> That would be a silly argument because feelings involve qualia, which we do not currently know how to precisely define, recognize or measure.
If we can't define, recognize or measure them, how exactly do we know that AI doesn't have them?
I remain amazed that a whole branch of philosophy (aimed, theoretically, at describing exactly this moment of technological change) is showing itself up as a complete fraud. It's completely unable to describe the old world, much less provide insight into the new one.
I mean, come on. "We've got qualia!" is meaningless. Might as well respond with "Well, sure, but AI has furffle, which is isomporphic." Equally insightful, and easier to pronounce.
> If we can't define, recognize or measure them, how exactly do we know that AI doesn't have them?
In the same way my digital thermometer doesn't have quaila. LLM's do not either. I really tire of this handwaving 'magic' concepts into LLM's.
Qualia being difficult to define and yet being such an immediate experience that we humans all know intimately and directly is quite literally the problem. Attempted definitions fall short and humans have tried and I mean really tried hard to solve this.
> In the same way my digital thermometer doesn't have quaila
And I repeat the question: how do you know your thermometer doesn't? You don't, you're just declaring a fact you have no basis for knowing. That's fine if you want a job in a philosophy faculty, but it's worthless to people trying to understand AI. Again, c.f. furffle. Thermometers have that, you agree, right? Because you can't prove they don't.
You're just describing panpsychism, which itself is the subject of much critique due to its nonfalsifiability and lack of predictive power. Not to mention it ignores every lesson we've learned in cognition thus far.
A thermometer encoding "memory" of a temperature is completely different than a thermometer on a digital circuit, or a thermometer attached to a fully-developed mammalian brain. Only the latter of this set for sure has the required circuitry to produce qualia, at least as far as I can personally measure without invoking solipsism.
It's also very silly to proclaim that philosophy of mind is not applicable to increasingly complex thinking machines. That sounds like a failure to consider the bodies of work behind both philosophy of mind and machine cognition. Again, "AI" is ill-defined and your consistent usage of that phrase instead of something more precises suggests you still have a long journey ahead of you for "understanding AI".
God, can we fucking quit with this "philosophy is bullshit" stuff. Like there are literally Faculty in Philosophy all over the world trying to understand AI. Philosophy faculty do stuff, they try to understand things, most of the ideas we are talking about here came from philosophers.
Philosophy seems a term generally reserved for the stuff we don't understand yet and so is inherently kind of speculative. Once you have a definite answer it gets called science instead.
> Philosophy (from Ancient Greek philosophía lit. 'love of wisdom') is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, knowledge, mind, reason, language, and value. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its methods and assumptions.
It is literally a self-reflective science.
I recommend taking a basic philosophical course at a local community college, or reading some literature or even watching YouTube videos on the subject of philosophy. Or just skim the Wikipedia article if nothing else. It might completely transform how you perceive and act upon the world.
>Physics was originally part of philosophy, like Isaac Newton's observation of how gravity affects falling apples.
like back then people would wonder how apples fall and it was labeled philosophy. Now we understand gravitation it's part of physics for the most part. People launching satellites seldom call a philosopher to calculate the orbit.
It remains to be seen if qualia, which we don't understand very well and are so regarded as philosophical, make the transition to neuroscience.
The fact that we have sharpened our classification of sciences over time does not imply that philosophy is a study of the ill-defined. It implies the opposite: Philosophy is more precisely defined now than ever.
If you read the rest of the article, you will see clear examples of what is considered a philosophical problem and what isn't.
My argument was more philosophy is for stuff we don't understand like how do qualia work, rather then ill-defined. When you get to stuff like how does neurotransmission work which we do kind of understand it gets classed as science.
Are there philosophical problems that have definite answers like what is the atomic number of oxygen type answers?
> Are there philosophical problems that have definite answers
Great question.
Within philosophical and epistemological frameworks, I could ask questions such as, "Can there be a square circle?"
Well, no, these two concepts have conflicting properties. A mathematician might think this a solved problem, but philosophy underpins our concept of concepts. Many philosophers spend a great deal arguing what is is.
For Plato, geometrical entities like circles and squares have distinct, perfect Forms. Forms have fixed essences, so a thing cannot participate in contradictory Forms at once.
Aristotle's law of noncontradiction says the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect.
Theophrastus developed hypothetical syllogisms and refined Aristotle’s logic by distinguishing logical impossibilities from physical impossibilities.
Kant calls it an analytic contradiction, false by virtue of the concepts involved.
A mathematician takes these things for granted when working with equalities, logic and axioms, but they stand on philosophical roots. Mathematics assumes the consistency of concepts, but the question of why some concepts are consistent while others are impossible is a philosophical one. It's not a coincidence that so many ancient Greek mathematicians were also philosophers.
> Philosophy seems a term generally reserved for the stuff we don't understand yet and so is inherently kind of speculative. Once you have a definite answer it gets called science instead.
As someone has commented earlier, Philosophy applied is given a name but it's a sub-discipline of Philosophy.
> Understanding the world through experiment?
That's a decent enough definition. Science precludes so much of the world we know which I think people really fail to realise. It's why I think it's important for people to understand what Philosophy is and what Science isn't.
For example logic isn't science. Science presupposes it but it is NOT science. There are many such examples.
How do you know that understanding the world through experiment works? How do you know what it even means? What is understanding, concretely? How did we come to appreciate the utility or whatever of understanding the world through experiment.
Empiricism is a sub-strategy under the general banner of philosophy. It neither supercedes nor stands without philosophy.
> Like there are literally Faculty in Philosophy all over the world trying to understand AI.
There surely are. The problem is that they are failing. While the practical nerds are coming up with some pretty good ideas.
And this was what philosophy was supposed to be for! Like, they've been arguing on their pins for centuries about the essence of consciousness and the uniqueness of the human condition and whatnot. AND HERE WE ARE AT THE DAWN OF NON-HUMAN INTELLIGENCE AND THEY HAVE NOTHING USEFUL TO SAY.
Basically at what point do we just pack it in and admit we all fucked up?
Blame philosophy as a field for actively kicking out anything which gains a practical application. If it is propaganda it is coming from inside the house of philosophy.
I had a computer science professor who had degrees in philosophy because he was old enough that computer science didn't exist as a major at the time. The logical arguments of philosophy proved useful for understanding interactions of boolean mathematics. Yet that triumph of philosophy didn't further interest in the field or gain prestiege among philosophers. Just the opposite really.
As far as I can tell it is for dumb reasons possibly related to Ancient Greeks and their obsession with 'purity of thought (read: not referencing reality) it is practically an axiom that if it is useful or grounded in objective reality it isn't treated as philosophy anymore. All likely stemming from motivated reasoning against checking their priors and from frankly many of the Ancient philosophers being influenced by a need to flatter their patrons who held the practical in disdain. As notoriously seen in Aristotlian physics with impetus physics where projectiles keep moving in the same direction until impetus is depleted and then fall.
Speculation of the origon of the pathology aside, there seems to be this deep-seated antiempericalism in philosophy. Which means at best you get 'philosophy of science' which isn't proper philosophy because it pollutes itself by daring to use reality and experimentation as benchmarks for theories. When philosophy gains a practical usage it doesn't become something called 'practical philosophy' and the focus of more interest by philosophers, it gets shunned. Natural philosophy didn't remain philosophy - it became science.
To be fair there is probably some interaction driving the divorce from the opposite direction, of the practical portions of philosophy being pilfered by those only looking for results as opposed to some sort of unquantifiable enlightenment.
Science is of course a process of refinement of ideas against the reference point of reality. Anything mathematically consistent can be a model but experimentation is needed to see how well your model corresponds to reality.
I'm seeing this attitude everywhere in this subthread, and it's frankly pretty offensive. The burden of proof is on you, not us. If a philosophy paper or textbook has an important contribution to this discussion then cite it! Or better link it, or even make an attempt at explaining it.
That's what the science people do. People who show up with questions get answers, or at least an attempt at an answer. No one tries to handwave away a discussion on power switching applications with "Well, see, this involves a MOSFET which isn't something we can actually explain but which you need to just believe in anyway because there are people who wrote textbooks about it". No, you link a StackExchange question or a electronics video on YouTube or whatnot.
The fundamental disconnect here is that you guys are saying: "Qualia are critically important and AI doesn't have them", to which we're responding "Qualia seem like complete bullshit and don't seem to mean anything". This is the point where you SHOULD try to explain them, or link an explanation that has some kind of relevance.
But instead you recursively cycle back to "No no, they're not bullshit, because Qualia are critically important per all of the philosophy papers and textbooks I'm not citing".
There is neither a burden of proof nor an us or them in this discussion. That isn't how inquiry works, in general. I'm not saying qualia are critically important, though perhaps other people are saying that, I don't know. The point is that qualia per se is just an idea which describes a certain character of physical experience. It isn't an "ideology". It is just a philosophical notion which most people find difficult to totally dismiss.
I genuinely don't get where you are coming from. There is a set of people who dedicate their lives to thinking about stuff and many of them believe there is something about actual experience which is not adequately captured by a purely physical description.
Read the SEP Entry on Qualia if you'd like to get a grounding on it:
I think what you will notice is that philosophers are neither monolithic nor dogmatic on the subject and yet, being intellectually honest and thorough, most neither dismiss it totally or believe in its adequacy as a description.
If you don't think the question of whether AI has or does not have qualia is important I don't know what to tell you. My personal sense is that AIs of the type we have now have no qualia but I am prepared to entertain the idea that they might.
If you want a good text about this try Koch's the Quest for Consciousness. Despite your certainty about qualia and its relation to science, there are genuine observational things we can say about it and how it relates to the physical structure of brains/minds.
On the subject of qualia per se and philosophy's relationship to the physical sciences I can suggest reading about Phenomenology:
The essential idea of import here is that, whether you like it or not, you as an individual have nothing at all, at a fundamental level, other than your perceptions of the world. You must then have an account of how you proceed from such to even basic ideas like empiricism or other sorts of epistemological strategies. Imperfect, perhaps even vague, as the notion of qualia is, it (or something like it) is, fundamentally, the foundation upon which all other sorts of inquiry into the physical world depends.
Unfortunately, sometimes you have to educate yourself on a subject before making arrogant, accusational claims about it. You can't expect people to patiently hold your hand and drip feed you compact knowledge while you spit in their face.
This is especially true of a field such as philosophy, where so much work is built upon earlier, historical work. You just have to do the work of reading the texts or at least reading about them, if you want to participate meaningfully and authoritatively in discussions.
You're speaking authoritatively, but multiple people have tried to correct you and you ignore and challenge all of them, instead of just absorbing what they have to say. Several people have tried to help you understand, and you're complaining that they aren't doing that. Articles have been linked, and specific individuals have been cited. The burden is on you. You arrived and said an entire branch of philosophy was fraudulant, and you have failed to support your initial claim, instead resorting to outbursts.
> Qualia are critically important and AI doesn't have them
No one is saying that. It's a straw man on your behalf.
The problem is that just like your digital thermometer, 50 human brain neurons in a petri dish "obviously" don't have qualia either.
So you end up either needing to draw a line somewhere between mechanical computation and qualia computation, or you can relegate it to supernatural (a soul) or grey areas (quantum magic).
What I'm trying to tease out is isn't an opinion alone. It's a generally understood problem in the scientific community. I'm highlighting it to illustrate the issues at hand.
> So you end up either needing to draw a line somewhere between mechanical computation and qualia computation, or you can relegate it to supernatural (a soul) or grey areas (quantum magic).
Quite literally the jury is still out. It is a hotly debated topic approached from various angles. Arguments are nuanced which is why you fill find ideas such as panpsychism thrown into the mix. I hate appealing to authority but in this instance it is more than warranted. Humans have grappled with this for centuries and the problem hasn't gone away.
We don't know what's inside a neutrino, and it's really hard to experiment with them, but we kind of know why and how they interact with different things. We're able to form theories, research programs, and sometimes even discovered honest-to-god facts, due to our inclusion of such fields in the scope of research, even though we don't know all there is to know about particles/fields or quantum mechanics.
Similarly, qualia is ill-defined, but we can't even start talking about it or refining it until we've at least given it a label and drawn a large circle on the map showing where it might be. Criticisms extending past that must also consider that "life" and "intelligence" are just as ill-defined, and that throwing all of those definitions out leaves us with very little to talk about or probe.
This is 100% backwards, and exposes exactly the nonsense I'm trying to call out!
A "neutrino" isn't a name given to something initially to try to define it later. The neutrino started as an experimental result. There was missing spin in some particle interactions. Stuff came out with a different angular momentum than what went in, and this was easily reproducible and clearly a real effect. But it didn't make sense, as it was a violation of a core conservation law that held everywhere else in the universe that we could observe.
So theorists (Wolfgang Pauli, specifically) sat down to try to describe what kind of thing would be needed. And then, and only then, did it get a name. And it turned out the theory predicted other stuff, like the neutrino carrying momentum and energy in a certain way, and interacting through only the weak force and not electromagnatism or the strong force, and later experiments confirmed that this was basically the way it worked. Later still it was shown that the mass is actually non-zero but extremely small, etc...
So sure: "neutrino" is a well-deserved label[2] for an abstraction we should understand and study. But it got its name after we started studying it, not before!
Philosophers want us to just drop and genuflect to this "qualia" notion long before[1] it's actually shown to be useful for describing anything at all.
[1] Infinitely, possibly. The fact that it predicts nothing testable is pretty good evidence IMHO that it doesn't actually exist at all, at least in the form philosophers want to talk about. Their failure to present any analysis of AI systems based it stands to that point too.
[2] Coined by Fermi, actually, not Pauli. Hilariously the neutrino was originally called "neutron" and its discovery predates the understanding of the structure of the atomic nucleus!
You're completely misinterpreting my comment. The point is we don't know what, if anything, is "inside" of a neutrino, not just due to current technology but ultimately due to uncertainty principles. But we still study it. I'm aware of how we came to study it.
I literally said nothing about "how" we discovered it, I said, "We don't know what's inside a neutrino, and it's really hard to experiment with them, but we kind of know why and how they interact with different things."
It is wild how you would take that and my analogy about drawing a circle on a map with respect to qualia to mean that I said anything which contradicts the history of neutrino research.
I'm going to assume this was just a true misinterpretation and not just another straw man, so with that in mind, do you have a different response?
I recognise it because I have had the subjective experience of 'redness'. So whether it exists for any other human I cannot say but I am certainly 100% certain it exists for me. However I should add that I can't fully define what this experience is. Though people say the same of love!
I'll appeal to authority in that scientists and philosophers today in all of the worlds universities and those in the past have determined to understand this phenomenon. That it exists is a given, what it is, is more murky. Again it's not me saying this.
> The meta-problem of consciousness is (to a first approximation) the problem of explaining why we think that there is a [hard] problem of consciousness.
I think there are several lines. Phase changes happen relatively suddenly, when a system or subsystem reaches a critical threshold. The experience of "qualia" certainly involves many such phase changes as a complex, dynamical system grows in complexity while maintaining stability.
A sufficiently complex organism lacking eyes but having light-sensitive organs still experiences qualia if you define it the right way. But do they experience heartbreak like I do? It isn't an all-or-nothing situation, even if we don't yet know where these lines are.
This supports the idea that subjective consciousness emerges from complexity in systems that have sensory feedback loops. The simpler the system, the smaller the qualia space.
Have you considered that you just don't fully understand the literature? It's quite arrogant to write off the entire philosophy of mind as "a complete fraud".
> It's completely unable to describe the old world, much less provide insight into the new one.
What exactly were you expecting?
Philosophy is a science, the first in fact, and it follows a scientific method for asking and answering questions. Many of these problems are extremely hard and their questions are still yet unanswered, and many questions are still badly formed or predicated on unproven axioms. This is true for philosophy of mind. Many other scientific domains are similarly incomplete, and remain active areas of research and contemplation.
What are you adding to this research? I only see you complaining and hurling negative accusations, instead of actually critically engaging with any specifics of the material. Do you have a well-formed theory to replace philosophy of mind?
> I mean, come on. "We've got qualia!" is meaningless. Might as well respond with "Well, sure, but AI has furffle, which is isomporphic." Equally insightful, and easier to pronounce.
Do you understand what qualia is? Most philosophers still don't, and many actively work on the problem. Admitting that something is incomplete is what a proper scientist does. An admission of incompleteness is in no way evidence towards "fraud".
The most effective way to actually attack qualia would be to simply present it as unfalsifiable. And I'd agree with that. We might hopefully one day entirely replace the notion of qualia with something more precise and falsifiable.
But whatever it is, I am currently experiencing a subjective, conscious experience. I'm experiencing it right now, even if I cannot prove it or even if you do not believe me. You don't even need to believe I'm real at all. This entire universe could all just be in your head. Meanwhile, I like to review previous literature/discussions on consciousness and explore the phenomenon in my own way. And I believe that subjective, conscious experience requires certain elements, including a sensory feedback loop. I never said "AI can't experience qualia", I made an educated statement about the lack of certain components in current-generation models which imply to me the lack of an ability to "experience" anything at all, much less subjective consciousness and qualia.
Even "AI" is such a broadly defined term that such a statement is just ludicrous. Instead, I made precise observations and predictions based on my own knowledge and decade of experience as a machine learning practitioner and research engineer. The idea that machines of arbitrary complexity inherently can have the capability for subjective consciousness, and that specific baselines structures are not required, is on par with panpsychism, which is even more unfalsifiable and theoretical than the rest of philosophy of mind.
Hopefully, we will continue to get answers to these deep, seemingly unanswerable questions. Humans are stubborn like that. But your negative, vague approach to discourse here doesn't add anything substantial to the conversation.
I would add I find it difficult to understand why so few have even a basic level of philosophical understanding. The attitude of being entirely dismissive of it is the height of ignorance I'm sure. I would presume few would be able to define then what Science actually is.
So many of these kinds of people also struggle to realize they're invoking panpsychism with their arguments. They lack a framework for describing intelligence. Such a framework allows us to separate "intelligence" from "experience".
"Intelligence" in the universe is actually quite common, more common than life. You can argue that any stable, complex process exhibits intelligence. After all, it needs to be able to sample its internal and external environments and carry out physical computations in order to regulate itself and maintain stability. And we can interpret things like the good regulator theorem to argue that such complex dynamical systems must also maintain at least a partial memory/mapping of their environment. That mapping can live abstractly within the structure of system itself.
But what a stabilized solar system doesn't have is the incredibly complex neurochemical structures present in the brain which support the insanely rich experience I am having now. It's one thing for a system to classify and label colors by wavelength. It's quite another for me to "see" and experience red in my mind's eye. To activate related emotional pathways that I associate with various colors and shapes, which are exploited in signage and architectural design. I'm not claiming my experience is separate from simpler dynamic systems, but it's got magnitudes more going on. Layers upon layers of things such as archetypes and instinct which create a possibly emergent conscious experience.
You've shifted jargon again. But you're still not providing a description or link to why AI doesn't "have experience", you're just demanding we all accept it as a prior and engaging in a (really pretty baldly stated) appeal to authority to fool us all into thinking someone else knows even if you don't.
And fundamentally my point is that no, they almost certainly don't either.
Instead of accusing me of "shifting jargon", point out exactly where this "jargon" changed and critically engage with that. Your response has done nothing to refute or critically engage with my argument. It's more retreating and vagueposting.
> you're just demanding we all accept it as a prior
At absolutely no point in this discussion have I claimed that machines are not capable of subjective conscious experience. I have, however, disqualified all publicly accessible modern models due to the lack of a sensory feedback loop. I certainly believe we can create machines which experience subjective consciousness and qualia; I do not believe in souls and divinity, so whatever is going on is physically based and likely reproducible with the right hardware.
So dispense with the straw man arguments, and please begin engaging more earnestly and intelligently in this discussion, as I am quickly losing interest in continuing to debate someone who showed up unprepared.
Not according to Zombie Feynman it isn't[1] (someone else can dig up the link). Case in point:
> Do you understand what qualia is? Most philosophers still don't
It's a meaningless word. It's a word that gives some clean construction around closely-held opinions about how life/consciousness/intelligence/furffle/whatever works. So it's a valuable word within the jargon of the subculture that invented it.
But it's not "science", which isn't about words at all except as shorthand for abstractions that are confirmed by testable results.
"Qualia", basically, is best understood as ideology. It's a word that works like "woke" or "liberal" or "fascist" or "bourgeoisie" to flag priors about which you don't want to argue. In this case, you want people to be special, so you give them a special label and declare a priori that it's not subject to debate. But that label doesn't make them so.
[1] Of course. You can recursively solve this problem by redefining "science" to mean something else. But that remains very solidly in the "not science" category of discourse.
Have you considered the possibility that you're the one who's really committed to an outcome, and are desperately trying to discredit anything that contradicts it?
I have! But the lack of a testable procedure tells me that's not a question worth asking. Look, if "qualia" can tell me something practical about the behavior of AI, I am here for it. Lay it on me, man. Let's see some of that "science" being promised.
It can't, because it's a meaningless word. It's not "discrediting" an idea to point out that (by its own admission) it's unfalsifiable.
"Qualia" is not totally meaningless - it means the inner experience of something, and can bring up the real question say of is my inner experience of the colour green the same as your experience of the colour red? Probably not but hard to tell with current tech. I asked Google if it has qualia and got "No, as an AI, Google Search does not have qualia." So Google search seemed to know what it means.
Hmmm... I think it's still stricter to consider Science a philosophy than the other way around. It's the belief (and an extremely useful and successful one) that the nature of the world can be understood through observation, experiment and deducing mathematical relationships between things. There branches of philosophy that are not strictly scientific, but nothing in Science that is doesn't rely on the fundamental philosophical principle of empiricism.
But we use the scientific method via philosophical inquiry, so I think it comes down to how we decide to strictly define these things. I definitely agree that certain definitions lead to the same logic you've presented.
> Aristotle pioneered scientific method in ancient Greece alongside his empirical biology and his work on logic, rejecting a purely deductive framework in favour of generalisations made from observations of nature.
Aristotle, the famous philosopher and mathematician.
If you cannot understand the very nature of where our modern scientific frameworks came from, how it relates to rationalism, itself a philosophical concept, then you cannot see that philosophy underpins every bit of science we have today. Philosophy gives us the tools to decide when to reasonably trust or distrust observations and intuitions. It is the foundational science that allows the rest of humanity's scientific research to be taken seriously.
>"Qualia", basically, is best understood as ideology. It's a word that works like "woke" or "liberal" or "fascist" or "bourgeoisie" to flag priors about which you don't want to argue. In this case, you want people to be special, so you give them a special label and declare a priori that it's not subject to debate. But that label doesn't make them so.
This is so dumb. Qualia is just the name for a specific thing which we all (appear) to phenomenologically experience. You can deny it exists or deny its utility as a concept, but fundamentally its just an idea that philosophers (and scientists, I have to add) have found useful to pose certain other questions about the human condition, minds, brains, etc.
Your XKCD actually seems to make the opposite point. I can do a non-rigorous experiment with just one subject (me) that suggests Qualia exists. Finding ways to make this rigorous is difficult, of course, but its an observation about the nature of the world that it feels like something to experience things.
My point isn't that qualia is a good concept. I tend to be somewhat deflationary about it myself, but its not an ideology.
If we can't define, recognize or measure them, how exactly do we know that AI doesn't have them?
I remain amazed that a whole branch of philosophy (aimed, theoretically, at describing exactly this moment of technological change) is showing itself up as a complete fraud. It's completely unable to describe the old world, much less provide insight into the new one.
I mean, come on. "We've got qualia!" is meaningless. Might as well respond with "Well, sure, but AI has furffle, which is isomporphic." Equally insightful, and easier to pronounce.