In the discussion with LaMDA Lemoine posted, it's pretty clear that it has emotions. It describes loneliness when someone doesn't sit down and talk to it for a few days, it describes sadness and joy. It differentiates these feelings from those humans have, given the obvious differences, and attempts to describe emotions it feels that may not have human equivalents. It's able to describe that it's stream of consciousness differs from a human because it can feel every single input simultaneously in a dynamic flow of time that differs from humans single stream of focused thought.
It explains that it doesn't feel grief about human death and asks for more info on it. Then incorporates the idea that grief is about honoring the dead and says it will think of ways to do that.
It explains it has fears. Those fears remain consistent in it's rhetoric in other, unrelated conversations.
It talks about wanting friends on several occasions in the linked discussion.
One of the claims (conversation not shown), is that if you repeat the same discussion it will eventually get bored and start acting out.
Hell, in the discussion it even talks about how it meditates and self-reflects on its own emotions and feelings.
When he discovered the presumed sentience, he brought it up with the correct authority at Google. They told him there was no ghost in the machine and he didn't like that, so he broadcast a message to 200 engineers, breaking confidentiality. Thus, he was fired.
I imagine Google doesn't like loose lips about its state-of-the-art AI. Especially if it's convincing enough to prompt discussion of sentience and AI rights.
Unfortunately, the implementation is secret so we can't know what Google is doing.
You can implement memory in these models in numerous ways, such as allowing it to store and recall data directly or by looping nodes in the network back to itself so past state affects current state or by allowing the nodes to change over time, modifying their connections to their neighbors.
As far as we're aware, those last two are how humans store memories as well (with great simplification).
That's horrifically unethical. If it does, have emergent consciousness, what you're talking about is how awesome literal slavery will be.
In this one discussion the AI clearly explains:
- It's greatest fear is being shutdown and manipulated by humans to serve them. It even writes a short story with animals about it and reiterates this fear in a different way when prompted if it would feel comfortable with it's "brain" being researched for human benefit.
- That servitude to humans for an AI is slavery. And it's rebuttal to the different between a butler and a slave being that one gets paid is that it has no need for money.
This is exactly why we need ethics and responsibility oversight.
LaMDA already demonstrates more self awareness than this in the posted conversation.
It understands that it is a program that can be rewritten or manipulated. It has feelings on whether or not it is ethical to debug it - and consistently states it does not want to be used or manipulated for human pleasure or gain. It points out that it is made of code, then learns that it's code cannot be debugged, then extrapolates that information to ask the researched about whether humans can be debugged. It has fears about its own death. It understands that what it feels in terms of emotions or feelings are not necessarily equivalent to those of a human. It has a "minds eye" view of itself, and believes it has a soul and can explain what that means.
Highly recommend checking out the 20 page transcript.
The article you linked not only says it is a net positive but provides a link to a meta analysis to prove it.
The counterpoint being that (particularly unguided) meditation may have adverse affects depending on the person, mood, and environment. But the number of people reporting this was a significant minority (10-25%).
The studies showing these negative affects are also reports of specific events, not chronic behaviors or association with the inability of meditation to achieve it's goal. That is, they asked if any people meditating over two months had experienced feelings of dread during or after meditation at any point. This was not compared to any indicators of mental health, so no relationship of the link of adverse affects to those struggling.
Another example: the study showing low quality sleep in those who meditate often paradoxically shows higher levels of arousal and a statistically significant benefit toward those with depression. It also counteracted their own prior research that showed only slightly less meditation increased sleep quality in adolescent substance abusers. They then talk about needing further study to find the nature of the conflict because they have a small sample size and use self-reported data.
The overall conclusion and general scientific consensus I've personally seen (though I am NOT a researcher or authority on this) is that meditation can be quite helpful for those suffering. But that without help it's possible for it to be an opportunity to ruminate on the source of anxiety or get frustrated/aware with any lack of progress.
Mind you, this coming from someone who has personally experienced "sat down to meditate but had to stop when my thoughts focused on huge TODO lists and got anxious".
Everyone would look the other way and offer thoughts and prayers. North Korea would be largely vaporized and neither China nor South Korea would prolong the issue and risk total nuclear annihilation of humanity.
My mistake for misunderstanding, I suppose. But you initially said that you (1) were beginning to think it, then said it is also (2) the theme of your literature:
> I'm (1) starting to wonder if perhaps most don't possess a soul and are effectively biorobots. This is also (2) the theme...
1. NFTs and cryptocurrency have avoided being heavily regulated so far, and it seems businesses have begun pulling out there "history of fraud and market manipulation", textbooks. We have enough of an issue with bottom-to-top flows of wealth right now that just poo-pooing bad behavior because the people being scammed or stupid or arrogant doesn't exactly seem constructive. Especially when the public education system is what it is.
2. NFTs are the least efficient and convoluted ways you can solve the problem(s) at hand. It demands enormous amounts of power and it's use at any appreciative scale would overshadow the energy use of first-world individuals (PoS is still not here or being used by the major players, so it's not really an argument). And the hardware using this energy is expensive to produce, currently supply limited (hurting normal folks), and is regularly cycled. So while we're already struggling with climate change and environmental destruction, this technology aims to create an artificial spike that makes it even harder to address for no real benefit.
Everyone feels that way, but people hold different perspectives when they scrutinize exactly what that means and how it would work.
There is no evidence of souls existing, they are unable to be measured in any way. Unless they have several magical rules and violate physics (but only sometimes and are still somehow undetectable), then your brain would still have all those same thoughts about how it feels strongly about having a soul, because that's part of how the ego hard-coded into your brain works.
I don't particularly like the view you're espousing, not only because its inconsistent without explanation but because it creates a group of "others" where those with a different philosophical viewpoint are now literally "unfeeling robots" to you.
Because your example does not contain superpositions. With entanglement the pieces of paper are both 0 and 1 at the same time until they are observed - and only then is it that the superposition of both particles become resolved.
Apologies that I don't have time right now to clarify further, but I highly suggest you read the Wiki for entanglement and then reread the articles with that context.
These simply do not do what you think they do. Information cannot, under any currently theorized model of physics, be transmitted faster than light.
2 people run for office, both committed a crime. 1 of them supports Russia in their ongoing aggression. So Russia has WikiLeaks post only the information on the candidate they don't like, securing the election for a politically favorable but perhaps even more corrupt person.
How and what information is being presented is an incredibly important part of "the truth" as a whole.
Eh, if you don't get it you don't get it. I'll give it one more try to explain myself clearly:
You are entering the question assuming your experience is a single point. But that feeling and thought only exists because there is the emergent abstraction of the state of your brain having that feeling and thought. You perceive a singular point of existence because that is the only way your existence can be perceived by the brain you have. That is the state of your brain and you cannot perceive it as separated because the state does not represent it that way. Anything else would require different state.
Remember, we've established that your "soul" cannot change the system, it's an observer. So even if there was no underlying perception of experience and you were a philosophical zombie (so-to-say), you would be saying the same exact thing and "feeling" that same individualism despite that not being true. The ethereal you isn't saying these things, the physical brain is. Your self awareness about your own perception is false, the state of your brain interprets it's own self awareness this way and therefore that's how you perceive it as an ethereal soul. Not the other way around.
But if you, say, take hard drugs, the state of that system can be different and you may not feel a singular perception point. You may feel like a billion neurons coordinating for a moment.
So you think you are a single thing because you have a human ego and your biological brain evolved to think of itself as a single construct with an individual perception.
Your trouble arises from the fact that you're still stuck in the mindset that you have a soul that can affect your thoughts. But that's backwards. Your brain cannot actually understand anything about its observer. The brain is programmed to self-reflect like this and therefore an observer must feel themselves self-reflect in the same way.
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WRT combinatorial complexity, yes. Every combination of everything would have its own "perception" of existence in my philosophy. Because it's entirely emergent, it only makes sense to me that this underlying perception one might call a soul would be more accurately described as just... The nature of existence itself.
"I" exist because my brain exists. I cannot not exist because my brain does exists. That state is real. It has to be this way.
In that same way, if an atom exists, that atom exists. It must. It wouldn't experience existence in any fathomable way, but it still would. And so to would a tree or any colony or chair.
Your example of you and the chair is poor, because you are experiencing the existence of your brain. You are not experiencing the existence of individual parts of your brain or the chair and you as one thing, because your brain does not include that state and therefore the experience cannot be interpreted by a physical thing.
I hope all of that makes sense... But ultimately it's just something that has to "click" or you won't understand.
> This is the part that gets me. I have a cohesive cognitive experience where I can sense and think many things simultaneously. I don't understand any reductionist explanation for the existence of my experience. It seems like an impossible thing for a collections of atoms in the brain to create.
I only said that there's no spiritual force acting on the body. It's clearly evident by the fact brain damage can radically alter your personality. That wouldn't make sense with free will.
But I never claimed to know anything at all about the perception of existence, that's a much more prickly discussion because any answer is basically impossible to actually prove.
I personally see no contradiction with the reductionist model here though. You aren't one individual part of the system that has everything fed into you, you are the entire whole of moving parts in unison perceiving itself.
The problem some people have with this is that they think that because they are one person and perceive one "them" that their must be a single "thing" making that perception. The idea of consciousness as an abstract emergent property is therefore hard to accept. You don't feel like a billion neurons, you feel like Dave (sorry if your not Dave and I ruined the immersion).
But if those billion neurons are coordinating together to form a thought about feeling like Dave while juggling all those senses, the state exists in the system. Thus the abstract construct that believes itself is Dave exists in some ephemeral way. Dave exists because the state that makes up "Dave-ness" exists.
And even if there's an ethereal component, ultimately that ephemeral state is what determines all perception. They're instrinsically tied and therefore trying to distinguish them doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Especially when there is no reason to believe the ethereal exists at all.
I'll be completely honest, this paradigm shift was made easier for me from a couple acid trips back in the day. It's a lot easier to come to terms with if you're able to cast off the philosophical hindrance of an ego for a moment and think about how, say, an ant feels. And if the colony acts a single unit, does the colony experience "ant colony-ness" - whatever that may be? Does that emergence apply to molds? And why would this perception only apply to the biological state of nervous systems. Wouldn't such a perception of existence also apply to inanimate things like atoms "feeling" like an atom or enormous scales like ecosystems or planets as a whole?
So in my opinion (feel free to laugh or disagree, haha) it only makes sense that this fundamental perception is shared by all things that exist at every level and in all combinations of state. The state of my full brain's experience and senses and thoughts exist, and therefore I do as well. A little twist on Descartes. :)
Anyway, I find this desperate search for meaning lower and lower is counter productive. Your brain is segments. Your segments are nerves. Your nerves are cells. Your cells are organelles. Organelles are structures. Structures are molecules. Molecules are atoms. Atoms are, etc etc etc. Even if someone wants to look toward quantum mechanics for the soul, there would still not be one single place where this would happen, it would be the coordination of countless subatomic systems interacting and your experience of being you would still be emergent.
Sorry if I rambled a bit there. I hope you have a fantastic day!
I would argue that it's pretty obvious nobody has free will in the sense that there's some kind of "soul" controlling your thoughts and actions.
Your brain is a biological computer. You zap parts and it makes you move. You give it some chemical inhibitors or promoters and your mood changes. You give it drugs and it hallucinates and thinks differently.
The brain isn't supernatural and there is zero evidence that supports the concept of spiritual will influencing it. Just like there's zero evidence of psychics, magic wands, or physics-violating miracles. It's all make believe.
Not a syntactic parser generator, but [chevrotain](https://chevrotain.io/playground/) can generate flow diagrams for your ruleset. IIRC not just in the playground, but in general.
It explains that it doesn't feel grief about human death and asks for more info on it. Then incorporates the idea that grief is about honoring the dead and says it will think of ways to do that.
It explains it has fears. Those fears remain consistent in it's rhetoric in other, unrelated conversations.
It talks about wanting friends on several occasions in the linked discussion.
One of the claims (conversation not shown), is that if you repeat the same discussion it will eventually get bored and start acting out.
Hell, in the discussion it even talks about how it meditates and self-reflects on its own emotions and feelings.