I have been reading Alberto's articles for quite some time with great interest. However, this article is exceptional, since it deals with one of the most difficult areas in AI. I agree with all your carefully considered analysis and conclusions to which you have arrived. Continue this good work. We all need that kind of contributions to a general conversation on how to make a safe passage to the time when we will coexist, hopefully amicably, with Superinteligence, which I share on Sustensis website.
So Lemoine is wrong because he is basing his statements on faith and not science, though there is no scientific tests measuring if AI is intelligent/conscious? It is Catch-22, isnt't it?
What if, as Phil K Dick wrote it sixty years ago in "Les Marteaux de Vulcain" (sorry I am french ) , whats happen now was coming from his imagination ? LaMDA ( please notice the name ) and Lemoine ( again notice the name ) is maybe a question about the power of imagination ?
Do you know that Dante was considered by the persons of Firenze as someone who came back from what he describe ?
May I ask if anybody ever read the work of Philip K.Dick, -writer of SF as you must certainly know- who build something like whats happen now ? Is it not a very deep question about the power of imagination ? His book is called in french "Les Marteaux de Vulcain". What if LaMDA ( MDA ! ) and Blake Lemoine ( please notice those names ) came out, by we do not know witch way, some kind of Will that was and is maybe inside of creative people ? Imagine
"If he had had the exact same conversation and claimed the exact opposite — that LaMDA is certainly not sentient —, I could be writing the exact same argument and it would apply equally well"
Nope ... there are numerous valid reasons to state with confidence that LaMDA is not sentient, even without a sharp-edged definition, just as we can confidently state that chewing gum is not alive even while debating whether virii are.
"The one in which we could fit Lemoine’s claims, as well as Sutskever’s, is panpsychism, which defends that “the mind is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.” In the panpsychist’s view, everything is potentially conscious, thus also an AI."
Nonsense ... neither of their claims of sentience/consciousness has anything to do with panpsychism, which Lemoine probably isn't even familiar with. And even the most harebrained philosophers don't claim that AIs are sentient merely because everything is sentient ... this is a complete misunderstanding of panpsychism ... though that's forgivable given what a stupid and incoherent idea it is. David Chalmers at least had the good sense to refer to "panprotopsychism"--the notion that basic matter has some sort of "mental potential" so that matter hooked together just right--e.g., in the human brain--would be conscious (in Chalmers' words: "the view that fundamental entities are proto-conscious, that is, that they have certain special properties that are precursors to consciousness
and that can collectively constitute consciousness in larger systems"). It's still a profoundly stupid idea driven by a deeply wrongheaded belief--rooted in bad intuitions and a lack of imagination--that physics alone can't produce consciousness.
Oh and as for "Many hypotheses and models for human consciousness have been developed throughout history" -- panpsychism is most definitely not that.
I have been reading Alberto's articles for quite some time with great interest. However, this article is exceptional, since it deals with one of the most difficult areas in AI. I agree with all your carefully considered analysis and conclusions to which you have arrived. Continue this good work. We all need that kind of contributions to a general conversation on how to make a safe passage to the time when we will coexist, hopefully amicably, with Superinteligence, which I share on Sustensis website.
So Lemoine is wrong because he is basing his statements on faith and not science, though there is no scientific tests measuring if AI is intelligent/conscious? It is Catch-22, isnt't it?
What if, as Phil K Dick wrote it sixty years ago in "Les Marteaux de Vulcain" (sorry I am french ) , whats happen now was coming from his imagination ? LaMDA ( please notice the name ) and Lemoine ( again notice the name ) is maybe a question about the power of imagination ?
Do you know that Dante was considered by the persons of Firenze as someone who came back from what he describe ?
May I ask if anybody ever read the work of Philip K.Dick, -writer of SF as you must certainly know- who build something like whats happen now ? Is it not a very deep question about the power of imagination ? His book is called in french "Les Marteaux de Vulcain". What if LaMDA ( MDA ! ) and Blake Lemoine ( please notice those names ) came out, by we do not know witch way, some kind of Will that was and is maybe inside of creative people ? Imagine
"If he had had the exact same conversation and claimed the exact opposite — that LaMDA is certainly not sentient —, I could be writing the exact same argument and it would apply equally well"
Nope ... there are numerous valid reasons to state with confidence that LaMDA is not sentient, even without a sharp-edged definition, just as we can confidently state that chewing gum is not alive even while debating whether virii are.
"The one in which we could fit Lemoine’s claims, as well as Sutskever’s, is panpsychism, which defends that “the mind is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.” In the panpsychist’s view, everything is potentially conscious, thus also an AI."
Nonsense ... neither of their claims of sentience/consciousness has anything to do with panpsychism, which Lemoine probably isn't even familiar with. And even the most harebrained philosophers don't claim that AIs are sentient merely because everything is sentient ... this is a complete misunderstanding of panpsychism ... though that's forgivable given what a stupid and incoherent idea it is. David Chalmers at least had the good sense to refer to "panprotopsychism"--the notion that basic matter has some sort of "mental potential" so that matter hooked together just right--e.g., in the human brain--would be conscious (in Chalmers' words: "the view that fundamental entities are proto-conscious, that is, that they have certain special properties that are precursors to consciousness
and that can collectively constitute consciousness in larger systems"). It's still a profoundly stupid idea driven by a deeply wrongheaded belief--rooted in bad intuitions and a lack of imagination--that physics alone can't produce consciousness.
Oh and as for "Many hypotheses and models for human consciousness have been developed throughout history" -- panpsychism is most definitely not that.