PhilosophyWIMB: How omnipotent is your deity?

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Originally Posted by Ash

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)

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I don't really understand why you consider human intelligence real and AI hypothetical. They are both merely data processing systems at different stages of their evolution :shrug:

Do you think AI has the potential to develop consciousness?

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Originally Posted by Ash

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)

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To which - like any good Jesuit - I would respond thus: what ‘evidence’ does the woodlouse have for the existence of a vastly superior human intelligence? The answer: none that it is capable of acknowledging, appreciating or comprehending. Would you bother trying to explain yourself to a woodlouse, a? Of course not. No more than God would bother trying to explain himself to you.

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Originally Posted by Burney

To which - like any good Jesuit - I would respond thus: what ‘evidence’ does the woodlouse have for the existence of a vastly superior human intelligence? The answer: none that it is capable of acknowledging, appreciating or comprehending. Would you bother trying to explain yourself to a woodlouse, a? Of course not. No more than God would bother trying to explain himself to you.

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Yeah, apart from the fact that god is continuously trying to get in our faces and demand that we worship him, only each time he has a different name, different number of arms, or gods even, and a different set of rules to follow. Many of us have found that this detracts from the credibility of his message.

And the woodlouse almost certainly doesn't conceptualise 'evidence' of any kind, let alone of a vastly superior intelligence. So it's just whataboutery really. The Jesuits should stick to creating sinister secret societies to enslave us all. They do that better than logic imo.

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Originally Posted by Ash

Yeah, apart from the fact that god is continuously trying to get in our faces and demand that we worship him, only each time he has a different name, different number of arms, or gods even, and a different set of rules to follow. Many of us have found that this detracts from the credibility of his message.

And the woodlouse almost certainly doesn't conceptualise 'evidence' of any kind, let alone of a vastly superior intelligence. So it's just whataboutery really. The Jesuits should stick to creating sinister secret societies to enslave us all. They do that better than logic imo.

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There is only one God, a. All the others are imposters.

Yes. His name is Allah and Mohamed is his prophet...

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Originally Posted by Ash

Yeah, apart from the fact that god is continuously trying to get in our faces and demand that we worship him, only each time he has a different name, different number of arms, or gods even, and a different set of rules to follow. Many of us have found that this detracts from the credibility of his message.

And the woodlouse almost certainly doesn't conceptualise 'evidence' of any kind, let alone of a vastly superior intelligence. So it's just whataboutery really. The Jesuits should stick to creating sinister secret societies to enslave us all. They do that better than logic imo.

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The AI of the future may very well see our own "conceptualisation" skills in not much of a different way to how we view those of woodlouse.

The crucial point is that to be a woodlouse is like *something*. Its capacity to conceptualise or reason is neither here nor there.

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Originally Posted by Monty92

I don't really understand why you consider human intelligence real and AI hypothetical. They are both merely data processing systems at different stages of their evolution :shrug:

Do you think AI has the potential to develop consciousness?

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Is an artificial leg a real leg? Only by a generous and very open definition of the word 'leg'. Maybe one day we'll build a leg that is identical to a real one.

We'd have to understand how our own consciousness works first before having a serious crack at that question. It's perhaps the best argument for some kind of metaphysics, or not if the conscious is just a combination of biochemistry and information processing. The human mind is amazing. The other night I dreamed I bought a battleship to live in. WTF?

I used to wonder at all these AI questions 30 years ago when I was dabbling with 'Expert Systems' and trying to write software that connected entities and attributes and sorted and processed them in exciting ways. Then I lost interest, which explains my cold scepticism perhaps. I regret that sometimes. At other times I don't, as I might have now been working for Google, Amazon, Facebook or some such bunch of evil shÃ*tcùnts.

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Originally Posted by Monty92

The AI of the future may very well see our own "conceptualisation" skills in not much of a different way to how we view those of woodlouse.

The crucial point is that to be a woodlouse is like *something*. Its capacity to conceptualise or reason is neither here nor there.

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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?

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Originally Posted by Ash

Yeah, apart from the fact that god is continuously trying to get in our faces and demand that we worship him, only each time he has a different name, different number of arms, or gods even, and a different set of rules to follow. Many of us have found that this detracts from the credibility of his message.

And the woodlouse almost certainly doesn't conceptualise 'evidence' of any kind, let alone of a vastly superior intelligence. So it's just whataboutery really. The Jesuits should stick to creating sinister secret societies to enslave us all. They do that better than logic imo.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Ash

Is an artificial leg a real leg? Only by a generous and very open definition of the word 'leg'. Maybe one day we'll build a leg that is identical to a real one.

We'd have to understand how our own consciousness works first before having a serious crack at that question. It's perhaps the best argument for some kind of metaphysics, or not if the conscious is just a combination of biochemistry and information processing. The human mind is amazing. The other night I dreamed I bought a battleship to live in. WTF?

I used to wonder at all these AI questions 30 years ago when I was dabbling with 'Expert Systems' and trying to write software that connected entities and attributes and sorted and processed them in exciting ways. Then I lost interest, which explains my cold scepticism perhaps. I regret that sometimes. At other times I don't, as I might have now been working for Google, Amazon, Facebook or some such bunch of evil shÃ*tcùnts.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Ash

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?

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