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- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.
But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.
This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.
So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.
Let me rephrase. If your definition of intelligence includes slime mold then the term is not very useful.
There’s a reason philosophy of the mind exists as a field of study. If we just assign intelligence to anything that can solve problems, which is what you seem to be doing, we are forced to assign intelligence to things which clearly don’t have minds and aren’t aware and can’t think. That’s a problem.
Why is it a problem?
Generally, I’d say having clear, specific and useful definitions is a good thing to help communicate and understand what we are talking about and avoid misinterpretations.
What is the reason you think philosophy of the mind exists as a field of study?
In part, so we don’t assign intelligence to mindless, unaware, unthinking things like slime mold - it’s so we keep our definitions clear and useful, so we can communicate about and understand what intelligence even is.
What you’re doing actually creates an unclear and useless definition that makes communication harder and spreads misunderstanding. Your definition of intelligence, which is what the AI companies use, has made people more confused than ever about “intelligence” and only serves the interests of the companies for generating hype and attracting investor cash.