Philosophy Discussion Forums

Posted: **October 1st, 2024, 5:48 am**

In my view, living things which we regard as possessing intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, agency, etc (such as humans) are made from matter. It may turn out in the future that they're not, but the evidence available so far suggests that they are. Given this fact, I can't see any reason why other material things with intelligence etc couldn't, in principle, be made by humans out of matter (other than in the normal way that we make them).

The question of whether this could apply to "things" existing in the form of software is a special case of this general principle. If we accept that, in principle, an intelligent entity could be manufactured by putting pieces of matter together in particular ways, the question is then this: Whatever it is about the configuration of matter that gives rise to intelligence: can that property be replicated by software? Since the software is a system for numerically solving large numbers of mathematical equations applied to very large arrays of numbers, this is a special case of the more general question: Is the physical universe entirely describe-able by mathematics? Or is there some aspect of it (an aspect that is crucial to the development of intelligent life) which could never, even in principle, be so described?

Posted: **October 1st, 2024, 12:35 pm**

I think you ask the right questions, Steve3007. I don't think we are currently in a position to say whether the universe is entirely describable by mathematics. However, everything we have been able to understand about the universe so far is based in mathematics. Maybe mathematics is the only language there is to describe the universe and its workings. If not, it's hard for me to imagine any other language that would do the job.

Posted: **October 1st, 2024, 3:28 pm**

[quote=Steve3007 post_id=468528 time=1727776137 user_id=37742]
In my view, living things which we regard as possessing intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, agency, etc (such as humans) are made from matter. It may turn out in the future that they're not, but the evidence available so far suggests that they are. Given this fact, I can't see any reason why other material things with intelligence etc couldn't, in principle, be made by humans out of matter (other than in the normal way that we make them).[/quote]
You’re skipping the first problem: if intelligence is found in living things, then the question should be if we can replicate the processes of life from which intelligence emerges. Bypassing organic life to access directly inorganic intelligence is like trying to get electrical current without electrons moving.

Posted: **October 1st, 2024, 10:23 pm**

Count Lucanor wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 3:28 pm
Steve3007 wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 5:48 am In my view, living things which we regard as possessing intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, agency, etc (such as humans) are made from matter. It may turn out in the future that they're not, but the evidence available so far suggests that they are. Given this fact, I can't see any reason why other material things with intelligence etc couldn't, in principle, be made by humans out of matter (other than in the normal way that we make them).
You’re skipping the first problem: if intelligence is found in living things, then the question should be if we can replicate the processes of life from which intelligence emerges. Bypassing organic life to access directly inorganic intelligence is like trying to get electrical current without electrons moving.

Then again, AI could become exceedingly intelligent, but without sentience.

Then again, the biosphere was once non-sentient (presumably) but it was intelligent, in the sense that organisms did what they needed to do in an efficient and effective manner. In time sentience evolved.

Posted: **October 1st, 2024, 11:06 pm**

Count Lucanor wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 3:28 pm
Steve3007 wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 5:48 am In my view, living things which we regard as possessing intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, agency, etc (such as humans) are made from matter. It may turn out in the future that they're not, but the evidence available so far suggests that they are. Given this fact, I can't see any reason why other material things with intelligence etc couldn't, in principle, be made by humans out of matter (other than in the normal way that we make them).
You’re skipping the first problem: if intelligence is found in living things, then the question should be if we can replicate the processes of life from which intelligence emerges. Bypassing organic life to access directly inorganic intelligence is like trying to get electrical current without electrons moving.

But are we forced to equate/confine intelligence to organic life? We may well be able to replicate the processes of life from which intelligence emerged. And we may also be able to bypass those processes and create intelligence in an inorganic substrate. I cannot see why either is impossible in principle.

Posted: **October 2nd, 2024, 12:06 pm**

Instead of the origin of life, understanding intelligence is closer to the origin of subjectivity. Even creatures without neurons can respond to food and dangers. A sensory signal producing a programmed response is a unit of computation. However, these primitive systems cannot be considered intelligent; mere precursors to intelligence. The present crop of AI systems are mere scaled up versions of these.
Evolution struggled to discover a system with the capacity objectively control its subjective representations. Without introducing computations on subjective representations, intelligence cannot be achieved because an intelligent system must necessarily be a system with boundaries between the 'self' and the rest. The subjectivity, belief, knowledge, good, bad, strong, weak, etc., must be anchored to the self. Without the separation, things like victory/defeat, goal, and values to guide intelligent actions have no meaning. 'Whose victory/defeat, goal...?', cannot be answered.
Following someone else's instructions without the possibility to subjectively override is just a machine, perhaps a powerful machine...but...without intelligence.

Posted: **October 2nd, 2024, 1:52 pm**

A storyteller at the end of time, could tell the whole of history as a story.

There are many ways to read things, moreover all of them involve mental qualia, which will have their counterparts in physical terms [primarily anyhow].

There may arrive cyberware that can read and interact with mental qualia!
It would probably have a powerful AI such to interact with such complexity which the brain has.

Ps, soz I been away a while, the ads have got terrible these days. Its just become an unpleasant experience these days.

Posted: **October 3rd, 2024, 12:11 am**

amorphos_ii wrote: ↑October 2nd, 2024, 1:52 pm Ps, soz I been away a while, the ads have got terrible these days. Its just become an unpleasant experience these days.

True.

Posted: **October 3rd, 2024, 12:05 pm**

I don’t know anyone that welcomes inopportune adds. I will go as far as saying that some people make a point of negative prejudice against the products of intrusive adds. So, what’s the point? A negative impression is recorded (impression is the point). The adds are forgotten and the product might resurface in a store window or as we shop for services. The impression might tilt the shopper towards it. In the world of AI, an app could store and track the intrusive adds so that they might no be forgotten. The acceptable class of adds might be annoying if inopportune but that’s the point. I guess, I would not use (enduring some) the AI app in this situation (forum support). However, the effectiveness of this tolerance turns to prejudice, and it is recorded in the App as intrusive when the product is advertised in other unsupported venues. I might now have the subliminal knowledge and the power to get revenge… if so. The idea of a focus target AI is taking form in my consciousness to the extent of taking it to the next level. As such, it could be in a Beta form soon and be advertised in this forum. I will give the administration part of the proceeds so they can pay knowledgeable topic based site administrators to engage in the improvement of the understanding.

Posted: **October 3rd, 2024, 1:33 pm**

Sy Borg wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 10:23 pm
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 3:28 pm
Steve3007 wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 5:48 am In my view, living things which we regard as possessing intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, agency, etc (such as humans) are made from matter. It may turn out in the future that they're not, but the evidence available so far suggests that they are. Given this fact, I can't see any reason why other material things with intelligence etc couldn't, in principle, be made by humans out of matter (other than in the normal way that we make them).
You’re skipping the first problem: if intelligence is found in living things, then the question should be if we can replicate the processes of life from which intelligence emerges. Bypassing organic life to access directly inorganic intelligence is like trying to get electrical current without electrons moving.
Then again, AI could become exceedingly intelligent, but without sentience.

Then again, the biosphere was once non-sentient (presumably) but it was intelligent, in the sense that organisms did what they needed to do in an efficient and effective manner. In time sentience evolved.

However, in most if not all discussions about artificial intelligence, the concept of “intelligence” is clearly pointing to that which we see in living, sentient organisms. That’s how the whole problem is set up: can we replicate “natural intelligence”, producing an artificial one? Otherwise another word or concept would have been chosen. If one extends the concept of intelligence to the type of agency found in non-sentient organisms, although debatable, we’re still within the domain of living things, but the entities in which we are to evaluate their “intelligence”, the devices running on software and electronic circuits, those are not organisms, not even close to being alive. I know that for advocates of AI being intelligent, that means having to redefine the concept of life. They’ll push for that, but then the discussion itself becomes pointless, as if one party was focused on discussing English grammar and the other on the reproductive cycle of mosquitoes. No matter how many things in common one thinks one may find, they are different discussions, and connecting them implies promoting confusion.

Posted: **October 3rd, 2024, 2:46 pm**

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 11:06 pm
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 3:28 pm
Steve3007 wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 5:48 am In my view, living things which we regard as possessing intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, agency, etc (such as humans) are made from matter. It may turn out in the future that they're not, but the evidence available so far suggests that they are. Given this fact, I can't see any reason why other material things with intelligence etc couldn't, in principle, be made by humans out of matter (other than in the normal way that we make them).
You’re skipping the first problem: if intelligence is found in living things, then the question should be if we can replicate the processes of life from which intelligence emerges. Bypassing organic life to access directly inorganic intelligence is like trying to get electrical current without electrons moving.
But are we forced to equate/confine intelligence to organic life? We may well be able to replicate the processes of life from which intelligence emerged. And we may also be able to bypass those processes and create intelligence in an inorganic substrate. I cannot see why either is impossible in principle.

Are we forced to confine mobility to the spatial relations of objects? The answer is: yes, obviously. If we redefined words so that, for example, we were able to talk about the “mobility” of ideas, or the “mobility” of arithmetic relations, without any direct or indirect reference to spatial relations, why would you use the term “mobility” in those scenarios in the first place? Arguing that it is a whole new category of mobility that does not apply to spatial relations would not make much sense. The same with artificial intelligence supposedly being a whole new class of things not related to natural intelligence.

Posted: **October 3rd, 2024, 3:24 pm**

Count Lucanor wrote: ↑October 3rd, 2024, 1:33 pm
Sy Borg wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 10:23 pm
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 3:28 pm
Steve3007 wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 5:48 am In my view, living things which we regard as possessing intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, agency, etc (such as humans) are made from matter. It may turn out in the future that they're not, but the evidence available so far suggests that they are. Given this fact, I can't see any reason why other material things with intelligence etc couldn't, in principle, be made by humans out of matter (other than in the normal way that we make them).
You’re skipping the first problem: if intelligence is found in living things, then the question should be if we can replicate the processes of life from which intelligence emerges. Bypassing organic life to access directly inorganic intelligence is like trying to get electrical current without electrons moving.
Then again, AI could become exceedingly intelligent, but without sentience.

Then again, the biosphere was once non-sentient (presumably) but it was intelligent, in the sense that organisms did what they needed to do in an efficient and effective manner. In time sentience evolved.
However, in most if not all discussions about artificial intelligence, the concept of “intelligence” is clearly pointing to that which we see in living, sentient organisms. That’s how the whole problem is set up: can we replicate “natural intelligence”, producing an artificial one? Otherwise another word or concept would have been chosen. If one extends the concept of intelligence to the type of agency found in non-sentient organisms, although debatable, we’re still within the domain of living things, but the entities in which we are to evaluate their “intelligence”, the devices running on software and electronic circuits, those are not organisms, not even close to being alive.

There is a blurred line between agency without sentience and agency with sentience, so you are right that the ideas are debatable. Consul and I debated this for years :) Still, the fact remains that the biosphere was once not sentient and now it is. Sentience has evolved from the non-sentient before. In fact, sentience emerging is the broad story of each of our lives.

My guess is there won't be a "lights on moment" in The Awakening of the Machines, but a gradual dawning, as happened with biological life.

I already extend life to beyond just biology. I see biological life as a phase of a larger dynamic. If life/sentience/existence is to be anything but a rare blip in a barren universe, then it needs to be at least interplanetary. Yet biology and space don't mix. Even a brief stay in the ISS is hard on the body. The story can only continue with non-biological sentience.

Even if humans die out and non-sentient AI continues, it may be a period of "sleep" before sentience re-emerges. In the end, either AI can eventually become sentient or the future of the universe is just plasma, rock, and mindless machines doing pointless tasks. Then again, in a sense, it already is.

Posted: **October 3rd, 2024, 3:26 pm**

Sy Borg wrote: ↑October 3rd, 2024, 3:24 pm
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑October 3rd, 2024, 1:33 pm
Sy Borg wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 10:23 pm
Count Lucanor wrote: ↑October 1st, 2024, 3:28 pm
You’re skipping the first problem: if intelligence is found in living things, then the question should be if we can replicate the processes of life from which intelligence emerges. Bypassing organic life to access directly inorganic intelligence is like trying to get electrical current without electrons moving.
Then again, AI could become exceedingly intelligent, but without sentience.

Then again, the biosphere was once non-sentient (presumably) but it was intelligent, in the sense that organisms did what they needed to do in an efficient and effective manner. In time sentience evolved.
However, in most if not all discussions about artificial intelligence, the concept of “intelligence” is clearly pointing to that which we see in living, sentient organisms. That’s how the whole problem is set up: can we replicate “natural intelligence”, producing an artificial one? Otherwise another word or concept would have been chosen. If one extends the concept of intelligence to the type of agency found in non-sentient organisms, although debatable, we’re still within the domain of living things, but the entities in which we are to evaluate their “intelligence”, the devices running on software and electronic circuits, those are not organisms, not even close to being alive.
There is a blurred line between agency without sentience and agency with sentience, so you are right that the ideas are debatable. Consul and I debated this for years :) Still, the fact remains that the biosphere was once not sentient and now it is. Sentience has evolved from the non-sentient before. In fact, sentience emerging is the broad story of each of our lives.

My guess is there won't be a "lights on moment" in The Awakening of the Machines, but a gradual dawning, as happened with biological life.

I already extend the definition of "life" beyond biology. I see biological life as a phase of a larger dynamic. If life/sentience/existence is to be anything but a rare blip in a barren universe, then it needs to be at least interplanetary. Yet biology and space don't mix. Even a brief stay in the ISS is hard on the body. The story can only continue with non-biological sentience.

Even if humans die out and non-sentient AI continues, it may be a period of "sleep" before sentience re-emerges. In the end, either AI can eventually become sentient or the future of the universe is just plasma, rock, and mindless machines doing pointless tasks. Then again, in a sense, it already is.

Posted: **October 4th, 2024, 10:00 am**

Sy Borg wrote:

There is a blurred line between agency without sentience and agency with sentience, so you are right that the ideas are debatable. Consul and I debated this for years Still, the fact remains that the biosphere was once not sentient and now it is. Sentience has evolved from the non-sentient before. In fact, sentience emerging is the broad story of each of our lives.

My guess is there won't be a "lights on moment" in The Awakening of the Machines, but a gradual dawning, as happened with biological life.

I already extend life to beyond just biology. I see biological life as a phase of a larger dynamic. If life/sentience/existence is to be anything but a rare blip in a barren universe, then it needs to be at least interplanetary. Yet biology and space don't mix. Even a brief stay in the ISS is hard on the body. The story can only continue with non-biological sentience.

Even if humans die out and non-sentient AI continues, it may be a period of "sleep" before sentience re-emerges. In the end, either AI can eventually become sentient or the future of the universe is just plasma, rock, and mindless machines doing pointless tasks. Then again, in a sense, it already is.

The facts that we are aware of are that biological life emerged from inanimate matter and then eventually sentience emerged from that biological life. There’s also the fact that we have seen no signs that in the vast universe outside or Earth, the two processes I just mentioned have taken place, so Earth is our only reference. What has happened on Earth, though, is entirely contingent, so anyway, even under similar initial conditions, which cannot be guaranteed, there’s no good reason to expect that things will come out the same.

Now, if that is not enough, there’s a bigger problem for the analogy between the emergence of life or sentience and the expected emergence of new sentience from lifeless forms. If the contingent processes of inanimate matter (A) produced the contingent process of animate matter (B), which then produced the processes that gave rise to sentience (C), it cannot be logically inferred that A has the potential to produce C directly, without B. Even worst, absent B or C, that is, if everything is reset to the conditions where only A exists, if one could argue that there’s a chance that B or C will reappear, none of that allows us to infer, being B or C present, that a new process D (artificial intelligence) will emerge, no matter that you name it as an existing process and put the adjective “artificial” before it. We already have life and intelligence, so what then is supposed to emerge new and from what? Of course, it is more likely that once the playing with words is avoided, we are left with the proposition that what is to be produced is a property that already exists in certain sentient entities (created out of the contingencies of inanimate matter), but this time would exist in non-sentient ones. Again, we lack any precedent for that possibility. The only precedent we have is that property arising from living organisms.

These problems cannot be solved by inverting the concepts and calling life a larger dynamic that encompasses non-life or intelligence as a larger dynamic that encompasses non-sentience, given the minimal evidence of those things outside of our ridiculously unimportant planet. The workaround, which involves reconceptualizing life and intelligence, is deeply problematic: whatever comes out of it can’t be “life as we know it” or “intelligence as we know it”. That’s a major issue for current discussions about AI, which focus on assigning properties, inferring relations and making predictions based on life and intelligence as we know it. They are always there and are never bypassed, so reconceptualizing simply will not work.

Posted: **October 4th, 2024, 11:10 am**

Would there be a difference between sentient AI and symbolic AI? The question of agency is not whether deep machine learning achieves sentiency in some definition. So… There is room for human feedback in the most advanced models. Idiosyncrasies of the natural languages are part of deep learning as well… grammar, semantics and spelling might have degrees of tolerance in favor of meaning. IMO a sign of understanding the symbolism is a sign of intelligence. In addition, human feedback in the loop of AI agency is fundamental. This will symbolically work the same way as a human driving a car disregarding (for the most part) the GPS and the GPS adjusting to that. If the GPS has agency and takes over the driving, then IMO AI is (in my definition) sentient and struggles the same as humans do with paper maps in visiting the places where the tentacles/relations/properties are located. What was the question: Would a sentient AI (slave) not eliminate the human feedback o will AI struggle as humans do?
Source Cornell University: Researches found that AI generated essays (college admissions) are more similar ”to essays authored by students who are males, with higher socioeconomic status and higher levels of social privilege”… journal of Big Data.

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