EAll

That exists in a gray area of intentionality. It's not the person the writing is being attributed to writing it, and it's not the person who actually wrote it doing so with any conscious intention. It's their subconscious "getting into character." It's unethical, but it's still art imo.

People with sophisticated ability as readers certainly have, at times, found literature produced via automatic writing meaningful. For instance, David Mitchell, the Cloud Atlas author, was profoundly move by The Reason I Jump, which was produced via facilitated communication.

If you ask a popular LLM to analyze what that text means, it's going to at least generally correctly interpret it while you can't. That's fairly interesting. It wasn't *that* long ago that a machine could not reliably beat someone at your ability level at this sort of task, but now they can.

In times such as these I think of the epilogue to Barry Lyndon:

Penn and Brown are on the Ivy list.

The brain is a computer more like a water clock than it is a computer like what people typically think of when they hear the word "computer."

That's not strictly true. The act of executing anything flips switches, but I think what you mean is that the past isn't being internally modeled. Why does that matter? Why would that preclude phenomenal experience?

It's true of all computer programs. They're just arrangements of matter moving from one to the next. I know what you're saying is that each output is generated anew rather than recursively rebuilding itself, but it's not clear why you think that's needed for subjectivity.

If we possessed a start trek replicator that constructed a carp electron cloud by electron cloud the same as our one that momentarily feels pain, it'd still momentarily feel pain. It doesn't strictly matter brain states cascaded from one to the next until this moment happened.

The carp as a consciously existing entity doesn't persist in this scenario. You mean that its present states invariably are a function of previous states that we'd still describe as a physical carp, but that also would be true of a computer program obtaining only moments of subjectivity.

I'm fearful of a Dem win from a candidate that lacks the courage to attempt this, particularly when they encounter opposition from conservatives in the judiciary.

If a Democrat were to win in 2028, they'd have to engage in a deep counter-purge throughout the government to remove all the amoral Trump lackeys installed up and down the admin. This would cripple the government functionality temporarily, but is necessary to prevent a relapse.

If that existed and we could tell, it'd be vital knowledge since we don't really understand it right now. You might want to intuitively leap to the moral implications of this, but I'm not sure they're there. What if I told you a carp subjectively feels pain, but only in occasional, brief flashes?

I got that, but I think the reason you gave doesn't fly. "Only for a moment" consciousness is not self-evidently wrong. We're not even sure if there aren't some biological species experience that.

Sensation is not the same as conscious attention and there are many things you are actively sensing right now that you are not consciously experiencing. Conversely, some things you consciously experience originate from within activity inside your own brain.

I agree that current AI systems don't have this, but that's a separate question from whether they *could* or if persistent self-reflection is something necessary to cause it.

Why wouldn't we say that being was conscious just for a moment? I am familiar with and agree with arguments about why persistent biography is meaningful for personhood in moral theory, but that's not our bar here. It's just whether phenomenal consciousness happened.

No, it's entirely possible that some species have only flashes of subjectivity with no persistent sense of self. I tried to extend that further into a hypothetical example where we have a hypothetical being that only gains a sense of subjectivity for a moment.

Things can both be an intentional attempt to distract and really important unto themselves. If someone shoots someone to distract from the robbery they're committing, that doesn't make shooting someone not worth paying attention to.

Imagine for a moment in hypothetical evolutionary history a species that doesn't ordinarily experience subjectivity - say a fish-like animal that has its predecessor to the mammalian limbic system - that only in flashes of extreme fear has an experience of emotional subjectivity,

I think having a persistent biography is an important feature of personhood, but I'm not sure matters if we're describing something as having consciousness or not. We can in theory imagine a being that has a brief moment of phenomenal consciousness or experience of subjectivity before vanishing.

Interestingly, the tone of that discussion is gives you this sense that they think they're 1) obviously right and 2) represent a vast majority sometimes defeated by greedy businesses who just have money and connections.

Every once in a blue moon I take a peak at what's happening in local Facebook political discussion and it's like 75% NIMBY's being irrate about the world around them and engaging in plans to stop it. It's like entering a portal to another dimension.

I wonder if when you said thinking that human minds are derived from an "input-output machine" is fascism you intended to describe the majority of scientists in any field related to the functioning of human behavior and cognition as fascists.

To be clear, I don't think current AI has a mind, and I don't have any idea if it's plausibly 10 years away or 10,000 years away. I'm just responding to specific arguments you are making.

You don't need to have a position on reductive or non-reductive physicalism to have a position on physicalism. And, also, it's actually ok to have positions on those things if you did. You seem to be going several stops down the line of what was said and rejecting that. I don't recommend either.

Particularly because they are at least adjacent to denying ostensible physical similarity as a basis how we know other humans have minds after observing them acting like we do, you have to wonder why they think *any* mind beyond their own exists.

I think we can bracket whether inference to the best explanation is the right way to know other minds exist and note that we think other minds exist.

I think there is a fair amount of evidence that the brain is chemistry and the claim that the brain is unlikely to be chemistry is unfortunately the one asserted in this conversation w/o a real evidential basis.

To say that chemistry is mathematically legible is not to say that chemistry is math, certainly not in the ontological sense that you have previously made clear you hear whenever you see the word *is* appear.