Have you considered that you just don't fully understand the literature? It's quite arrogant to write off the entire philosophy of mind as "a complete fraud".
> It's completely unable to describe the old world, much less provide insight into the new one.
What exactly were you expecting?
Philosophy is a science, the first in fact, and it follows a scientific method for asking and answering questions. Many of these problems are extremely hard and their questions are still yet unanswered, and many questions are still badly formed or predicated on unproven axioms. This is true for philosophy of mind. Many other scientific domains are similarly incomplete, and remain active areas of research and contemplation.
What are you adding to this research? I only see you complaining and hurling negative accusations, instead of actually critically engaging with any specifics of the material. Do you have a well-formed theory to replace philosophy of mind?
> I mean, come on. "We've got qualia!" is meaningless. Might as well respond with "Well, sure, but AI has furffle, which is isomporphic." Equally insightful, and easier to pronounce.
Do you understand what qualia is? Most philosophers still don't, and many actively work on the problem. Admitting that something is incomplete is what a proper scientist does. An admission of incompleteness is in no way evidence towards "fraud".
The most effective way to actually attack qualia would be to simply present it as unfalsifiable. And I'd agree with that. We might hopefully one day entirely replace the notion of qualia with something more precise and falsifiable.
But whatever it is, I am currently experiencing a subjective, conscious experience. I'm experiencing it right now, even if I cannot prove it or even if you do not believe me. You don't even need to believe I'm real at all. This entire universe could all just be in your head. Meanwhile, I like to review previous literature/discussions on consciousness and explore the phenomenon in my own way. And I believe that subjective, conscious experience requires certain elements, including a sensory feedback loop. I never said "AI can't experience qualia", I made an educated statement about the lack of certain components in current-generation models which imply to me the lack of an ability to "experience" anything at all, much less subjective consciousness and qualia.
Even "AI" is such a broadly defined term that such a statement is just ludicrous. Instead, I made precise observations and predictions based on my own knowledge and decade of experience as a machine learning practitioner and research engineer. The idea that machines of arbitrary complexity inherently can have the capability for subjective consciousness, and that specific baselines structures are not required, is on par with panpsychism, which is even more unfalsifiable and theoretical than the rest of philosophy of mind.
Hopefully, we will continue to get answers to these deep, seemingly unanswerable questions. Humans are stubborn like that. But your negative, vague approach to discourse here doesn't add anything substantial to the conversation.
I would add I find it difficult to understand why so few have even a basic level of philosophical understanding. The attitude of being entirely dismissive of it is the height of ignorance I'm sure. I would presume few would be able to define then what Science actually is.
So many of these kinds of people also struggle to realize they're invoking panpsychism with their arguments. They lack a framework for describing intelligence. Such a framework allows us to separate "intelligence" from "experience".
"Intelligence" in the universe is actually quite common, more common than life. You can argue that any stable, complex process exhibits intelligence. After all, it needs to be able to sample its internal and external environments and carry out physical computations in order to regulate itself and maintain stability. And we can interpret things like the good regulator theorem to argue that such complex dynamical systems must also maintain at least a partial memory/mapping of their environment. That mapping can live abstractly within the structure of system itself.
But what a stabilized solar system doesn't have is the incredibly complex neurochemical structures present in the brain which support the insanely rich experience I am having now. It's one thing for a system to classify and label colors by wavelength. It's quite another for me to "see" and experience red in my mind's eye. To activate related emotional pathways that I associate with various colors and shapes, which are exploited in signage and architectural design. I'm not claiming my experience is separate from simpler dynamic systems, but it's got magnitudes more going on. Layers upon layers of things such as archetypes and instinct which create a possibly emergent conscious experience.
You've shifted jargon again. But you're still not providing a description or link to why AI doesn't "have experience", you're just demanding we all accept it as a prior and engaging in a (really pretty baldly stated) appeal to authority to fool us all into thinking someone else knows even if you don't.
And fundamentally my point is that no, they almost certainly don't either.
Instead of accusing me of "shifting jargon", point out exactly where this "jargon" changed and critically engage with that. Your response has done nothing to refute or critically engage with my argument. It's more retreating and vagueposting.
> you're just demanding we all accept it as a prior
At absolutely no point in this discussion have I claimed that machines are not capable of subjective conscious experience. I have, however, disqualified all publicly accessible modern models due to the lack of a sensory feedback loop. I certainly believe we can create machines which experience subjective consciousness and qualia; I do not believe in souls and divinity, so whatever is going on is physically based and likely reproducible with the right hardware.
So dispense with the straw man arguments, and please begin engaging more earnestly and intelligently in this discussion, as I am quickly losing interest in continuing to debate someone who showed up unprepared.
Not according to Zombie Feynman it isn't[1] (someone else can dig up the link). Case in point:
> Do you understand what qualia is? Most philosophers still don't
It's a meaningless word. It's a word that gives some clean construction around closely-held opinions about how life/consciousness/intelligence/furffle/whatever works. So it's a valuable word within the jargon of the subculture that invented it.
But it's not "science", which isn't about words at all except as shorthand for abstractions that are confirmed by testable results.
"Qualia", basically, is best understood as ideology. It's a word that works like "woke" or "liberal" or "fascist" or "bourgeoisie" to flag priors about which you don't want to argue. In this case, you want people to be special, so you give them a special label and declare a priori that it's not subject to debate. But that label doesn't make them so.
[1] Of course. You can recursively solve this problem by redefining "science" to mean something else. But that remains very solidly in the "not science" category of discourse.
Have you considered the possibility that you're the one who's really committed to an outcome, and are desperately trying to discredit anything that contradicts it?
I have! But the lack of a testable procedure tells me that's not a question worth asking. Look, if "qualia" can tell me something practical about the behavior of AI, I am here for it. Lay it on me, man. Let's see some of that "science" being promised.
It can't, because it's a meaningless word. It's not "discrediting" an idea to point out that (by its own admission) it's unfalsifiable.
"Qualia" is not totally meaningless - it means the inner experience of something, and can bring up the real question say of is my inner experience of the colour green the same as your experience of the colour red? Probably not but hard to tell with current tech. I asked Google if it has qualia and got "No, as an AI, Google Search does not have qualia." So Google search seemed to know what it means.
Hmmm... I think it's still stricter to consider Science a philosophy than the other way around. It's the belief (and an extremely useful and successful one) that the nature of the world can be understood through observation, experiment and deducing mathematical relationships between things. There branches of philosophy that are not strictly scientific, but nothing in Science that is doesn't rely on the fundamental philosophical principle of empiricism.
But we use the scientific method via philosophical inquiry, so I think it comes down to how we decide to strictly define these things. I definitely agree that certain definitions lead to the same logic you've presented.
> Aristotle pioneered scientific method in ancient Greece alongside his empirical biology and his work on logic, rejecting a purely deductive framework in favour of generalisations made from observations of nature.
Aristotle, the famous philosopher and mathematician.
If you cannot understand the very nature of where our modern scientific frameworks came from, how it relates to rationalism, itself a philosophical concept, then you cannot see that philosophy underpins every bit of science we have today. Philosophy gives us the tools to decide when to reasonably trust or distrust observations and intuitions. It is the foundational science that allows the rest of humanity's scientific research to be taken seriously.
>"Qualia", basically, is best understood as ideology. It's a word that works like "woke" or "liberal" or "fascist" or "bourgeoisie" to flag priors about which you don't want to argue. In this case, you want people to be special, so you give them a special label and declare a priori that it's not subject to debate. But that label doesn't make them so.
This is so dumb. Qualia is just the name for a specific thing which we all (appear) to phenomenologically experience. You can deny it exists or deny its utility as a concept, but fundamentally its just an idea that philosophers (and scientists, I have to add) have found useful to pose certain other questions about the human condition, minds, brains, etc.
Your XKCD actually seems to make the opposite point. I can do a non-rigorous experiment with just one subject (me) that suggests Qualia exists. Finding ways to make this rigorous is difficult, of course, but its an observation about the nature of the world that it feels like something to experience things.
My point isn't that qualia is a good concept. I tend to be somewhat deflationary about it myself, but its not an ideology.
> It's completely unable to describe the old world, much less provide insight into the new one.
What exactly were you expecting?
Philosophy is a science, the first in fact, and it follows a scientific method for asking and answering questions. Many of these problems are extremely hard and their questions are still yet unanswered, and many questions are still badly formed or predicated on unproven axioms. This is true for philosophy of mind. Many other scientific domains are similarly incomplete, and remain active areas of research and contemplation.
What are you adding to this research? I only see you complaining and hurling negative accusations, instead of actually critically engaging with any specifics of the material. Do you have a well-formed theory to replace philosophy of mind?
> I mean, come on. "We've got qualia!" is meaningless. Might as well respond with "Well, sure, but AI has furffle, which is isomporphic." Equally insightful, and easier to pronounce.
Do you understand what qualia is? Most philosophers still don't, and many actively work on the problem. Admitting that something is incomplete is what a proper scientist does. An admission of incompleteness is in no way evidence towards "fraud".
The most effective way to actually attack qualia would be to simply present it as unfalsifiable. And I'd agree with that. We might hopefully one day entirely replace the notion of qualia with something more precise and falsifiable.
But whatever it is, I am currently experiencing a subjective, conscious experience. I'm experiencing it right now, even if I cannot prove it or even if you do not believe me. You don't even need to believe I'm real at all. This entire universe could all just be in your head. Meanwhile, I like to review previous literature/discussions on consciousness and explore the phenomenon in my own way. And I believe that subjective, conscious experience requires certain elements, including a sensory feedback loop. I never said "AI can't experience qualia", I made an educated statement about the lack of certain components in current-generation models which imply to me the lack of an ability to "experience" anything at all, much less subjective consciousness and qualia.
Even "AI" is such a broadly defined term that such a statement is just ludicrous. Instead, I made precise observations and predictions based on my own knowledge and decade of experience as a machine learning practitioner and research engineer. The idea that machines of arbitrary complexity inherently can have the capability for subjective consciousness, and that specific baselines structures are not required, is on par with panpsychism, which is even more unfalsifiable and theoretical than the rest of philosophy of mind.
Hopefully, we will continue to get answers to these deep, seemingly unanswerable questions. Humans are stubborn like that. But your negative, vague approach to discourse here doesn't add anything substantial to the conversation.