May 23, 2023 06:32 PM
The idea that AI can be conscious is a mistake. It’s just a very shiny mirror of humanity, reflecting what we want to see
https://psyche.co/ideas/the-myth-of-mach...-of-us-all
INTRO (David Bentley Hart): According to the best-known version of his story, the young Boeotian hunter Narcissus was at once so beautiful and so stupid that, on catching sight of his own gorgeous reflection in a forest pool, he mistook it for someone else and at once fell hopelessly in love. There he remained, bent over the water in an amorous daze, until he wasted away and – as apparently tended to happen in those days – was transformed into a white and golden flower.
An admonition against vanity, perhaps, or against how easily beauty can bewitch us, or against the lovely illusions we are so prone to pursue in place of real life. Like any estimable myth, its range of possible meanings is inexhaustible. But, in recent years, I have come to find it particularly apt to our culture’s relation to computers, especially in regard to those who believe that there is so close an analogy between mechanical computation and mental functions that one day, perhaps, artificial intelligence will become conscious, or that we will be able to upload our minds on to a digital platform. Neither will ever happen; these are mere category errors. But computers produce so enchanting a simulacrum of mental agency that sometimes we fall under their spell, and begin to think there must be someone there.
[...] Computers work as well as they do, after all, precisely because of the absence of mental features within them. Having no unified, simultaneous or subjective view of anything, let alone the creative or intentional capacities contingent on such a view, computational functions can remain connected to but discrete from one another, which allows them to process data without being obliged to intuit, organise, unify or synthesise anything, let alone judge whether their results are right or wrong. Their results must be merely consistent with their programming.
Today, the dominant theory of thought in much of Anglophone philosophy is ‘functionalism’, the implications of which are not so much that computers might become conscious intentional agents, but rather that we are really computers who suffer the illusion of being conscious intentional agents, chiefly as a kind of ‘user interface’ that allows us to operate our machinery without needing direct access to the codes our brains are running. This is sheer gibberish, of course, but – as Cicero almost remarked – there is nothing one can say so absurd that it has not been proposed by an Anglophone philosopher of mind... (MORE - missing details)
https://psyche.co/ideas/the-myth-of-mach...-of-us-all
INTRO (David Bentley Hart): According to the best-known version of his story, the young Boeotian hunter Narcissus was at once so beautiful and so stupid that, on catching sight of his own gorgeous reflection in a forest pool, he mistook it for someone else and at once fell hopelessly in love. There he remained, bent over the water in an amorous daze, until he wasted away and – as apparently tended to happen in those days – was transformed into a white and golden flower.
An admonition against vanity, perhaps, or against how easily beauty can bewitch us, or against the lovely illusions we are so prone to pursue in place of real life. Like any estimable myth, its range of possible meanings is inexhaustible. But, in recent years, I have come to find it particularly apt to our culture’s relation to computers, especially in regard to those who believe that there is so close an analogy between mechanical computation and mental functions that one day, perhaps, artificial intelligence will become conscious, or that we will be able to upload our minds on to a digital platform. Neither will ever happen; these are mere category errors. But computers produce so enchanting a simulacrum of mental agency that sometimes we fall under their spell, and begin to think there must be someone there.
[...] Computers work as well as they do, after all, precisely because of the absence of mental features within them. Having no unified, simultaneous or subjective view of anything, let alone the creative or intentional capacities contingent on such a view, computational functions can remain connected to but discrete from one another, which allows them to process data without being obliged to intuit, organise, unify or synthesise anything, let alone judge whether their results are right or wrong. Their results must be merely consistent with their programming.
Today, the dominant theory of thought in much of Anglophone philosophy is ‘functionalism’, the implications of which are not so much that computers might become conscious intentional agents, but rather that we are really computers who suffer the illusion of being conscious intentional agents, chiefly as a kind of ‘user interface’ that allows us to operate our machinery without needing direct access to the codes our brains are running. This is sheer gibberish, of course, but – as Cicero almost remarked – there is nothing one can say so absurd that it has not been proposed by an Anglophone philosopher of mind... (MORE - missing details)
