as the assumptions have anything to do with the real world. Take the Banach-Tarski paradox, where you can — informally stated — chop up a pea and reassemble it into the Sun. It is all perfectly sound mathematics and logics. But it is not physically realisable, as there is no physical law of conservation of volume. Also, you might have to consider binding energy and conservation of mass in determining whether it has anything to do with physically realisable stuff. So while you might think about Banach-Tarski spheres and theorise about them all you want, they are not physically realisable.
It’s unevidenced, unfalsifiable and untestable, and has no explanatory powers in terms of consciousness. No more objections are necessary.
Exactly as was explained to him weeks ago.
Useful for those who want to indulge unevidenced subjective beliefs they favour. Useful here depends what you subjectively want to achieve. If beluefs based on unevidenced assumptions are your goal, that are unsupported by any objective or empirical evidence, and are u falsifiable and untestable, then yes I can see how pretending you’ve argued something into existence might be self satisfying. If the truth is your primary goal then no, it’s not useful.
Use logic to design a plane, don’t use any empirical data, and nothing falsifiable. When you’re ready to fly it, let me know.
Another fact he is determined to ignore.
Ah but magic see, it’s mysterious mun, and omnipotent omniscient deity that has to supplement it’s income as a particular time carpenter performing magic tricks see. To people who are biased in favour, reality can encompass ideas that are not part of objective reality, and label it existence.
Like the false equivalence god = objective reality.
True. But such assumptions can be demonstrated to be rationally coherent, we have an epistemological duty to accept them as rational beings.
Empirical data isn’t king by a long shot. Empirical data is subject to subjective inference, subject to higher order measurement systems, and reflects a temporal observation. You are joking, right?
Yes, and that encompasses all of reality. All of reality. Including the unobserved and the realities beyond our limited scope of being.
The Banach-Tarski paradox is not a true mathematical proof, only a mathematical thought experiment. The Banach-Tarski paradox fails as a mathematical proof because it doesn’t not consider all variables relevant to the idea.
That’s where the disagreement arises. Panpsychism has greater explanatory powers in terms of consciousness than the prevailing alternatives (the Hard Problem of Consciousness, the Combination Problem, and the Causal Closure of the Material).
Rational inquiry and demonstration is objective: far more objective than relying on mere empirical data.
Logic and mathematics cannot be “seen” or “experienced”: they structure experience, rather than deriving from it. Without rationalism, induction (the basis of all empirical science) cannot be justified empirically without circular reasoning.
If I had a perfect understanding of all mathematical contingencies, I could do so quite easily.
A functional aircraft depends on:
fluid dynamics (Navier–Stokes equations)
aerodynamic lift equations
stability derivatives
structural mechanics
mass distribution
control theory
propulsion physics
Every one of these is mathematically expressible.
Nothing about an airplane’s design requires intuition beyond what mathematics can encode.
A “perfect understanding of all mathematical contingencies” gives you:
complete knowledge of all governing equations,
complete knowledge of how small changes ripple through the system,
complete predictive ability.
In principle, that is more than any aerospace engineer has.
And in reality, no one in their right mind would fly in a plane that had not been systematically tested by test pilots, including to the edges of its design parameters, and the final design being the product of repeated iterations in real-world feedback.
Yes I know you qualified it with IF you had a PERFECT understanding of all mathematical contingencies. But you don’t, and neither does anyone else. The equations that would define the design of an airplane are just models. Models are not reality. The objective of building a plane is to properly engage with reality by refining the models enough that they don’t meaningfully differ from observable reality.
Like tge assunpri9n Superman if as imagined can be harmed by kryptonite, is rationally consistent.
Superman remains imaginary of course, like deities.
Build the plane using only logical arguments, without any empirical data or objective evidence, come back and let us know how many people it kills.
Yet can be demonstrated to reflect objective reality, unlike deities and panpsychism of course.
No it doesn’t, unevidenced assumptions about imaginary deities for example, you can’t objectively evidence they exist.
Just as Godel’s argument fails, because his initial assumptions are unevidenced, and amount to question begging.
Nonsense, it has no explanatory powers for human consciousness. Whereas we have a vast amount of objective evidence that it is an emergent property of a functioning human brain. How can zero be greater than every single time consciousness disappears when the brain dies.
Making unevidenced assumptions is not.
Empirical evidence already dies it, demonstrating your claim it is superior reflection of objective reality to be nonsense. Thanks…