Re:We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop ac...
by beefield on Monday June 13, 2022 @12:42PM
(#31727980)
To me emergent phenomena are things that simply can't be analyzed just looking at the building blocks the emergence comes from. Say, a photo of a cat is made of pixels, but there is no meaningful way to discuss "catness" of a single pixel. The RGB value of a single pixel simply has no information in that that distinguishes a non-cat pixel from cat-pixel. Only when you take a pile of pixels you may start to dicuss if that pile contains a cat or not. But you need to falsifiably define the catness of the image by something else than RGB values of individual pixels.
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Re:We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop ac...
by dekhn on Monday June 13, 2022 @01:12PM
(#31728436)
this isn't entirely correct. if you take the distribution of all extant cat pixels, you will see that pink is very rarely observed (there are no naturally pink cats, but there are certainly pictures of cats dyed pink). Therefore, if you see a pink pixel, you can say with modest certainty that it's not a cat. That's a fairly pedantic and uninteresting point, but the reality is even scalar observations contain information and can be used to classify, if poorly.
Re:We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop ac...
by __s on Monday June 13, 2022 @01:22PM
(#31728569)
Re:We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop ac...
by mitchdoogle on Monday June 13, 2022 @01:37PM
(#31728753)
Aside from the cats mentioned in a sibling comment, there are also all kinds of ways light could make something look pink, when it is actually not