An excerpt from one Jewish view of the Sabbath:https://www.athwart.org/notes-on-judaic-political-economy/
Readit Newswaserwill commented on The Quiet Revolution of the Sabbath newyorker.com/culture/the... · Posted by u/samclemens
Maybe the real definition of intelligence isn't being able to answer questions effectively, but being able to know what you know and know what you don't know.
There's truth to this, but in a time and place. There are times being very specific about what you know and don't know is important, but most of the time we are learning little by little, and we benefit from saying things we aren't entirely comfortable with, if only to figure out whether they are true and/or socially acceptable.
Why?
My guess: if non-genetic heritable elements -- epigenetics (such as modifications to DNA) -- are necessary for proper development, then the DNA sequence alone will not be enough to develop thylacines. (There are caveats, notably that some modifications can be inferred). However, the scientists will also be experimenting with gestation and creating embryos from modified cells, so whether epigenetics specifically is a limiting factor will be hard to tell.
Evolutionary adaptations? As this is a domesticated plant, shouldn't any changes be considered the product of intelligent design?
Domestication and breeding/husbandry aren't always done consciously, but even when they are, people produce selective pressures (e.g. selective breeding). Evolution is ambivalent to intelligent, conscious choice or natural selection, as long as the next generation's heritable traits are different.
Once in grad school I went to a talk where another grad student was presenting on his fear research with mice. Many powerpoint details unfold of the hell he and his advisor had contrived to make the mice chronically afraid, and to be able to quantify the fear induced and its effects. I learned that when mice get scared enough they shit excessively. In the presentation of results he lingers on a graph, and says, for effect: "That's right, they were scared shitless."
Hilarity. The room bubbles with laughter. Just enough transgression.
I remember in that moment bubbling with rage. A famous and well-regarded paragon of the field [1] who had recently come to the university to give a talk spent his career characterizing animal emotions, especially of mice and rats. He revealed their rich emotional worlds in glorious detail. The presentor, his advisor, many of us in the department knew -- or should have -- how un-funny the joke was. We were perfectly positioned to know it.
Despite knowing what I knew, I didn't say anything. That silence is still among the top few of my regrets. I guess I learned the weight of doing the right thing in a packed room full of people with contrary opinions, and learned that I was way less strong / bold / principled than I had believed myself to be; which was remarkable, as that bar was already low.
I've seen similar things. Besides many experiments not being remotely worth the harm they cause (poor design, niche topics without applications, dead end checking-all-the-boxes, etc.), they leave a mark on the people who conduct them. Some leave that sort of research out of distaste or disgust, and some become callous. It struck me that it inculcates an inhumane indifference to suffering. And numb scientists. It ultimately damages both the people and the science. Yet incentives (monetary, career progression) can push people past boundaries, and with time, erase them.
I think your definition of a machine is limited to simple mechanical devices.
Machines are just physical systems that perform some work. This includes cells, biological systems etc
If we built a human from scratch at atom level detail then it would be reasonable assume it would experience the world as we would. By definition you would have created consciousness.
The issue isn't with machines, but humans as just machines. You rightly point to the assumption: "If we built a human from scratch at atom level detail then it would be reasonable assume it would experience the world as we would." What's the reason the clone has to have experience?
I'm not sure whether this clone would or not, but we don't have a good basis for either. If we built one, we should act like it does experience things, but that's on moral, not scientific grounds.
If you state what you disagree with, people might understand where people differ better.
Do you disagree with the idea that with knowledge and time humans have the potential create any material thing?
If that's a reasonable thing to assume. Then we could simply just build a human from scratch.
If I had to guess: "You are a machine." It's reminiscent of Victorian authors describing the heart as pistons or the brain as strings being pulled. Less of a fact and more of a metaphor, a poetic interpretation.
Then, add on the entirely subjective experience each of us has of consciousness: it's not obvious that subjectivity is created or come from machines. Each of us has one good example, and the rest is intuition, induction. At best, "You can build machines like us, because we ourselves are the proof," is a wishful project, rather than a proof.
> One thing that seems missing from this discussion is that even if LLMs are sentient, there is no reason to believe that we would be able to tell by "communicating" with them.
Or, more horrifyingly, our own subjective experience may be an illusion and maybe the concept of sentience is not really meaningful
More horrifying is that our subjective experience is all that there is. Luckily, neither is easy to square with what we experience, and we probably shouldn't try to horrify ourselves anyhow
To NickM and whimsicalism:
The quantitative argument is a red herring. Science is one of the disciplines in the business of explaining things, not in the business of calculating values, but it just so happens that when you get into the details, quantifying properties leads to better explanations. For example, I can give a qualitative explanation for why it rains, which can be expanded into a quantitative one.
The subjectivity of experience can be attributed to the scientifically-explainable inability of our conscious mind to directly access the physical state of the brain. If arguments such as "Mary the Neuroscientist" show anything, it is that phenomenal experiences can not be conveyed by any language, scientific or otherwise, so if you are demanding an explanation must do that, neither science nor philosophy nor anything else will explain consciousness.
What's wrong with helping consciousness in the realm of poetry and religion? It's the most humanistic thing we can know, after all.
Consciousness, being internal and subjective, exists at odds with anything else that science considers. Sure, study cognition and neurology, but there's an ontological gap between those and experience.
Time is the direction in which entropy always increases. It's the most real thing there is.
Or at least tends to increase. Entropy can always spontaneously decrease, or can simply not increase for a moment. This was actually discussed a week ago! [1] As discussed in those comments, entropy isn't well-formulated outside of equilibrium states, and is subjective: it is a function of an observer's knowledge of the system (particularly microstates).
I'd say time is very real, and an inescapable part of experience (no experience without change). As for time being the most real, we only know it through experience, so I think of it as secondary, along with space, etc.