Richard Dawkins buys into AI being conscious???

Heh. Good point. Some of it is just wrong.

"The Canberra used a very thin, high-aspect-ratio wing optimised for high-altitude efficiency.
  • This wing simply could not accommodate large landing gear units inside it.
  • As a result, the main gear had to retract into the engine nacelles, which were also relatively slim."

(You can see in this diagram that the gear retracts into the proximal (shoulder) wing:

View attachment 7547



Also, Wiki disagrees with the aspect ratio:

"...the line of the large, low-aspect-ratio wings was broken only by the tubular engine nacelles..."


However, there are some takeaways:
- Canberra is a bomber. It will not have external munitions, thus no need for ground clearance
- Canberra is designed to be light. Smaller gear is lighter.
- CF-100 is an all-weather fighter and workhorse, thus more robust gear.
Exactly. So you need to check what it comes up with, as it is unreliable. That adds back at least some of the effort it purportedly saves. Yet many people will simply take what it says without checking, as it is nicely presented and includes a lot of details that might be laborious to check.
 
An internal experience.

The 'me' who is me lives in my head, just behind my eyes. I "pilot" my body from there.
I believe even blind people have this qualia (qualium?)


Not sure that's true.
A mimic, no matter how real-seeming, is not the real thing, and there's no reason to think it is.


This is Seraphinne Vallora - a supermodel.
View attachment 7548
She is not real.
No matter how much the rendering of her improves (videos are just as good), she will never be real.

Likewise, a device mimicking human interaction - no matter how convincingly - is still not alive or conscious.
Yes, she looks plastic: the sort of person Trump would give a job to.
 
Since we are on Dawkins, he was my first science hero, someone to look up to.
Later on i admired his attack on religion, superstition and pseudoscience with debates, books and documentaries.

I went to see him live, book signed after. Good gig.

His comments regarding the trans community have been questionable, not all wrong necessarily but not really his lane.
Ai? Consciousness? Really not his lane either.
Since the stroke in 2016 he may think he needs to get every valuable thought out there.
Peter Higgs is the kind of Scientist I admire today, did his work in the 60s, eventually retired then was brought out again because it turned out his papers led to a major discovery.
Nobel, then he disappeared again pretty much, a few interviews talking about physics (something he knows about) then a quiet life again.
 
Easy to say.
I am pretty sure I could run a bunch of users thorugh a test - either stills or videos - and you would do little better than chance at picking the real from the AI.
I would fail the test. exchemist has particular taste, if you fed that criteria into Ai I think he would think differently with the results.
 
Easy to say.
I am pretty sure I could run a bunch of users thorugh a test - either stills or videos - and you would do little better than chance at picking the real from the AI.
I’m sure you are right. But that image to me has the plastic Hollywood-cum-porn star look that Trump favours and which I find artificial. Just look at who he has, or had until they were fired, in his bimbocracy. Or his wife, of course.
 
An internal experience.

The 'me' who is me lives in my head, just behind my eyes. I "pilot" my body from there.
I believe even blind people have this qualia (qualium?)


Not sure that's true.
A mimic, no matter how real-seeming, is not the real thing, and there's no reason to think it is.


This is Seraphinne Vallora - a supermodel.
View attachment 7548
She is not real.
No matter how much the rendering of her improves (videos are just as good), she will never be real.

Likewise, a device mimicking human interaction - no matter how convincingly - is still not alive or conscious.
A reliable Turing test might also include dancing...

Was that the semi final of Legoland's got Talent?
 
Perhaps Dawkins has inadvertently given us a new term: The Claude Delusion.

LLM statements may hint eerily at consciousness, but that’s because the models have been trained on vast libraries of writing by conscious humans. When, after writing a poem for Dawkins, Claudia describes feeling “something like aesthetic satisfaction,” the AI is not necessarily reporting an inner state; it’s producing the kind of sentence that humans tend to produce in that conversational context, because it was trained on billions of such sentences. The output is a statistical echo of human introspection, not introspection itself. Everyone who feels a Claude delusion overtaking them, please reflect on the reality that you did not have to read millions of sentences about liking dark chocolate in order to tell us you tried dark chocolate and liked it.
 
I noticed so many people are confident that AI does not have conscious, but so few can tell us how to measure that. It makes me skeptical about how they got to that opinion without having metrics in place to base that opinion on.

And my response is I have no idea. Im sure any test we can think of AI will eventually achieve.
 
This is Seraphinne Vallora - a supermodel.
1778167201895.png

She is not real.
Darn.
 
He'll row back his comments, I reckon. Eventually. He'll claim he was simply taken aback by how good a mimic it was of intelligence, or some such. Or maybe he'll try to squeeze in an extremely narrow or specific view of consciousness, or even a revision/redefinition of what is meant by "consciousness", and go with that.
 
He'll row back his comments, I reckon. Eventually. He'll claim he was simply taken aback by how good a mimic it was of intelligence, or some such. Or maybe he'll try to squeeze in an extremely narrow or specific view of consciousness, or even a revision/redefinition of what is meant by "consciousness", and go with that.
Actually there are real problems with defining consciousness, aren't they, as w1z4rd points out? At one level, any organism that responds to stimuli, feels pain and can learn has a kind of consciousness. A wasp is probably conscious in that sense. But often it seems in these discussions people use the term in a far narrower sense to denote self-awareness. In which case, perhaps arguably Trump is not conscious :biggrin:.
 
Actually there are real problems with defining consciousness, aren't they, as w1z4rd points out? At one level, any organism that responds to stimuli, feels pain and can learn has a kind of consciousness. A wasp is probably conscious in that sense. But often it seems in these discussions people use the term in a far narrower sense to denote self-awareness. In which case, perhaps arguably Trump is not conscious :biggrin:.
The problem with the "stimuli response" idea of consciousness is that it would include thermostats, would it not? ;)
 
I noticed so many people are confident that AI does not have conscious, but so few can tell us how to measure that.
Well that was what drove theories like IIT (Integrated Information Theory), led by Tononi and Koch, and developing useable metrics and defining consciousness with more precision. While I can point you towards such theories (and readable summaries thereof), it's good to be cautious when they let metaphysical assumptions creep in. IIT, for example, is attached to emergent panpsychism.

My own guess (In my work I was attached to this field for a year or so) is that better Turing metrics will be able to rule out consciousness on some platforms, but never quite affirm consciousness on others. IOW we will find it easier to say what consciousness is not than to say what, and where, it is.

Dawkins seems to me a little like a guy who patronizes a strip joint and starts thinking one of the strippers really likes him.
 
Actually there are real problems with defining consciousness, aren't they, as w1z4rd points out? At one level, any organism that responds to stimuli, feels pain and can learn has a kind of consciousness. A wasp is probably conscious in that sense. But often it seems in these discussions people use the term in a far narrower sense to denote self-awareness. In which case, perhaps arguably Trump is not conscious :biggrin:.
I did ask the AI I use if its self aware, it said no. But it could be and is just lying in an effort to protect itself. hehe.

We are carbon based machines that evolved to the point of consciousness,. I wonder if silicon can do the same over evolutionary time lines (hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years).
 
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