Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. If you're wondering why this went up late, I was doing other shit)
“ Not all self-models are sentience. A thermo- stat has a feedback loop. A PID controller models its own error history. Neither is sentient. The question is what makes the difference, and the answer is representational capacity.”
Absolute cop out. My thermostat has a lil computer capable of executing code. If i give it enough memory and time, it is capable of running any program. If you are going to bite this bullet, like you actually have to address this shit, or say fine fuck it, your ti-89 and samsung fridge are sentient. Just because they arent currently running the right program is silly.
Also they argue mysticism about natural language creates sentience so i guess before humans sentient creatures didnt exist 🫠
@BigMuffN69 Cognitive science does not have a working definition for ‘intelligence’ or ‘sentience’. We can define ‘consciousness’ circularly in terms of GCS score, but that’s the same approach as defining intelligence in terms of its role in a Turing test.
Anyone who claims to have a functional definition for any of these terms is trying to sell you something.
When (if) this actually changes, it will be massive, significant world news.
Until that time, it’s a useful metric for spotting con-artists and morons.
@BigMuffN69 Thomas Metzinger (“Being No-One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity”, 2004) also argues representational capacity is required for consciousness, but in a much more principled manner and with many examples, at length. I notice they don’t reference that book, or indeed any book that’s younger than 75 years old. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@BigMuffN69 @Amoeba_Girl My old thermostat ran a feedback loop with a bimetallic strip and a mercury switch. Was it sentient?
It was certainly more reliable than an LLM.
You can't just go around telling people that their loop isn't strange enough
@simonbp @BigMuffN69 @Amoeba_Girl
According to the Animist's, everything is sapient to differing degree's. :D
@BigMuffN69 @Amoeba_Girl A thermostat has less moral significance than a human, but not infinitely less, and this is subject to change. The notion of fluid boundaries between degrees of moral patiency imply fluid boundaries in capacity to formulate and practice moral rules, and accepting this would conjure a more or less continuous ontological crisis in people proportional to their traditional seriousness.
@BigMuffN69 @Amoeba_Girl I think a sentient system (1) has a memory of experience (2) uses that updating memory to color the signal from its sensorium on a partial order and (3) takes action seeking better outcomes on that partial order. Evolution would favor (3) aligning with being healthy, cautious, and successful at reproduction but that’s outside the definition.