PhilosophyWIMB: How omnipotent is your deity?

[Monty92]

Jesus wept. It isn't much of an AI if it can't distinguish between a (relatively) advanced civilisation with knowledge and culture and space travel and video games, and a fùcking woodlouse, which goes around eating wood. You are just being obtuse now to pretend we are having an actual conversation rather than you just winding me up.

If we created an AI, wouldn't that make us some kind of GOD for the AI?

I dealt with this last point earlier. If dogs had created humans, we'd have even more reason to slavishly devote ourselves to their well-being. But if there was a point at which they became an existential threat to us, we'd cease giving one single fúck about them and kill them all instantly.

[Burney]

Do woodlice actually eat wood, a? One knows so little of the degustatory preferences of the lower insecta. It's rather appalling, actually.

Not insects. Crustaceans

[Sir C]

Not insects. Crustaceans

Even worse. One can't imagine a prawn or a lobster tucking into a lump of 4 by 2, but on the other hand, what can one imagine a prawn snacking on?

[Ash]

Would a leg created out of human cells be a real leg?

You're talking like a dualist, which is basically a position of religiosity, yet you've spent much of this thread deriding religion.

Materialism dictates that consciousness originates in the mind. The mind is merely a data processing system. Ergo, AI is of course capable of developing consciousness.

No, I'm just demonstrating that I have a slightly open mind for a materialist. Just leaving the door open a tiny fraction for the mysteries of consciousness. I'm not letting just anything in.

[Monty92]

No, I'm just demonstrating that I have a slightly open mind for a materialist. Just leaving the door open a tiny fraction for the mysteries of consciousness. I'm not letting just anything in.

And what would stop AI from one day accessing, or exposing, these same mysteries of consciousness?

Nothing, if you believe that humans are merely lumps of meat equipped with hugely limited data processing systems. But you don't think that. You think humans are something more than this. You're just not prepared to say what that is, presumably because it would make you sound like a god-botherer.

[Ash]

And what would stop AI from one day accessing, or exposing, these same mysteries of consciousness?

Nothing, if you believe that humans are merely lumps of meat equipped with hugely limited data processing systems. But you don't think that. You think humans are something more than this. You're just not prepared to say what that is, presumably because it would make you sound like a god-botherer.

No. Metaphysics <> GodBothery.

I have been arguing against the concept of omnipotent monotheism, which is not the same as speculating that the universe may contain rules we haven't worked out yet, that go beyond the materialist model of understanding. There's a long distance between that and the spaghetti monster.

If consciousness is material, then a machine may attain it one day, but as I said, we don't know what it is or how it works. A 'thinking' machine is one thing, self-awareness and the consciousness is something else.

I find the dog analogy poor tbh. It is absurd, as dogs did not create men. Also is not our instinct to wipe out those we perceive to be a threat linked to our evolution over millions of years of desperate, grubby survival? An AI we construct with no history of competition would not necessarily think like us.

There is, of course a whole sub-genre of Sci-Fi dealing with exactly these questions, from A.C Clark to Terminator and Blade Runner.

[Ash]

The woodlouse is as capable of conceptualising ‘evidence’ relating to us as we are of conceptualising evidence relating to a God, a. That’s the point: God laughs at our pathetic attempts to understand Him.

I've addressed both of these points already. And others - yet my carefully crafted comments are callously and continually ignored until the thing goes full circle and we're back to where we started.

[World's End Stella]

I'm grateful to Monty now for bringing AI into this thread because we are now comparing three types of intelligence. One of which is real, empirically experienced by all, measurable in some ways, and with the whole of history to analyse it's outputs for good and ill.

The other two are both hypothetical, and at opposite extremes in different directions from the one real intelligence we know. One might one day come into being as something other than a conjuring trick (which contemporary AI is), the other has apparently always been there and is what we project a fantasy extrapolation of ourselves onto, bestowing it with any and all super-human powers we can imagine.

It is not lack of imagination or an excess of arrogance that drives my position, but a lack of evidence. (We could speculate about alien or animal intelligence too but ultimately to no end)

But the fact that you are looking for evidence suggests you lack the imagination needed to realize that in theological matters, evidence is not required.

[Monty92]

No. Metaphysics <> GodBothery.

I have been arguing against the concept of omnipotent monotheism, which is not the same as speculating that the universe may contain rules we haven't worked out yet, that go beyond the materialist model of understanding. There's a long distance between that and the spaghetti monster.

If consciousness is material, then a machine may attain it one day, but as I said, we don't know what it is or how it works. A 'thinking' machine is one thing, self-awareness and the consciousness is something else.

I find the dog analogy poor tbh. It is absurd, as dogs did not create men. Also is not our instinct to wipe out those we perceive to be a threat linked to our evolution over millions of years of desperate, grubby survival? An AI we construct with no history of competition would not necessarily think like us.

There is, of course a whole sub-genre of Sci-Fi dealing with exactly these questions, from A.C Clark to Terminator and Blade Runner.

But the dog analogy is just one example of why AI may decide to wipe us out. Another could be that they're basically like autistic humans who don't understand nuance and may *accidently* respond recklessly to benign instructions. So, for example, say we told an AI to cure cancer. Their solution to this may be to kill every human that carries a cancer-mutating gene.

So yes, of course the relationship between dogs and humans and humans and AI is radically different. But the lack of evolutionary history does not obviate the risk that AI will consider humans to be an existential threat.

I've no idea what self-awareness has to do with anything. You really think humans have self-awareness and, say, a woodlouse doesn't?

[Ash]

But the fact that you are looking for evidence suggests you lack the imagination needed to realize that in theological matters, evidence is not required.

I'm not imaginative enough to be so gullible as to believe that, for example, The Prophet ascended to heaven on a flying horse or some such and that's why Islam should own Jerusalem?

Shame on me for being so unimaginative as to swallow any old utter crap.