Google employee says they have sentient AI

[wolfpup]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

Not to rehash a stale debate, but that’s not my position at all.

In my defense, you seemed to be arguing against emergent properties here:

Downloading Your Consciousness Just Before Death.

Strong emergence is a very contentious notion, and to be honest, having to appeal to it rather weakens your position. While it’s true that a strongly emergent property can’t even in principle be inferred from lower-level properties, that also means that knowledge of the lower-level properties can never yield sufficient reason for belief in strongly emergent features—so we’re back with faith. On the whole, the main idea behind computationalism and other physicalist ideas is essentially a reject…

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

@wolfpup

Things like this are why computer scientists and philosophers who opine about their work are so often at odds.

It works just as well the other way around: computer scientists routinely opine about philosophical topics, such as what is or isn’t conscious or sentient—but, not typically being experts on the matter, get things often wrong. Which isn’t really a problem—after all, it’s not their working area—but one ought to expect a bit more recognition of the expertise of those whose working area it is.

The reason they’re so often at odds is that, however theoretical their work may be, computer scientists at heart are essentially pragmatic engineers who successfully build things like increasingly powerful AI systems, while at least some philosophers (Dreyfus and Searle, to name two) seem to be dreamy weavers of ethereal abstractions purporting to describe the nature of reality who enjoy telling computer scientists why they’re wrong.