Comments by "L.W. Paradis" (@l.w.paradis2108) on "Google Engineer Suspended After Saying Company's AI, LaMBDA, HAS A SOUL u0026 Requires Consent For Tests" video.

I have an idea. Let's not eat animals. Okay, no can do. Then how about let's not eat fellow mammals? Non-starter, too?
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No, it is not possible that he is correct.
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@scottmcloughlin4371 You're right. I don't worry about it at all, except insofar as all of this tech will eventually be used for surveillance and control at home, and military action abroad. But that's just more more more . . . of the same.
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@chrisheist652 Which was perfect.
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@michaellowe3665 I have credible knowledge that sentient beings arose through a process of evolution, and that sentience arises in no other way except biologically. Read What Computers Can't Do. This story sounds like some sort of a ruse.
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@naasking No it isn't. All sorts of living things display various characteristics of sentience, not just speech, and that includes pre-linguistic infants. There is no reason to believe that anything like it can exist outside of living things or that non-living things can do more than mimic sentience, as they have been programmed to do.
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@michaellowe3665 So we're all biological illiterates, too. Great, just great.
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@naasking Whether there could be such a non-living machine that symbolically represents all of my internal states has nothing to do with sentience. The burden of proof is on you.
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@naasking Is information information about something? Or is there no "something" that the information is about?
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@naasking Is the scroll people once thought God kept, that records every single thought and feeling I ever had, sentient?
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@michaellowe3665 I'm saying neither is sentient. My god. This cannot be real, that you cannot put together two clauses of a single sentence, or use basic logic.
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@michaellowe3665 I wonder if they are censoring some posts, so that you cannot follow the line of thought? Is that it?
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@naasking Well, if you could reproduce literally every biological, biochemical, or biophysical process occurring in me, rather than simply encode it in symbols and embed it in an entirely different physical system, then you would also presumably reproduce sentience as well. No one is arguing that. All the information in a star is not the star. Wishing cannot make it so.
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@michaellowe3665 "Where is that nonsense coming from?" The phone call is from within the house. 🤣
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@naasking You're equivocating now. No one said information is not physical. Words are things. They aren't the things they stand for.
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@naasking You're pretending to answer my last post when you have not.
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@naasking Nice job pretending to be the spokesman of Science, with a capital S. A cursory reading of Nature magazine can tell any reasonably scientifically educated lay person that your assertions about quantum teleportation are not at all the object of any scientific consensus. I wouldn't have guessed how great the disagreements about the foundations of information theory actually are. But it was easy to find out. Well, new cool stuff to read.
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@naasking To suggest symbols are not the things of which they are symbols? Er . . . That's a basic scientific contention. Who introduces symbols into the world? They are no more discovered than are human languages. To pretend that a computation and the thing which is the object of that computation are one and the same in the physical realm is so farfetched that it barely merits consideration --- and you announce this as though it were uncontroversial, and in a smug tone. There IS no single, uncontroversial theory of consciousness, but you've somehow mastered it. This is risible. "If you want to truly understand . . . " because obviously I don't want to understand things . . . Just come off it.
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@naasking "The brain as information processor," which in turn is posited as explaining the whole of consciousness, is not uncontroversial, to say the least. I find it interesting that in order to examine consciousness, Penrose starts with the experimental observation that under anesthesia, we become unconscious, and then as we are brought out of anesthesia, our consciousness is restored to us. Any of this other stuff that talks about consciousness being reducible to observable behaviors that include claims about have consciousness, or "uploading" our disembodied consciousness, reminds me of a new version of Skinner, and we all know how that was demolished.
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@naasking "This is magic" isn't an argument. It's a talking point which simply deploys a standard informal fallacy. You cannot come out and call me crazy, that would be too obvious, so just go through some handwaving motions and then say, "this is magic." Worthless comment.
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@naasking What voodoo do I believe in? "Perhaps you should work on you [sic] English" is what you just wrote. 🤣
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@naasking "god of the gaps," "vitalism," "voodoo" . . . Your cliches aren't landing. Reread your advertising class textbook.
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@naasking The way this propaganda works to create a "controversy" and make careers is brilliantly explained in Pierre Vidal-Naquet's Assassins of Memory. It's an all-purpose template, not just for use in the social sciences. I cite Roger Penrose, mathematician and Nobel Prize winner in physics, and you start babbling about voodoo. 🤣
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Everyone wants to repeal Darwin so bad. Sentience is a property of living things and the product of millions of years of evolution.
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If consciousness has its origins in the fully-functioning brains of living things, and if living things come to exist through the process of evolution, then any purported consciousness that does not arise through evolution should be presumed not to be a consciousness like the one we experience. Don't confuse our direct experience of consciousness with the way we deduce that beings other than ourselves possess consciousness.
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@dashx1103 Because that is where sentience and consciousness came from. Because living/nonliving is a real distinction. Because the burden of proof is on you to show otherwise. Speculation about what computers could do is not an argument.
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@scottmcloughlin4371 Oh! Feel free to recommend your favorite books on this subject! (I studied ancient philosophy at Paris IV, and the other subspecialties there were not very good at the time. Also did some grad linguistics in a night school near me, for fun.) I was just in an argument with someone else about "information," essentially saying to that person much of what you just did here. Love this stuff. Book list, please.
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The Dalai Lama? Sentience arises through biological evolution. It is detectible in living organisms in myriad ways, only one of which manifests as speech in only one species, on Earth at any rate, and is evident in pre-linguistic infants.
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