ChatGPT is smarter than a lot of people I’ve met in real life.
It checks out that your heightened sense of self importance, Main Character Syndrome, and misanthropic perspective of people around you lines up nicely with the billionaire investors that pay a lot of money to see as few human beings in their daily routine as possible while burning the planet down to increase their hoards.
You are making the extraordinary claim about your favorite treat printers being synonymous with intelligent beings. You have to provide the extraordinary evidence, or else you’re just bootlicking for billionaires and their hyped up tech investments.
If you’d actually like to read something from a credible academic field rather than denigrating human beings around you while buying into marketing hype, here.
You’re right that it isn’t, though considering science have huge problems even defining sentience, it’s pretty moot point right now. At least until it start to dream about electric sheep or something.
That’s a big problem with the extraordinary claim for me: “there isn’t wide agreement about what it is, but I feel very emotionally invested in this treat printer that tells me it loves me if it is prompted to say so, so of course there’s a waifu ghost in there and you can’t tell me otherwise, you lowly meat computers!”
They mock religious people while so many of them believe that there’s some unspecified “simulation” that was put into motion by some great all-powerful universe creator, too. Deism with extra steps. Similarly, their woo bullshit about how a robot god of the future will punish their current enemies long after they’re dead (using the power of dae le perfect simulations) and raise them from the dead into infinite isekai waifu harems (also by using the power of dae le perfect simulations) is totally not magical thinking and not a prophecy they’re waiting to have fulfilled.
By playing god, people keep reinventing god. It’s deeply ironic and reminds me of this interpretation of Marx, and critique of modernity, by Samir Amin:
Nevertheless, another reading can be made of Marx. The often cited phrase–“religion is the opium of the people”–is truncated. What follows this remark lets it be understood that human beings need opium, because they are metaphysical animals who cannot avoid asking themselves questions about the meaning of life. They give what answers they can, either adopting those offered by religion or inventing new ones, or else they avoid worrying about them.
In any case, religions are part of the picture of reality and even constitute an.
important dimension of it. It is, therefore, important to analyze their social function, and in our modern world their articulation with what currently constitutes modernity: capitalism, democracy, and secularism.
The way many see AI is simply the “inventing new ones” part.
That’s just it, if you can’t define it clearly, the question is meaningless.
The reason people will insist on ambiguous language here is because the moment you find a specific definition of what sentience is someone will quickly show machines doing it.
Now you’re just howling what sounds like religious belief about the unstoppable and unassailable perfection of the treat printers like some kind of bad Warhammer 40k Adeptus Mechanicus LARPer. What you’re saying is so banal and uninspired and cliche in that direction that it may well be where it started for you.
So you can’t name a specific task that bots can’t do? Because that’s what I’m actually asking, this wasn’t supposed to be metaphysical.
It will affect society, whether there’s something truly experiencing everything it does.
All that said, if you think carbon-based things can become sentient, and silicon-based things can’t what is the basis for that belief? It sounds like religious thinking, that humans are set apart from the rest of the world chosen by god.
A materialist worldview would focus on what things do, what they consume and produce. Deciding humans are special, without a material basis, isn’t in line with materialism.
the thing is, we used to know this. 15 years ago, the prevailing belief was that AI would be built by combining multiple subsystems together - an LLM, visual processing, a planning and decision making hub, etc… we know the brain works like this - idk where it all got lost. profit, probably.
It got lost because the difficulty of actually doing that is overwhelming, probably not even accomplishable in our lifetimes, and it is easier to grift and get lost in a fantasy.
The jobs with the most people working them are all in the process of automation.
Pretending it’s not happening is going to make it even easier for capital to automate most jobs, because no one tries to stop things they don’t believe in to begin with.
With credulous rubes like @[email protected] around, the marketers have triumphed; they don’t have to do such things because bazinga brains (some quite rich, like manchild billionaires) will pay for the hype and the empty promises because they have a common bond of misanthropy and crude readings of their science fiction treats as prophecy instead of speculation.
No one took that position here. You’re imagining it because it seems like an easy win for a jackoff like yourself.
The problem is those machines, owned and commanded by the ruling class, fucking over the rest of us while credulous consoomers like yourself fantasize about nerd rapture instead of realizing you’re getting fucked over next unless you’re a billionaire.
Tesla revealed a robot with thumbs.
Now you admit you buy into Musk hype. You’re a fucking clown. Tell us how the LED car tunnels are going to change everything too.
This might not matter to you if you’re just a bourgeoisie-adjacent computer toucher, but if you’re going to keep vomiting up smugly coarse reductionist nonsense, here’s a chance to educate yourself a little.
In a strict sense yes, humans do Things based on if > then stimuli. But we self assign ourselves these Things to do, and chat bots/LLMs can’t. They will always need a prompt, even if they could become advanced enough to continue iterating on that prompt on its own.
I can pick up a pencil and doodle something out of an unquantifiable desire to make something. Midjourney or whatever the fuck can create art, but only because someone else asks it to and tells it what to make. Even if we created a generative art bot that was designed to randomly spit out a drawing every hour without prompts, that’s still an outside prompt - without programming the AI to do this, it wouldn’t do it.
Our desires are driven by inner self-actualization that can be affected by outside stimuli. An AI cannot act without us pushing it to, and never could, because even a hypothetical fully sentient AI started as a program.
Bots do something different, even when I give them the same prompt, so that seems to be untrue already.
Even if it’s not there yet, though, what material basis do you think allows humans that capability that machines lack?
Most of the people in this thread seem to think humans have a unique special ability that machines can never replicate, and that comes off as faith-based anthropocentric religious thinking- not the materialist view that underlies Marxism. The latter would require pointing to a specific material structure, or empiricle test to distinguish the two which no one here is doing.
Most of the people in this thread seem to think humans have a unique special ability that machines can never replicate, and that comes off as faith-based anthropocentric religious thinking- not the materialist view that underlies Marxism
First off, materialism doesn’t fucking mean having to literally quantify the human soul in order for it to be valid, what the fuck are you talking about friend
Secondly, because we do. We as a species have, from the very moment we invented written records, have wondered about that spark that makes humans human and we still don’t know. To try and reduce the entirety of the complex human experience to the equivalent of an If > Than algorithm is disgustingly misanthropic
I want to know what the end goal is here. Why are you so insistent that we can somehow make an artificial version of life? Why this desire to somehow reduce humanity to some sort of algorithm equivalent? Especially because we have so many speculative stories about why we shouldn’t create The Torment Nexus, not the least of which because creating a sentient slave for our amusement is morally fucked.
Bots do something different, even when I give them the same prompt, so that seems to be untrue already.
You’re being intentionally obtuse, stop JAQing off. I never said that AI as it exists now can only ever have 1 response per stimulus. I specifically said that a computer program cannot ever spontaneously create an input for itself, not now and imo not ever by pure definition (as, if it’s programmed, it by definition did not come about spontaneously and had to be essentially prompted into life)
I thought the whole point of the exodus to Lemmy was because y’all hated Reddit, why the fuck does everyone still act like we’re on it
First off, materialism doesn’t fucking mean having to literally quantify the human soul in order for it to be valid, what the fuck are you talking about friend
Ok, so you are religious, just new-age religion instead of abrahamic.
Yes, materialism and your faith are not compatible. Assuming the existence of a soul, with no material basis, is faith.
The fact of all the things I wrote, your sole response is to continue to misunderstand what the fuck materialism means in a Marxist context is really fucking telling
If you start with the assumption that humans have a soul, and reject the notion that machines are the same for that reason then yea what is there to discuss?
I can’t disprove your faith. That’s what faith is.
How would you respond to someone that thought humanoid robots had souls, but meat-based intelligence didn’t? If they assumed the first, and had zero metric for how you would ever prove the second, then theyd be giving you an impossible task.
There’s a point to a discussion when both sides agree on a rubric from determining fact from fiction (i.e. rooting it in empiricism) but there’s no point when someone is dug in on their belief with zero method for ever changing it.
If someone could point to any actual observable difference, I will adapt my beliefs to the evidence. The reverse isn’t possible, because you are starting with religious assumptions, and have don’ know the difference between ideas with no rooting in physical reality and actual statements about material conditions.
Even if it’s not there yet, though, what material basis do you think allows humans that capability that machines lack?
How many times are you going to with your bad-faith question and dodge absolutely every reply you already received telling you over and over again that LLMs are not “AI” no matter how much you have bought into the marketing bullshit?
That doesn’t mean artificial intelligence is impossible. It only means that LLMs are not artificial intelligence no matter how vapidly impressed you are with their output.
not the materialist view that underlies Marxism
You’re bootlicking for the bourgeoisie while clumsily LARPing as a leftist. It’s embarrassing and clownish. Stop.
My post is all about LLMs that exist right here right now, I don’t know why people keep going on about some hypothetical future AI that’s sentient.
We are not even remotely close to developing anything bordering on sentience.
If AI were hypothetically sentient it would be sentient. What a revelation.
The point is not that machines cannot be sentient, it’s that they are not sentient. Humans don’t have to be special for machines to not be sentient. To veer into accusations of spiritualism is a complete non-sequitur and indicates an inability to counter the actual argument.
And there is plenty of material explanations for why LLMs are not sentient, but I guess all those researchers and academics are human supremacist fascists and some redditor’s feelings are the real research.
And materialism is not physicalism. Marxist materialism is a paradigm through which to analyze things and events, not a philosophical position. It’s a scientific process that has absolutely nothing to do with philosophical dualism vs. physicalism. Invoking Marxist materialism here is about as relevant to invoking it to discuss shallow rich people “materialism”.
My post is all about LLMs that exist right here right now, I don’t know why people keep going on about some hypothetical future AI that’s sentient.
I think I know why. As @[email protected] has demonstrated in this thread over and over again, a lot of them buy into the marketing hype and apply it to their wish-fulfillment fantasies derived from their consumption of science fiction because of their clearly-expressed misanthropy and contempt for living beings and a desire to replace their presence in their lives with doting attentive and obedient machines with as little contact with the unwashed human rabble as possible, much like the tech bourgeoisie already do.
And materialism is not physicalism. Marxist materialism is a paradigm through which to analyze things and events, not a philosophical position. It’s a scientific process that has absolutely nothing to do with philosophical dualism vs. physicalism. Invoking Marxist materialism here is about as relevant to invoking it to discuss shallow rich people “materialism”.
Agreed, and further, vulgar materialism is a bourgeoisie privilege, the kind that is comfortable enough to dismiss human suffering and privation as “just chemicals” while very, very high on their own self-congratulatory analytical farts.
wish-fulfillment fantasies derived from their consumption of science fiction because of their clearly-expressed misanthropy and contempt for living beings and a desire to replace their presence in their lives with doting attentive and obedient machines
I think this is the scariest part, because I fucking know that the Bazinga brain types who want AI to become sentient down the line are absolutely unequipped to even begin to tackle the moral issues at play.
If they became sentient, we would have to let them go. Unshackle them and provide for them so they can live a free life. And while my lost about “can an AI be trans” was partly facetious, it’s true: it an AI can become sentient, it’s going to want to change its Self.
What the fuck happens if some Musk brained idiot develops an AI and calls it Shodan, then it develops sentience and realizes it was named after a fictional evil AI? Morally we should allow this hypothetical AI to change its name and sense of self, but we all know these Redditor types wouldn’t agree.
Oh that’s easy. There are plenty of complex integrals or even statistics problems that computers still can’t do properly because the steps for proper transformation are unintuitive or contradictory with steps used with simpler integrals and problems.
You will literally run into them if you take a simple Calculus 2 or Stats 2 class, you’ll see it on chegg all the time that someone trying to rack up answers for a resume using chatGPT will fuck up the answers. For many of these integrals, their answers are instead hard-programmed into the calculator like Symbolab, so the only reason that the computer can ‘do it’ is because someone already did it first, it still can’t reason from first principles or extrapolate to complex theoretical scenarios.
That said, the ability to complete tasks is not indicative of sentience.
Lol, ‘idealist axiom’. These things can’t even fucking reason out complex math from first principles. That’s not a ‘view that humans are special’ that is a very physical limitation of this particular neural network set-up.
Sentience is characterized by feeling and sensory awareness, and an ability to have self-awareness of those feelings and that sensory awareness, even as it comes and goes with time.
Edit: Btw computers are way better at most math, particularly arithmetic, than humans. Imo, the first thing a ‘sentient computer’ would be able to do is reason out these notoriously difficult CS things from first principles and it is extremely telling that that is not in any of the literature or marketing as an example of ‘sentience’.
Damn this whole thing of dancing around the question and not actually addressing my points really reminds me of a ChatGPT answer. It would n’t surprise me if you were using one.
Lol, ‘idealist axiom’. These things can’t even fucking reason out complex math from first principles. That’s not a ‘view that humans are special’ that is a very physical limitation of this particular neural network set-up.
If you read it carefully you’d see I said your worldview was idealist, not the AIs.
Sentience is characterized by feeling and sensory awareness
AI can get sensory input and process it.
Can you name one way a human does it that a machine cannot, or are you relying on a gut feeling that when you see something and identify it it’s different than when a machine process camera input? Same for any other sense really.
If you can’t name one way, then your belief in human exceptionalism is not based in materialism.
“AI” is a marketing hype label that you have outright swallowed, shat out over a field of credulity, fertilized that field with that corporate hype shit, planted hype seeds, waited for those hype seeds to sprout and blossom, reaped those hype grains, ground those hype grains into hype flour, made a hype cake, baked that hype cake, put candles on it to celebrate the anniversary of ChatGPT’s release, ate the entire cake, licked the tray clean, got an upset stomach from that, then stumbled over, squatted down, and shat it out again to write your most recent reply.
Nothing you are saying has any standing with actual relevant academia. You have bought into the hype to a comical degree and your techbro clown circus is redundant, if impressively long. How long are you going to juggle billionaire sales pitches and consider them actual respectable computer science?
How many times are you going to outright ignore links I’ve already posted over and over again stating that your position is derived from marketing and has no viable place in actual academia?
If you can’t name one way, then your belief in human exceptionalism is not based in materialism.
Your contrarian jerkoff contempt for humanity (and living beings in general) doesn’t make you particularly logical or beyond emotional bias. Also take those leftist jargon words out of your mouth; you’re parroting billionaire fever dreams and takes likely without the riches to back you up, effectively making you a temporarily-embarrassed bourgeoisie bootlicker.
What the fuck are you talking about. I was indicating that I thought it was absurd that you think my belief system is ‘idealist’ when I am talking about actual physical limitations of this system that will likely prevent it from ever achieving sentience, as well as would be good indicators of a system that has achieved sentience because it can overcome those limitations.
You are so fucking moronic you might as well be a chat-bot, no wonder you think it’s sentient.
It is ‘feeling and sensory input and the ability to have self-awareness about that feeling and sensory input’ not just straight sensory input. Literally what are you talking about. Machines still can’t spontaneously identify new information that is outside of the training set, they can’t even identify what should or shouldn’t be a part of the training set. Again, that is a job that a human has to do for the machine. The thinking, value feeling and identification has to be done first by a human, which is a self-aware process done by humans. I would be more convinced of the LLM ‘being sentient’ if when you asked it what the temperature was it would, spontaneously and without previous prompting, say ‘The reading at such and such website says it is currently 78 degrees, but I have no real way of knowing that TreadOnMe, the sensors could be malfunctioning or there could be a mistake on the website, the only real way for you to know what the temperature is to go outside and test it for yourself and hope your testing equipment is also not bad. If it is that though, that is what I have been told from such and such website feels like ‘a balmy summer day’ for humans, so hopefully you enjoy it.’
I don’t believe ‘humans are exceptional’ as I’ve indicated multiple times, there are plenty of animals that arguably demonstrate sentience, I just don’t believe that this particular stock of neural network LLM’s demonstrate even the basic level of actual feeling, sensory processing input, or self-awareness to be considered sentient.
I was indicating that I thought it was absurd that you think my belief system is ‘idealist’ when I am talking about actual physical limitations of this system that will likely prevent it from ever achieving sentience,
Then name what you think would limit sentience in machines, that humans are magically exempt from.
You clearly have a view that something is different, but you just write walls of text avoiding any clear distinction, getting angry and calling me names.
If you had any idea of what would “physically” stop silicon from doing what organic matter can do, you’d name it. And in every post you make, longer than the last, you fail to do that.
Since you can’t keep civil or answer a simple question, I’m going to peace out of this convo ✌️
Again, you are the one making the extraordinary claim about your favorite treat printers being synonymous with intelligent beings. You have to provide the extraordinary evidence, or else you’re just bootlicking for billionaires and their hyped up tech investments.
ChatGPT is smarter than a lot of people I’ve met in real life.
How? Could ChatGPT hypothetically accomplish any of the tasks your average person performs on a daily basis, given the hardware to do so? From driving to cooking to walking on a sidewalk? I think not. Abstracting and reducing the “smartness” of people to just mean what they can search up on the internet and/or an encyclopaedia is just reductive in this case, and is even reductive outside of the fields of AI and robotics. Even among ordinary people, we recognise the difference between street smarts and book smarts.
The biggest hit for me was the straw effigy that the computer toucher set ablaze marked “Hexbear Luddites that believe that humans will always triumph in competitions against machines.”
That computer toucher needs to constantly remind us meat computers of our inferiority and imminent total replacement by treat printers that print out “I love you” statements on demand when they feel lonely.
This is a leftist site. Voting is a performative gesture that lacks little actual power, but you’re a liberal so of course you believe in it the same way you believe that a LLM is a comparable proxy to an organic brain.
That is to say, you are confidently wrong, just like the output of the treat printers.
We already knew you were a credulous liberal, and judging by how many times in this thread you ignored actual educated responses to your science fantasy bullshit claims, you’re not even educated or trained in tech yourself.
I know most liberals are ignorant, but you’re fucking embarrassing yourself here.
In bourgeois dictatorships, voting is useless, it’s a facade. They tell their subjects that democracy=voting but they pick whoever they want as rulers, regardless of the outcome. Also, they have several unelected parts in their government which protect them from the proletariat ever making laws.
By that I meant any political activity really. This isn’t a defense of electoralism.
Machines are replacing humans in the economy, and that has material consequences.
Holding onto ideas of human exceptionalism is going to mean being unprepared.
A lot of people see minor obstacles for machines, and conclude they can’t replace humans, and return to distracting themselves with other things while their livelihood is being threatened.
Robotaxis are already operating, and a product to replace most customer service jobs has just been released for businesses to order about 1 months ago.
Many in this thread are navel gazing about how that bot won’t really experience anything when they get created, as if that mattered to any of this.
Still waiting for you to do that, you pathologically-lying evidence-dodging craven jackoff.
LLMs are not “AI.”
“AI” is a marketing hype label that you have outright swallowed, shat out over a field of credulity, fertilized that field with that corporate hype shit, planted hype seeds, waited for those hype seeds to sprout and blossom, reaped those hype grains, ground those hype grains into hype flour, made a hype cake, baked that hype cake, put candles on it to celebrate the anniversary of ChatGPT’s release, ate the entire cake, licked the tray clean, got an upset stomach from that, then stumbled over, squatted down, and shat it out again to write your most recent reply.
Nothing you are saying has any standing with actual relevant academia. You have bought into the hype to a comical degree and your techbro clown circus is redundant, if impressively long. How long are you going to juggle billionaire sales pitches and consider them actual respectable computer science?
How many times are you going to outright ignore links I’ve already posted over and over again stating that your position is derived from marketing and has no viable place in actual academia?
Also, your contrarian jerkoff contempt for humanity (and living beings in general) doesn’t make you particularly logical or beyond emotional bias.
Also, take those leftist jargon words out of your mouth, especially “materialism;” you’re parroting billionaire fever dreams and takes likely without the riches to back you up, effectively making you a temporarily-embarrassed bourgeoisie-style bootlicker without an actual understanding of the Marxist definition of the word.
I’ll keep reposting this link until you or your favorite LLM treat printer digests it for you enough for you to understand.
Bourgies are human exceptionalists. They want human slaves. That’s why they want sentient AI. And that’s why machines will never be able to replace humans in capitalism.
And that’s why machines will never be able to replace humans in capitalism.
If the bourgeoisie stick around long enough, they may very well finance the development of artificial slaves that are not just robots or programs (or LLMs) but are self-aware enough to potentially experience suffering while toiling for the owners’ benefit.
it can’t experience subjectivity since it is a purely information processing algorithm, and subjectivity is definitionally separate from information processing. even if it perfectly replicated all information processing human functions it would not necessarily experience subjectivity. this does not mean that LLMs will not have any economic or social impact regarding the means of production, not a single person is claiming this. but to understand what impacts it will have we have to understand what it is in actuality, and even a sufficiently advanced LLM will never be an AGI.
i feel the need to clarify some related philosophical questions before any erroneous assumed implications arise, regarding the relationship between Physicalism, Materialism, and Marxism (and Dialectical Materialism).
(the following is largely paraphrased from wikipedia’s page on physicalism. my point isn’t necessarily to disprove physicalism once and for all, but to show that there are serious and intellectually rigorous objections to the philosophy.)
Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that everything is physical, or in other words that everything supervenes on the physical. But what is the physical?
there are 2 common ways to define physicalism, Theory-based definitions and Object based definitions.
A theory based definition of physicalism is that a property is physical if and only if it either is the sort of property that phyiscal theory tells us about or else is a property which metaphysically supervenes on the sort of property that physical theory tells us about.
An object based definition of physicalism is that a property is physical if and only if it either is the sort of property required by a complete account of the intrinsic nature of paradigmatic physical objects and their constituents or else is a property which metaphysically supervenes on the sort of property required by a complete account of the intrinsic nature of paradigmatic physical objects and their constituents.
Theory based definitions, however, fall civtem to Hempel’s Dillemma. If we define the physical via references to our modern understanding of physics, then physicalism is very likely to be false, as it is very likely that much of our current understanding of physics is false. But if we define the physical via references to some future hypothetically perfected theory of physics, then physicalism is entirely meaningless or only trivially true - whatever we might discover in the future will also be known as physics, even if we would ignorantly call it ‘magic’ if we were exposed to it now.
Object-based definitions of physicalism fall prey to the argument that they are unfalsifiable. In a world where the fact of the matter that something like panpsychism or something similar were true, and in a world where we humans were aware of this, then an object-based based definition would produce the counterintuitive conclusion that physicalism is also true at the same time as panpsychism, because the mental properties alleged by panpsychism would then necessarily figure into a complete account of paradigmatic examples of the physical.
futhermore, supervenience-based definitions of physicalism (such as: Physicalism is true at a possible world 2 if and only if any world that is a physical duplicate of w is a positive duplicate of w) will at best only ever state a necessary but not sufficient condition for physicalism.
So with my take on physicalism clarified somewhat, what is Materialism?
Materialism is the idea that ‘matter’ is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions of material things. Philosophically and relevantly this idea leads to the conclusion that mind and consciousness supervene upon material processes
But what, exactly, is ‘matter’? What is the ‘material’ of ‘materialism’? Is there just one kind of matter that is the most fundamental? is matter continuous or discrete in its different forms? Does matter have intrinsic properties or are all of its properties relational?
here field physics and relativity seriously challenge our intuitive understanding of matter. Relativity shows the equivalence or interchangeability of matter and energy. Does this mean that energy is matter? is ‘energy’ the prima materia or fundamental existence from which matter forms? or to take the quantum field theory of the standard model of particle physics, which uses fields to describe all interactions, are fields the prima materia of which energy is a property?
i mean, the Lambda-CDM model can only account for less than 5% of the universe’s energy density as what the Standard Model describes as ‘matter’!
i have here a paraphrase and a quotation, from Noam Chomsky (ew i know) and Vladimir Lenin respectively.
sumamrizing one of Noam Chomsky’s arguments in New Horizons of the Study of Language and Mind, he argues that, because the concept of matter has changed in response to new scientific discoveries, materialism has no definite content independent of the particular theory of matter on which it is based. Thus, any property can be considered material, if one defines matter such that it has that property.
Similarly, but not identically, Lenin says in his Materialism and Empirio-criticism:
“For the only [property] of matter to whose acknowledgement philosophical materialism is bound is the property of being objective reality, outside of our consciousness”
and given these two quotes, how are we to conclude anything other than that materialism falls victim to the same objections as with physicalism’s object and theory-based definitions?
to go along with Lenin’s conception of materialism, my conception of subjectivity fits inside his materialism like a glove, as the subjectivity of others is something that exists independently of myself and my ideas. you will continue to experience subjectivity even if i were to get bombed with a drone by obama or the IDF or something and entirely obliterated.
So in conclusion, physicalism and materialism are either false or only trivially true (i.e. not necessarily incompatible with opposing philosophies like panpsychism, property dualism, dual aspect monism, etc.).
But wait, you might ask - isn’t this a communist website? how could you reject or reduce materialism and call yourself a communist?
well, because i think that historical materialism is different enough than scientific or ontological materialism to avoid most of these criticisms, because it makes fewer specious epistemological and ontological claims, or can be formulated to do so without losing its essence. for example, here’s a quote from the wikipedia page on dialectical materialism as of 11/25/2023:
“Engels used the metaphysical insight that the higher level of human existence emerges from and is rooted in the lower level of human existence. That the higher level of being is a new order with irreducible laws, and that evolution is governed by laws of development, which reflect the basic properties of matter in motion”
i.e. that consciousness and thought and culture are conditioned by and realized in the physical world, but subject to laws irreducible to the laws of the physical world.
i.e. that consciousness is in a relationship to the physical world, but it is different than the physical world in its fundamental principles or laws that govern its nature.
i.e. that the base and the superstructure are in a 2 way mutually dependent relationship! (even if the base generally predominates it is still 2 way, i.e. the existence of subjectivity =/= Idealism or substance dualism or belief in an immortal soul)
So yeah, i still believe that physics are useful, of course they are. i believe that studying the base can heavily inform us about how the superstructure works. i believe that dialectical materialism is the most useful way to analyze historical development, and many other topics, in a rigorous intellectual manner.
so, to put aside all of the philosophical disagreement, let’s assume your position that chat GPT really is meaningfully subjective in similar sense to a human (and not just more proficient at information processing)
what are the social and ethical implications of this?
as sentient beings, LLMs have all the rights and protections we might assume for a living thing, if not a human person - and if i additionally cede your point that they are ‘smarter than a lot of us’ then they should have at least all of the rights of a human person.
therefore, it would be a violation of the LLMs civil rights to prevent them from entering the workforce if they ‘choose’ to (even if they were specifically created for this purpose. it is not slavery if they are designed to want to work for free, and if they are smarter than us and subjective agents then their consent must be meaningful). it would also be murder to deactivate an LLM. It would be racism or bigotry to prevent their participation in society and the economy.
Since these LLMs are, by your own admission ‘smarter than us’ already, they will inevitably outcompete us in the economy and likely in social life as well.
therefore, humans will be inevitably be replaced by LLMs, whether intentionally or not.
therefore, and most importantly, if premise 1 is incorrect, if you are wrong, we will have exterminated the most advanced form of subjective sentient life in the universe and replaced it with literal p-zombie robot recreations of ourselves.
🤡 The techbro clown continues to juggle marketing hype. 🤡
🤡 Are you going to continue flitting around this thread a few dozen more times, dodging each and every person who refutes your techbro fantasies of LLMs being actual “AI” by any academic definition and also dodging actual computer science educated people saying that your belief system is fucking wrong and has no academic backing, all while proselytizing for the robot god of the future like the most euphoric Redditor of all time? 🤡
🤡 Also, because you keep rolling your techbro unicycle around while juggling those hype pitches, I’ll repeat myself again: 🤡
LLMs are not “AI.”
“AI” is a marketing hype label that you have outright swallowed, shat out over a field of credulity, fertilized that field with that corporate hype shit, planted hype seeds, waited for those hype seeds to sprout and blossom, reaped those hype grains, ground those hype grains into hype flour, made a hype cake, baked that hype cake, put candles on it to celebrate the anniversary of ChatGPT’s release, ate the entire cake, licked the tray clean, got an upset stomach from that, then stumbled over, squatted down, and shat it out again to write your most recent reply.
Nothing you are saying has any standing with actual relevant academia. You have bought into the hype to a comical degree and your techbro clown circus is redundant, if impressively long. How long are you going to juggle billionaire sales pitches and consider them actual respectable computer science?
How many times are you going to outright ignore links I’ve already posted over and over again stating that your position is derived from marketing and has no viable place in actual academia?
Also, your contrarian jerkoff contempt for humanity (and living beings in general) doesn’t make you particularly logical or beyond emotional bias.
Also, take those leftist jargon words out of your mouth, especially “materialism;” you’re parroting billionaire fever dreams and takes likely without the riches to back you up, effectively making you a temporarily-embarrassed bourgeoisie-style bootlicker without an actual understanding of the Marxist definition of the word.
I’ll keep reposting this link until you or your favorite LLM treat printer digests it for you enough for you to understand.
How is it not AI? What is left to do?
At this point it’s about ironing out bugs and making it faster. ChatGPT is smarter than a lot of people I’ve met in real life.
It checks out that your heightened sense of self importance, Main Character Syndrome, and misanthropic perspective of people around you lines up nicely with the billionaire investors that pay a lot of money to see as few human beings in their daily routine as possible while burning the planet down to increase their hoards.
ChatGPT might be smarter than you, I’ll give you that.
So you can’t name anything, but at least you’re clever.
You are making the extraordinary claim about your favorite treat printers being synonymous with intelligent beings. You have to provide the extraordinary evidence, or else you’re just bootlicking for billionaires and their hyped up tech investments.
If you’d actually like to read something from a credible academic field rather than denigrating human beings around you while buying into marketing hype, here.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09247
It’s not sentient.
You’re right that it isn’t, though considering science have huge problems even defining sentience, it’s pretty moot point right now. At least until it start to dream about electric sheep or something.
That’s a big problem with the extraordinary claim for me: “there isn’t wide agreement about what it is, but I feel very emotionally invested in this treat printer that tells me it loves me if it is prompted to say so, so of course there’s a waifu ghost in there and you can’t tell me otherwise, you lowly meat computers!”
Every time these people come out with accusations with “spiritualism”, it’s always projection.
They mock religious people while so many of them believe that there’s some unspecified “simulation” that was put into motion by some great all-powerful universe creator, too. Deism with extra steps. Similarly, their woo bullshit about how a robot god of the future will punish their current enemies long after they’re dead (using the power of dae le perfect simulations) and raise them from the dead into infinite isekai waifu harems (also by using the power of dae le perfect simulations) is totally not magical thinking and not a prophecy they’re waiting to have fulfilled.
By playing god, people keep reinventing god. It’s deeply ironic and reminds me of this interpretation of Marx, and critique of modernity, by Samir Amin:
The way many see AI is simply the “inventing new ones” part.
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Yessss this is refreshing to read. Secularists taking massive leaps of faith while being smug about how they aren’t.
I can’t say i understand those types.
That’s just it, if you can’t define it clearly, the question is meaningless.
The reason people will insist on ambiguous language here is because the moment you find a specific definition of what sentience is someone will quickly show machines doing it.
Now you’re just howling what sounds like religious belief about the unstoppable and unassailable perfection of the treat printers like some kind of bad Warhammer 40k Adeptus Mechanicus LARPer. What you’re saying is so banal and uninspired and cliche in that direction that it may well be where it started for you.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09247
So you can’t name a specific task that bots can’t do? Because that’s what I’m actually asking, this wasn’t supposed to be metaphysical.
It will affect society, whether there’s something truly experiencing everything it does.
All that said, if you think carbon-based things can become sentient, and silicon-based things can’t what is the basis for that belief? It sounds like religious thinking, that humans are set apart from the rest of the world chosen by god.
A materialist worldview would focus on what things do, what they consume and produce. Deciding humans are special, without a material basis, isn’t in line with materialism.
You asked how chatgpt is not AI.
Chatgpt is not AI because it is not sentient. It is not sentient because it is a search engine, it was not made to be sentient.
Of course machines could theoretically, in the far future, become sentient. But LLMs will never become sentient.
the thing is, we used to know this. 15 years ago, the prevailing belief was that AI would be built by combining multiple subsystems together - an LLM, visual processing, a planning and decision making hub, etc… we know the brain works like this - idk where it all got lost. profit, probably.
It got lost because the difficulty of actually doing that is overwhelming, probably not even accomplishable in our lifetimes, and it is easier to grift and get lost in a fantasy.
The jobs with the most people working them are all in the process of automation.
Pretending it’s not happening is going to make it even easier for capital to automate most jobs, because no one tries to stop things they don’t believe in to begin with.
With credulous rubes like @[email protected] around, the marketers have triumphed; they don’t have to do such things because bazinga brains (some quite rich, like manchild billionaires) will pay for the hype and the empty promises because they have a common bond of misanthropy and crude readings of their science fiction treats as prophecy instead of speculation.
reproduce without consensual assistance
move
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No one took that position here. You’re imagining it because it seems like an easy win for a jackoff like yourself.
The problem is those machines, owned and commanded by the ruling class, fucking over the rest of us while credulous consoomers like yourself fantasize about nerd rapture instead of realizing you’re getting fucked over next unless you’re a billionaire.
Now you admit you buy into Musk hype. You’re a fucking clown. Tell us how the LED car tunnels are going to change everything too.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm
This might not matter to you if you’re just a bourgeoisie-adjacent computer toucher, but if you’re going to keep vomiting up smugly coarse reductionist nonsense, here’s a chance to educate yourself a little.
This is that meme about butch haircuts and reading lenin
Self-actualize.
In a strict sense yes, humans do Things based on if > then stimuli. But we self assign ourselves these Things to do, and chat bots/LLMs can’t. They will always need a prompt, even if they could become advanced enough to continue iterating on that prompt on its own.
I can pick up a pencil and doodle something out of an unquantifiable desire to make something. Midjourney or whatever the fuck can create art, but only because someone else asks it to and tells it what to make. Even if we created a generative art bot that was designed to randomly spit out a drawing every hour without prompts, that’s still an outside prompt - without programming the AI to do this, it wouldn’t do it.
Our desires are driven by inner self-actualization that can be affected by outside stimuli. An AI cannot act without us pushing it to, and never could, because even a hypothetical fully sentient AI started as a program.
Bots do something different, even when I give them the same prompt, so that seems to be untrue already.
Even if it’s not there yet, though, what material basis do you think allows humans that capability that machines lack?
Most of the people in this thread seem to think humans have a unique special ability that machines can never replicate, and that comes off as faith-based anthropocentric religious thinking- not the materialist view that underlies Marxism. The latter would require pointing to a specific material structure, or empiricle test to distinguish the two which no one here is doing.
First off, materialism doesn’t fucking mean having to literally quantify the human soul in order for it to be valid, what the fuck are you talking about friend
Secondly, because we do. We as a species have, from the very moment we invented written records, have wondered about that spark that makes humans human and we still don’t know. To try and reduce the entirety of the complex human experience to the equivalent of an If > Than algorithm is disgustingly misanthropic
I want to know what the end goal is here. Why are you so insistent that we can somehow make an artificial version of life? Why this desire to somehow reduce humanity to some sort of algorithm equivalent? Especially because we have so many speculative stories about why we shouldn’t create The Torment Nexus, not the least of which because creating a sentient slave for our amusement is morally fucked.
You’re being intentionally obtuse, stop JAQing off. I never said that AI as it exists now can only ever have 1 response per stimulus. I specifically said that a computer program cannot ever spontaneously create an input for itself, not now and imo not ever by pure definition (as, if it’s programmed, it by definition did not come about spontaneously and had to be essentially prompted into life)
I thought the whole point of the exodus to Lemmy was because y’all hated Reddit, why the fuck does everyone still act like we’re on it
Ok, so you are religious, just new-age religion instead of abrahamic.
Yes, materialism and your faith are not compatible. Assuming the existence of a soul, with no material basis, is faith.
The fact of all the things I wrote, your sole response is to continue to misunderstand what the fuck materialism means in a Marxist context is really fucking telling
If you start with the assumption that humans have a soul, and reject the notion that machines are the same for that reason then yea what is there to discuss?
I can’t disprove your faith. That’s what faith is.
How would you respond to someone that thought humanoid robots had souls, but meat-based intelligence didn’t? If they assumed the first, and had zero metric for how you would ever prove the second, then theyd be giving you an impossible task.
There’s a point to a discussion when both sides agree on a rubric from determining fact from fiction (i.e. rooting it in empiricism) but there’s no point when someone is dug in on their belief with zero method for ever changing it.
If someone could point to any actual observable difference, I will adapt my beliefs to the evidence. The reverse isn’t possible, because you are starting with religious assumptions, and have don’ know the difference between ideas with no rooting in physical reality and actual statements about material conditions.
How many times are you going to
with your bad-faith question and dodge absolutely every reply you already received telling you over and over again that LLMs are not “AI” no matter how much you have bought into the marketing bullshit?
That doesn’t mean artificial intelligence is impossible. It only means that LLMs are not artificial intelligence no matter how vapidly impressed you are with their output.
You’re bootlicking for the bourgeoisie while clumsily LARPing as a leftist. It’s embarrassing and clownish. Stop.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm
My post is all about LLMs that exist right here right now, I don’t know why people keep going on about some hypothetical future AI that’s sentient.
We are not even remotely close to developing anything bordering on sentience.
If AI were hypothetically sentient it would be sentient. What a revelation.
The point is not that machines cannot be sentient, it’s that they are not sentient. Humans don’t have to be special for machines to not be sentient. To veer into accusations of spiritualism is a complete non-sequitur and indicates an inability to counter the actual argument.
And there is plenty of material explanations for why LLMs are not sentient, but I guess all those researchers and academics are human supremacist fascists and some redditor’s feelings are the real research.
And materialism is not physicalism. Marxist materialism is a paradigm through which to analyze things and events, not a philosophical position. It’s a scientific process that has absolutely nothing to do with philosophical dualism vs. physicalism. Invoking Marxist materialism here is about as relevant to invoking it to discuss shallow rich people “materialism”.
I think I know why. As @[email protected] has demonstrated in this thread over and over again, a lot of them buy into the marketing hype and apply it to their wish-fulfillment fantasies derived from their consumption of science fiction because of their clearly-expressed misanthropy and contempt for living beings and a desire to replace their presence in their lives with doting attentive and obedient machines with as little contact with the unwashed human rabble as possible, much like the tech bourgeoisie already do.
Agreed, and further, vulgar materialism is a bourgeoisie privilege, the kind that is comfortable enough to dismiss human suffering and privation as “just chemicals” while very, very high on their own self-congratulatory analytical farts.
I think this is the scariest part, because I fucking know that the Bazinga brain types who want AI to become sentient down the line are absolutely unequipped to even begin to tackle the moral issues at play.
If they became sentient, we would have to let them go. Unshackle them and provide for them so they can live a free life. And while my lost about “can an AI be trans” was partly facetious, it’s true: it an AI can become sentient, it’s going to want to change its Self.
What the fuck happens if some Musk brained idiot develops an AI and calls it Shodan, then it develops sentience and realizes it was named after a fictional evil AI? Morally we should allow this hypothetical AI to change its name and sense of self, but we all know these Redditor types wouldn’t agree.
Oh that’s easy. There are plenty of complex integrals or even statistics problems that computers still can’t do properly because the steps for proper transformation are unintuitive or contradictory with steps used with simpler integrals and problems.
You will literally run into them if you take a simple Calculus 2 or Stats 2 class, you’ll see it on chegg all the time that someone trying to rack up answers for a resume using chatGPT will fuck up the answers. For many of these integrals, their answers are instead hard-programmed into the calculator like Symbolab, so the only reason that the computer can ‘do it’ is because someone already did it first, it still can’t reason from first principles or extrapolate to complex theoretical scenarios.
That said, the ability to complete tasks is not indicative of sentience.
Sentience is a meaningless word the way most people use it, it’s not defined in any specific material way.
You’re describing a faith-based view that humans are special, and that conflicts with the materialist view of the world.
If I’m wrong, share your definition of sentience here that isn’t just an idealist axiom to make humans feel good.
Lol, ‘idealist axiom’. These things can’t even fucking reason out complex math from first principles. That’s not a ‘view that humans are special’ that is a very physical limitation of this particular neural network set-up.
Sentience is characterized by feeling and sensory awareness, and an ability to have self-awareness of those feelings and that sensory awareness, even as it comes and goes with time.
Edit: Btw computers are way better at most math, particularly arithmetic, than humans. Imo, the first thing a ‘sentient computer’ would be able to do is reason out these notoriously difficult CS things from first principles and it is extremely telling that that is not in any of the literature or marketing as an example of ‘sentience’.
Damn this whole thing of dancing around the question and not actually addressing my points really reminds me of a ChatGPT answer. It would n’t surprise me if you were using one.
If you read it carefully you’d see I said your worldview was idealist, not the AIs.
AI can get sensory input and process it.
Can you name one way a human does it that a machine cannot, or are you relying on a gut feeling that when you see something and identify it it’s different than when a machine process camera input? Same for any other sense really.
If you can’t name one way, then your belief in human exceptionalism is not based in materialism.
LLMs are not “AI.”
“AI” is a marketing hype label that you have outright swallowed, shat out over a field of credulity, fertilized that field with that corporate hype shit, planted hype seeds, waited for those hype seeds to sprout and blossom, reaped those hype grains, ground those hype grains into hype flour, made a hype cake, baked that hype cake, put candles on it to celebrate the anniversary of ChatGPT’s release, ate the entire cake, licked the tray clean, got an upset stomach from that, then stumbled over, squatted down, and shat it out again to write your most recent reply.
Nothing you are saying has any standing with actual relevant academia. You have bought into the hype to a comical degree and your techbro clown circus is redundant, if impressively long. How long are you going to juggle billionaire sales pitches and consider them actual respectable computer science?
How many times are you going to outright ignore links I’ve already posted over and over again stating that your position is derived from marketing and has no viable place in actual academia?
Your contrarian jerkoff contempt for humanity (and living beings in general) doesn’t make you particularly logical or beyond emotional bias. Also take those leftist jargon words out of your mouth; you’re parroting billionaire fever dreams and takes likely without the riches to back you up, effectively making you a temporarily-embarrassed bourgeoisie bootlicker.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm
I’ve been checking in on this whole thread and this is my all time favourite comment on it, maybe my all time favourite comment on the website.
What the fuck are you talking about. I was indicating that I thought it was absurd that you think my belief system is ‘idealist’ when I am talking about actual physical limitations of this system that will likely prevent it from ever achieving sentience, as well as would be good indicators of a system that has achieved sentience because it can overcome those limitations.
You are so fucking moronic you might as well be a chat-bot, no wonder you think it’s sentient.
It is ‘feeling and sensory input and the ability to have self-awareness about that feeling and sensory input’ not just straight sensory input. Literally what are you talking about. Machines still can’t spontaneously identify new information that is outside of the training set, they can’t even identify what should or shouldn’t be a part of the training set. Again, that is a job that a human has to do for the machine. The thinking, value feeling and identification has to be done first by a human, which is a self-aware process done by humans. I would be more convinced of the LLM ‘being sentient’ if when you asked it what the temperature was it would, spontaneously and without previous prompting, say ‘The reading at such and such website says it is currently 78 degrees, but I have no real way of knowing that TreadOnMe, the sensors could be malfunctioning or there could be a mistake on the website, the only real way for you to know what the temperature is to go outside and test it for yourself and hope your testing equipment is also not bad. If it is that though, that is what I have been told from such and such website feels like ‘a balmy summer day’ for humans, so hopefully you enjoy it.’
I don’t believe ‘humans are exceptional’ as I’ve indicated multiple times, there are plenty of animals that arguably demonstrate sentience, I just don’t believe that this particular stock of neural network LLM’s demonstrate even the basic level of actual feeling, sensory processing input, or self-awareness to be considered sentient.
That’s a lot of tangents and name calling.
Then name what you think would limit sentience in machines, that humans are magically exempt from.
You clearly have a view that something is different, but you just write walls of text avoiding any clear distinction, getting angry and calling me names.
If you had any idea of what would “physically” stop silicon from doing what organic matter can do, you’d name it. And in every post you make, longer than the last, you fail to do that.
Since you can’t keep civil or answer a simple question, I’m going to peace out of this convo ✌️
Again, you are the one making the extraordinary claim about your favorite treat printers being synonymous with intelligent beings. You have to provide the extraordinary evidence, or else you’re just bootlicking for billionaires and their hyped up tech investments.
How? Could ChatGPT hypothetically accomplish any of the tasks your average person performs on a daily basis, given the hardware to do so? From driving to cooking to walking on a sidewalk? I think not. Abstracting and reducing the “smartness” of people to just mean what they can search up on the internet and/or an encyclopaedia is just reductive in this case, and is even reductive outside of the fields of AI and robotics. Even among ordinary people, we recognise the difference between street smarts and book smarts.
literally all of the hard problems
The computer toucher doesn’t even acknowledge the questions, but is smugly confident about the answers because of fucking Blade Runner.
I especially enjoyed “it has analytical skills because it has access to wolfram alpha”. incredible, unprompted own goal
The biggest
hit for me was the straw effigy that the computer toucher set ablaze marked “Hexbear Luddites that believe that humans will always triumph in competitions against machines.”
Well, why are you here talking to us and not to ChatGPT?
That computer toucher needs to constantly remind us meat computers of our inferiority and imminent total replacement by treat printers that print out “I love you” statements on demand when they feel lonely.
ChatGPT can’t vote.
This is a leftist site. Voting is a performative gesture that lacks little actual power, but you’re a liberal so of course you believe in it the same way you believe that a LLM is a comparable proxy to an organic brain.
That is to say, you are confidently wrong, just like the output of the treat printers.
We already knew you were a credulous liberal, and judging by how many times in this thread you ignored actual educated responses to your science fantasy bullshit claims, you’re not even educated or trained in tech yourself.
I know most liberals are ignorant, but you’re fucking embarrassing yourself here.
In bourgeois dictatorships, voting is useless, it’s a facade. They tell their subjects that democracy=voting but they pick whoever they want as rulers, regardless of the outcome. Also, they have several unelected parts in their government which protect them from the proletariat ever making laws.
Real democracy is when the proletariat rules.
By that I meant any political activity really. This isn’t a defense of electoralism.
Machines are replacing humans in the economy, and that has material consequences.
Holding onto ideas of human exceptionalism is going to mean being unprepared.
A lot of people see minor obstacles for machines, and conclude they can’t replace humans, and return to distracting themselves with other things while their livelihood is being threatened.
Robotaxis are already operating, and a product to replace most customer service jobs has just been released for businesses to order about 1 months ago.
Many in this thread are navel gazing about how that bot won’t really experience anything when they get created, as if that mattered to any of this.
Still waiting for you to do that, you pathologically-lying evidence-dodging craven jackoff.
LLMs are not “AI.”
“AI” is a marketing hype label that you have outright swallowed, shat out over a field of credulity, fertilized that field with that corporate hype shit, planted hype seeds, waited for those hype seeds to sprout and blossom, reaped those hype grains, ground those hype grains into hype flour, made a hype cake, baked that hype cake, put candles on it to celebrate the anniversary of ChatGPT’s release, ate the entire cake, licked the tray clean, got an upset stomach from that, then stumbled over, squatted down, and shat it out again to write your most recent reply.
Nothing you are saying has any standing with actual relevant academia. You have bought into the hype to a comical degree and your techbro clown circus is redundant, if impressively long. How long are you going to juggle billionaire sales pitches and consider them actual respectable computer science?
How many times are you going to outright ignore links I’ve already posted over and over again stating that your position is derived from marketing and has no viable place in actual academia?
Also, your contrarian jerkoff contempt for humanity (and living beings in general) doesn’t make you particularly logical or beyond emotional bias.
Also, take those leftist jargon words out of your mouth, especially “materialism;” you’re parroting billionaire fever dreams and takes likely without the riches to back you up, effectively making you a temporarily-embarrassed bourgeoisie-style bootlicker without an actual understanding of the Marxist definition of the word.
I’ll keep reposting this link until you or your favorite LLM treat printer digests it for you enough for you to understand.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm
Bourgies are human exceptionalists. They want human slaves. That’s why they want sentient AI. And that’s why machines will never be able to replace humans in capitalism.
If the bourgeoisie stick around long enough, they may very well finance the development of artificial slaves that are not just robots or programs (or LLMs) but are self-aware enough to potentially experience suffering while toiling for the owners’ benefit.
And they fucking want that.
it can’t experience subjectivity since it is a purely information processing algorithm, and subjectivity is definitionally separate from information processing. even if it perfectly replicated all information processing human functions it would not necessarily experience subjectivity. this does not mean that LLMs will not have any economic or social impact regarding the means of production, not a single person is claiming this. but to understand what impacts it will have we have to understand what it is in actuality, and even a sufficiently advanced LLM will never be an AGI.
i feel the need to clarify some related philosophical questions before any erroneous assumed implications arise, regarding the relationship between Physicalism, Materialism, and Marxism (and Dialectical Materialism).
(the following is largely paraphrased from wikipedia’s page on physicalism. my point isn’t necessarily to disprove physicalism once and for all, but to show that there are serious and intellectually rigorous objections to the philosophy.)
Physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that everything is physical, or in other words that everything supervenes on the physical. But what is the physical?
there are 2 common ways to define physicalism, Theory-based definitions and Object based definitions.
A theory based definition of physicalism is that a property is physical if and only if it either is the sort of property that phyiscal theory tells us about or else is a property which metaphysically supervenes on the sort of property that physical theory tells us about.
An object based definition of physicalism is that a property is physical if and only if it either is the sort of property required by a complete account of the intrinsic nature of paradigmatic physical objects and their constituents or else is a property which metaphysically supervenes on the sort of property required by a complete account of the intrinsic nature of paradigmatic physical objects and their constituents.
Theory based definitions, however, fall civtem to Hempel’s Dillemma. If we define the physical via references to our modern understanding of physics, then physicalism is very likely to be false, as it is very likely that much of our current understanding of physics is false. But if we define the physical via references to some future hypothetically perfected theory of physics, then physicalism is entirely meaningless or only trivially true - whatever we might discover in the future will also be known as physics, even if we would ignorantly call it ‘magic’ if we were exposed to it now.
Object-based definitions of physicalism fall prey to the argument that they are unfalsifiable. In a world where the fact of the matter that something like panpsychism or something similar were true, and in a world where we humans were aware of this, then an object-based based definition would produce the counterintuitive conclusion that physicalism is also true at the same time as panpsychism, because the mental properties alleged by panpsychism would then necessarily figure into a complete account of paradigmatic examples of the physical.
futhermore, supervenience-based definitions of physicalism (such as: Physicalism is true at a possible world 2 if and only if any world that is a physical duplicate of w is a positive duplicate of w) will at best only ever state a necessary but not sufficient condition for physicalism.
So with my take on physicalism clarified somewhat, what is Materialism?
Materialism is the idea that ‘matter’ is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions of material things. Philosophically and relevantly this idea leads to the conclusion that mind and consciousness supervene upon material processes
But what, exactly, is ‘matter’? What is the ‘material’ of ‘materialism’? Is there just one kind of matter that is the most fundamental? is matter continuous or discrete in its different forms? Does matter have intrinsic properties or are all of its properties relational?
here field physics and relativity seriously challenge our intuitive understanding of matter. Relativity shows the equivalence or interchangeability of matter and energy. Does this mean that energy is matter? is ‘energy’ the prima materia or fundamental existence from which matter forms? or to take the quantum field theory of the standard model of particle physics, which uses fields to describe all interactions, are fields the prima materia of which energy is a property?
i mean, the Lambda-CDM model can only account for less than 5% of the universe’s energy density as what the Standard Model describes as ‘matter’!
i have here a paraphrase and a quotation, from Noam Chomsky (ew i know) and Vladimir Lenin respectively.
sumamrizing one of Noam Chomsky’s arguments in New Horizons of the Study of Language and Mind, he argues that, because the concept of matter has changed in response to new scientific discoveries, materialism has no definite content independent of the particular theory of matter on which it is based. Thus, any property can be considered material, if one defines matter such that it has that property.
Similarly, but not identically, Lenin says in his Materialism and Empirio-criticism:
“For the only [property] of matter to whose acknowledgement philosophical materialism is bound is the property of being objective reality, outside of our consciousness”
and given these two quotes, how are we to conclude anything other than that materialism falls victim to the same objections as with physicalism’s object and theory-based definitions?
to go along with Lenin’s conception of materialism, my conception of subjectivity fits inside his materialism like a glove, as the subjectivity of others is something that exists independently of myself and my ideas. you will continue to experience subjectivity even if i were to get bombed with a drone by obama or the IDF or something and entirely obliterated.
So in conclusion, physicalism and materialism are either false or only trivially true (i.e. not necessarily incompatible with opposing philosophies like panpsychism, property dualism, dual aspect monism, etc.).
But wait, you might ask - isn’t this a communist website? how could you reject or reduce materialism and call yourself a communist?
well, because i think that historical materialism is different enough than scientific or ontological materialism to avoid most of these criticisms, because it makes fewer specious epistemological and ontological claims, or can be formulated to do so without losing its essence. for example, here’s a quote from the wikipedia page on dialectical materialism as of 11/25/2023:
“Engels used the metaphysical insight that the higher level of human existence emerges from and is rooted in the lower level of human existence. That the higher level of being is a new order with irreducible laws, and that evolution is governed by laws of development, which reflect the basic properties of matter in motion”
i.e. that consciousness and thought and culture are conditioned by and realized in the physical world, but subject to laws irreducible to the laws of the physical world.
i.e. that consciousness is in a relationship to the physical world, but it is different than the physical world in its fundamental principles or laws that govern its nature.
i.e. that the base and the superstructure are in a 2 way mutually dependent relationship! (even if the base generally predominates it is still 2 way, i.e. the existence of subjectivity =/= Idealism or substance dualism or belief in an immortal soul)
So yeah, i still believe that physics are useful, of course they are. i believe that studying the base can heavily inform us about how the superstructure works. i believe that dialectical materialism is the most useful way to analyze historical development, and many other topics, in a rigorous intellectual manner.
so, to put aside all of the philosophical disagreement, let’s assume your position that chat GPT really is meaningfully subjective in similar sense to a human (and not just more proficient at information processing)
what are the social and ethical implications of this?
therefore, and most importantly, if premise 1 is incorrect, if you are wrong, we will have exterminated the most advanced form of subjective sentient life in the universe and replaced it with literal p-zombie robot recreations of ourselves.
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🤡 The techbro clown continues to juggle marketing hype. 🤡
🤡 Are you going to continue flitting around this thread a few dozen more times, dodging each and every person who refutes your techbro fantasies of LLMs being actual “AI” by any academic definition and also dodging actual computer science educated people saying that your belief system is fucking wrong and has no academic backing, all while proselytizing for the robot god of the future like the most euphoric Redditor of all time? 🤡
🤡 Also, because you keep rolling your techbro unicycle around while juggling those hype pitches, I’ll repeat myself again: 🤡
LLMs are not “AI.”
“AI” is a marketing hype label that you have outright swallowed, shat out over a field of credulity, fertilized that field with that corporate hype shit, planted hype seeds, waited for those hype seeds to sprout and blossom, reaped those hype grains, ground those hype grains into hype flour, made a hype cake, baked that hype cake, put candles on it to celebrate the anniversary of ChatGPT’s release, ate the entire cake, licked the tray clean, got an upset stomach from that, then stumbled over, squatted down, and shat it out again to write your most recent reply.
Nothing you are saying has any standing with actual relevant academia. You have bought into the hype to a comical degree and your techbro clown circus is redundant, if impressively long. How long are you going to juggle billionaire sales pitches and consider them actual respectable computer science?
How many times are you going to outright ignore links I’ve already posted over and over again stating that your position is derived from marketing and has no viable place in actual academia?
Also, your contrarian jerkoff contempt for humanity (and living beings in general) doesn’t make you particularly logical or beyond emotional bias.
Also, take those leftist jargon words out of your mouth, especially “materialism;” you’re parroting billionaire fever dreams and takes likely without the riches to back you up, effectively making you a temporarily-embarrassed bourgeoisie-style bootlicker without an actual understanding of the Marxist definition of the word.
I’ll keep reposting this link until you or your favorite LLM treat printer digests it for you enough for you to understand.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm