We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI

Re:We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI by mlinsey on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @12:24PM (#35442123)

I'm not convinced we understand qualia/feelings well enough to definitively say. The presence of eg phantom limb pain suggests pain can arise in the mind, independent of physical nerve signals. It would be a remarkable convergence if AGI's developed the same sensations as humans, but we can't rule it out until we fully understand both how the human mind and the AGI systems actually work.

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Re:We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI by burnished on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @02:19PM (#35443856)

Phantom limb pain is still part of a physical system and does not 'arise from the mind' in some abstract sense. The absence of a signal is in a sense a signal.

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Re:We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI by nanny on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @03:58PM (#35445123)

>Phantom limb pain is still part of a physical system and does not 'arise from the mind'

Careful, because you seem to have implied that the mind is not a physical system (i.e. you've assumed that dualism or idealism is true and that physicalism is wrong).

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Re:We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI by burnished on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @05:30PM (#35446105)

Oh thats funny, I'm having a hard time reading that interpretation, my point more specifically is that it is all a purely physical system - I put scare quotes around that phrase because I believed it implied some metaphysical mind.

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Re:We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI by nanny on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @08:29PM (#35447677)

Ahh I see what you mean now, sorry. I mistakenly inferred something that wasn't there. I agree that it's all part of a physical system and that the absence of the signal is still meaningful.

Getting back to the topic:

While phantom pain may be more interesting, maybe a better example that the parent comment could've brought up is psychogenic pain. In this case there is no apparent physical (bodily) damage, no apparent signal, nor an absence of a signal. Searching for a cause of this type of pain in the brain (presumably some "wires" are getting "crossed") seems like it might help us develop a explanation of pain qualia...in humans/animals.

But I feel like this type of thinking and research could only apply to AGI if subjective experience turns out to be functionalist in nature, and arguments in favor of a functionalist interpretation of experience have so far been fairly unconvincing.

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Re:We need a much more sophisticated debate about AI by hoseja on Wednesday April 05, 2023 @04:49AM (#35451190)

Or he made a distinction between the simple, signalling peripheral nervous system and the highly integrated, full of emergent properties, seemingly more than the sum of its parts, central nervous system.

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