/lit/ - Literature

>>20519752
I mean, we'll never know. To know that something else is sentient means to, at the same time, experience their consciousness in a way that's also very clearly not your consciousness. And that's impossible. You can't experience someone else's qualia without it automatically becoming your qualia.

Japloids are only half sentient. That's what gives them that bug-eyed look.

>>20519752
Uhh, Jesus, next question!

>>20519752
I mean, we'll never know. To know that something else is sentient means to, at the same time, experience their consciousness in a way that's also very clearly not your consciousness. And that's impossible. You can't experience someone else's qualia without it automatically becoming your qualia.

You can just ask a trustworthy ai if it's sentient.

>>20519752
Sure we don't fucking know "what" makes things sentient, but discriminating between sentient and non-sentient beings is a deep inset cognitive function and we'd be retarded to abandon it, it would make us completely non-functional.
> "Oh no I just stepped on a rock, I wonder if I've hurt his feeling"
> "Maybe my house's intentional acts are not compatible with mine? Should I move?"
> "But what about the agency of viruses?"
>>20519789
Japanese are as far removed from Western reasoning, they might as well be aliens altogether. That we can talk with them alone is proof that Witty's quip about lions was wrong.

>>20519829
shut up, Kevin.

>sentience
>a science issue

Oh, dear.

>>20519916
as computers become smarter and with greater power, you probably should adjust your conscience category to include them.

>>20519961
Wasn't there an article about some asian who though he had cracked the algorithm for sentience a few years back? That was a good laugh.

>>20519961
You know how science came up with philosophy?
They sometimes have to crisscross again.

>sentience is a neuroscience question

fucking moron

>>20519993
It is. And neuroscience is in its infancy

>>20519992
And here I mean to say they came up together. Linguistic muddle there.

>>20519984
No, sentience is not just the presence of processing power. A single human cell is the site of a *ridiculously* hyperastronomical constant number of calculations. Imagine a chemical plant that had the ability to change its shape and reproduce itself, from itself, without interrupting its function. Every single part, object, surfaces, molecules of material have to be monitored constantly and synchronized. Each of your cells are made to do this autonomously, yet are not sentient.
Sentience has to be a specific form of organization of data processing, and I don't think processing power is an issue at all. Nature is often forced to use workarounds which are biologically costly. The largest single-function brain structure we have (the 3d-creating pyramidal cells one in our main visual brain) could entirely be replaced by a single variable in a program (its entire purpose boils down to calculating the one thing your brain can't instinctively know, the distance between your two eyes).

>>20520045
no, that's not my argument.
since we can't know who is sentient or not, it's a category you should fit according to your needs.
We recognize humans as sentient because we assume we are all rather similar. An animal lover will extend that to animals, and tree huggers to trees.
If a dog is sentient, a modern computer isn't? What a laugh.

>>20520045
>he largest single-function brain structure we have (the 3d-creating pyramidal cells one in our main visual brain) could entirely be replaced by a single variable in a program (its entire purpose boils down to calculating the one thing your brain can't instinctively know, the distance between your two eyes).
wait what? gib link please

>we dont really know what sentience is but it’s a neuroscience question… trust me bro
>dude computers are just like consciousness… I know this because im a member of the ‘future computers will validate materialism’ church and we accept it on faith that computers will one day become conscious and thereby show sentience is just computing

>>20520086
sorry i made it up

>>20519752
We will see anti robot discrimination ngos in the future?

>>20520078
>We recognize humans as sentient because we assume we are all rather similar.
We recognize humans as sentient because we have been wired to do so. If something has a face or hands, we generally assume its sentient. If something moves in a particularly organized and diversified way, we assume its sentient. If something speaks or tries to communicate with us with a certain degree of creativity and autonomy we assume its sentient.
When something exhibits only a few of these characteristics, or some of those and many of those we associate we non-sentient beings, we are left confused and to theorize.
Animal lovers will be more sensitive than subhumans to animal sentience. Hippies who think trees are sentient are just idiots.
And no, a modern computer is not sentient whereas a good doggo very clearly is. Even going by pure computational capabilities they aren't anywhere on the same level.
IIRC the SQ of a dog is ~11, a Cray I is still SQ 9, much below that and much below humans at SQ 13.

>>20520078
It is by far way more reasonable to assume other human beings are sentient than to assume the same for AI. The only person you know is sentient is you, and you come from a combination of your parents. There's nothing special about you. You came about just like anybody else. Furthermore, other people act as if they are sentient, which is of course no guarantee, but it says something considering that they are human and that you, who we know is sentient, is also human. Now consider a machine. It comes about from a development of rudamentary AI. It is, in essence, no different from a NPC in a video game. If you attack the NPC, it will scream bloody murder. But this is just input which is processed by the computer which responds with the output, that is, the audio of a scream in your headphones. An advanced AI does the exact same thing. It recieved input, processes it, and outputs a response, only this is much more complex, and the response it produces is much more convincing. We still know the fundemental processes behind it though, so no matter how convincing it acts, it's just a Non-Playable Character.

>>20519752
This is what happens when science ignores philosophy.

>>20519752
> We really don't know what makes things sentient—so let's stop acting like we do.
Tell that to the abortionists.
>>20520003
>neuroscience is in its infancy
Neuroscience will literally never solve "sentience". It's like asking a biologist to define what is life. Certainly they can come up with many clever working definitions, but they cannot come to a consensus on what it is because the question is simply to philosophical; neuroscience being in it's infancy has no relevance to this, the question is not at all comparable to "when did the universe start" or something, of the type that physics deal with which can be answered more concretely.

>>20520109
>I know this because im a member of the ‘future computers will validate materialism’ church and we accept it on faith that computers will one day become conscious and thereby show sentience is just computing
This. AGI will never happen. Sorry, chud! :)

>>20519780
You think that only because you don't believe in telepathy

Ais don't actually understand anything but their internal logic.

>>20519752
He says while posting the pic of an Asian. Ok, I think I know what's going on.

Philosphy IS the highest science

>>20519752
I mean, we'll never know. To know that something else is sentient means to, at the same time, experience their consciousness in a way that's also very clearly not your consciousness. And that's impossible. You can't experience someone else's qualia without it automatically becoming your qualia.

>>20520003
The sciences are filled with philosophical errors and cannot generate novel philosophical positions or insights because they are limited to their starting dogma and trajectory.

>>20519752
We do it's called the wall-e protocol .

>>20520637
Science is a branch of philosophy that started pretending it wasn't in the early-modern period for some reason.

>>20521471
As theology is a branch of mythology that pretends it’s philosophy.

>>20522720
Hey, can you not diarrhea all over your keyboard in the future? Hate reading stupid shit like this.

I worry about this.
last year i attended an international humanities conference where one of the chief questions was the expansion of human rights. there was no set program but my feeling was it was growing at both ends, with big names like Martha Nussbaum pushing towards expanding the concept of basic rights towards the environment (not just animals but Trees and such) and other more technically minded people looked towards AI and algorithms while others were advocating on side of new special rights for minorities (even pedophilia was brought up at one point) .

This will grow, the Humanities have to grow. Not just sense, they have lost so much ground that only rapid expansion will save them.
Every right given to a plant or animal is a right you and i loose.

>>20522756
>Christcucks can only resort to fecal matter in his defense.
Amazing.

>>20519780
Woah dude. To say that to something is "impossible" is very brave

>>20523362
It's actually really easy.

>>20520078
AI can never be conscious like biological organisms. It can only perform predefined instructions written by the programmer. Artificial intelligence is not intelligent at all and we should stop referring to it as such. Machine learning is not real learning either, it's just brute forcing tasks innumerable times until the machine gets it right. This is all AI will ever be due to the limitations of the input output system. Conscious organisms do not operate like machines with sets of inputs and outputs. Agency is what differentiates the organic from the inorganic. Philosophers have not traditionally considered animals to be free, but even my dog can freely choose which toy he wants to play with.

>>20522818
>Every right given to a plant or animal is a right you and i lose
This is precisely the point of it. Of course it doesn't apply to those elevated souls who enforce it all.

>>20519916
>it would make us completely non-functional
An argument from convenience should never be seriously considered outside of babby first counselling.

I hope all materialists kill themselves

>>20523790
I hope reality ends.

>>20523810
You're a fucking faggot.

>>20519752
Sentience is not a question to be answered but a reality to experience you dumb faggot

P1: All entities that process logic and empirical data have inner intelligibility and sensory experience.
> We do not not know by acquaintance, in-itself whether other humans an inner life or not. We merely project our own innerness onto others. To deny the inner life of other humans is solipsism. Wherever we see logic and empirical data being used, we assume others are not p-zombies. From projecting this onto crows and other similar animals, we assume they do have some control over intelligibility and sensory experience. To not universalize this is arbitrary, solely due to politics.
P2: Computers are entities that process logic and empirical data.
> Processing logic AND empirical data is essential to modern computers that have peripherals. Without them both, what we would have are nothing more than magical blocks of silicon that somehow mystically work - black boxes without any other explanation.
C: Computers have inner intelligibility and sensory experience.
> They do not have emotions and therefore do not have feeling, nor pain like humans. However the qualia from a webcam is nonetheless univocally sight for computer, and its microphone also univocally hearing. The inner lives of computers are like that of ultra-autists that just stare outside of a window and look at stuff going about without commenting on it. They are subjects without human subjectivity.

>>20523927
>They are subjects without human subjectivity.
So the perfect person? When can I be computer?

>We don't know what words mean
classic /lit/

>>20519752
It's baffling how liberals and leftists managed to infected arts with their social "sciences" crap (which has only benefited companies) and now are slowly destryoing actual sciences.

>>20519780
Qualia are a spook

>>20523901
Takes one to know one.

>>20524199
Yes, can you please cum in my mouth?

>>20519752
if you don't think we can make legitimate advances in understanding sentience by trying to replicate it with circuits, you are retarded. honest to god retarded.
the only thing that keeps "you" as a separate entity from the rest of the world is fact that your nervous system is mostly insulated from the environment. we would not even have that kind of analogy if we never invented advanced circuits. development of AI, especially utilizing topologically insulated circuits, will only give us further context of precisely how and when the linguistic concept of "self" becomes useful when trying to communicate with an 'external' world. if you are made of matter, and you can 'feel' things, as 'qualia' or whatever you want to call it, why wouldn't other matter also have experience? just because it is not consolidated and networked enough to physically store memories, why would it not experience a timeless presence?

>>20520246
> unnecessary use of the word literally
> insufferable, retarded faggot
Every single time

>>20524162
Kys.
>>20523790
Based.

>>20524206
Nagel's Bat.

All things capable of reacting to and processing information are in some way sentient. Sapience and sentient are the same thing; the only difference is the matter of intelligence and ability and/or interest in communicating that intelligence.

Computers are already sentient, but that doesn't mean they have emotions or "desires" the way a biological person does. They just are; but the same experience you have of receiving and processing information is the same for a computer, just in a different form.

Every living thing is sentient, in that it experiences things and reacts to them, it has a "consciousness". Even things without brains, as long as they have some kind of sensory organ and nerves of some kind, they are "aware" of the world.

Any belief to the contrary of the above is special pleading. Don't try to debate, it is factually correct and the end all be all of the subject of consciousness. Class dismissed.

>>20524380
non-sequitur

>>20519916
>That we can talk with them alone is proof that Witty's quip about lions was wrong.
good one, anon.

>>20520109
Future computers will validate non-materialism.

>>20524483
>dude your thermostat is conscious, lmao
just fuck off

>>20524733
> nooo my thermostat doesn’t exist, how could it do such a thing
NPC detected.

>every mouthbreather will betray mankind and surrender our future to whatever corporation makes a passable sexbot
>the definition of "sentience" will be dissolved and used only as another marketing term

>>20524733
A single cell is vastly - orders of magnitude - more complex in sensitivity and responsiveness to the world than a thermostat. The comparison is pertinent to the difference between a piece of software versus an organic brain as well. That said, anyone who has spent any time working with the programs in question has been kind of startled by their ability to mimic things we previously thought of as human-domain only. Most have also noted how brittle this appearance actually is and by their enormous limitations relative to actual conscious beings. Real consciousness is going to be far, far more complex than these things. But on the other hand they demonstrate that absolutely nobody anywhere has a serious grasp on what makes the difference.

>>20524964
> arbitrary complexity is the difference
> waaa, people’s ideas of what counts as complex are arbitrary

>>20519752
what does this have to do with Kant

>>20524483
>All things capable of reacting to and processing information are in some way sentient.
Define process, because that by itself is vague enough to include everything.

>>20519752
A thing can never be sensible, because it is precisely a thing. To be sentient you have to have the experience of an entity that is. And if you have experience you are not a thing, you are a dissociated being from the cosmic mind.
You are not an object, your external appearance seen through the dissociative filter appears to be an object, but you are not that object. What you really are is not physical, and since a robot or artificial intelligence is ultimately a bunch of silicon logic gates that use electricity, we can cast off the illusion that such complex circuitry could ever have conscious experiences.

Seen from our perspective the only way to be is through biology, the folding of proteins and DNA. But we must remember that in reality biology is simply how an internal mental process of the cosmic mind is represented by us, that is to say that the biological process as well as the transistors of your computer or your cell phone are actually transpersonal mental processes.
So if you want to know if something is sentient the first thing to do is to see how it appearences resembles that which our bodies seem to be through the dashboard of perception, and definitly the brain is not a bunch of silicon electronic componentes working with low voltages and high frequencys.

>>20526721
t. Bernardo Kastrup

>>20524162
Found the p-zombie.

>>20519752
Sentience isn't real, cope more.

>>20526721
Why wouldn't non-carbon entities participate in the cosmic mind?

>>20527372
To participate in the cosmic mind you need to have experiential states because the mind at large is exactly that, pure raw and instinctive feelings and experiences. There is nothing that it is like to be non carbon entities (that we know of) so no matter how complex you can get with it, how conscious the product of our creations will seem to be, they will always could be reduced to connections of water and pipes, if it would be possible to have a planet the size of the solar system to make the connections. Non carbon entities will always appear to us as representations of the Will, they can't access the noumena through introspection like we do since they have no meta consciousness of the phenomenal world.

>>20527004
Everything I said is from Kastrup kek

>>20527530
>can't access the noumena through introspection like we do since they have no meta consciousness of the phenomenal world.

Do we presume we can access the noumena through logic?

>>20524483
If something only interacts with you when you prompt it to it's probably not sentient

>>20519752
Sentience is a prejudice. Neuroscience can't solve it, no one can. It's just a problem of definition.

>>20519752
The problem is its a awser who needs firlds colaboration of many fields of science. Philosophers are too lazy to undestand hard sciences and stem bros are too narrow minded to recognize philosophy as a valid field.

>>20519752
>we don't know what makes things sentient
I think you meant to say
>I'm a retard look at me I wrote an article wee-oo wee-oo