queermunist she/her

/u/outwrangle before everything went to shit in 2020, /u/emma_lazarus for a while after that, now I’m all queermunist!

  • 3 Posts
  • 897 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 10th, 2023

help-circle






  • What is the reason you think philosophy of the mind exists as a field of study?

    In part, so we don’t assign intelligence to mindless, unaware, unthinking things like slime mold - it’s so we keep our definitions clear and useful, so we can communicate about and understand what intelligence even is.

    What you’re doing actually creates an unclear and useless definition that makes communication harder and spreads misunderstanding. Your definition of intelligence, which is what the AI companies use, has made people more confused than ever about “intelligence” and only serves the interests of the companies for generating hype and attracting investor cash.





  • My understanding is that the reason LLMs struggle with solving math and logic problems is that those have certain answers, not probabilistic ones. That seems pretty fundamentally different from humans! In fact, we have a tendency to assign too much certainty to things which are actually probabilistic, which leads to its own reasoning errors. But we can also correctly identify actual truth, prove it through induction and deduction, and then hold onto that truth forever and use it to learn even more things.

    We certainly do probabilistic reasoning, but we also do axiomatic reasoning i.e. more than probability engines.



  • So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

    What? No.

    Chatbots can’t think because they literally aren’t designed to think. If you somehow gave a chatbot a body it would be just as mindless because it’s just a probability engine.






  • Because Israel has a complete ban on reporters in Gaza, for example, there’s no way to corroborate or refute what Israel said. It’s newsworthy to repeat what Israel said, but you can’t blame the media when someone reads that and assumes that the government is telling the truth

    If there’s no way to corroborate or refute what Israel said, don’t print what Israel said. Lies aren’t newsworthy, except as a way to report on the lies themselves for the purpose of debunking them.

    Remember when Israel first started bombing hospitals and blamed Islamic Jihad for it? They still don’t claim responsibility for Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, but after a year of targeting hospitals and doctors it’s ridiculous to deny it at this point.

    Yet there were few retractions or corrections. As far as CNN and The Guardian are concerned, Israel didn’t bomb that hospital. What a joke.

    As you said yourself, the government lies all the time, so why would you assume that “the government said X happened” means that “X happened”.

    I don’t think people make that assumption anymore, but that’s because people stopped trusting the media. They published and promoted so many government lies that they’ve destroyed their own credibility.

    People expect the media to investigate government claims and to publish the truth, not just parrot the lies they’re fed. When the media doesn’t do that, when all the major news outlets become court stenographers, people lose faith in the media.

    Maybe people are expecting too much, but that’s what people have been taught to expect. They were taught that journalists find the truth and report on it. They’re finding out that journalists basically just print what their sources say and they can’t just trust things because they’re in the news anymore.

    And it’s going to get worse forever.