38
votes
Why is it impossible for a program or AI to have semantic understanding?
There is a blatant problem with Searle’s argument and it’s quite hard to understand why it hasn’t been pointed out before: None of Mr. Searle’s brain cells understands English, yet he claims that he ...
- 5,833
29
votes
What do humans do uniquely, that computers apparently will not be able to?
“What do humans do uniquely, that computers apparently will not be able to?”
Be human.
In all seriousness, your question reduces entirely to what it means to be human. If computers (or anything else) ...
- 1,565
28
votes
I prompt an AI into generating something; who created it: me, the AI, or the AI's author?
Stories of creation, like stories of attribution, are social constructs. Causation involves many interacting parts, going out and back as far as one can imagine. When we talk about somebody having ...
- 1,281
26
votes
Why are humans and AI often treated differently in cases where they perform nearly identical processes?
The training sets for generative AI systems are orders of magnitude larger than the number of images or words that a human being sees in a lifetime. If you trained a neural net on only the images that ...
- 1,304
25
votes
Does the success of AI (Large Language Models) support Wittgenstein's position that "meaning is use"?
No. Wittgenstein would probably be the first to argue that the bare existence of a functioning Large Language Model does not by itself have any philosophical importance. The construction of an LLM is ...
- 2,433
22
votes
Accepted
Why is it impossible for a program or AI to have semantic understanding?
I find it odd that his main argument for why programs could not think was that because programs could only follow syntax rules but could not associate any understanding or semantics to words( or any ...
- 2,867
19
votes
Why do some physicalists use the Turing Machine as a model of the brain?
A little background: there's a funny fact about computers that a very crude system with a primitive programming language can solve every computable problem (given enough memory). As we write better ...
- 521
19
votes
Does the use of AI make someone more intelligent?
This depends on your definition of Intelligence
There are two competing (categories of) ways to define intelligence, Internalism and Externalism. Neither of these are "more correct" than the ...
- 732
18
votes
Can LLMs have intention?
No, an LLM itself is a statistical model stored as a artificial neural network about linguistics in a training set. It has no activity, nor intentions. It has no perception of the world or time, no ...
- 7,417
17
votes
Why are humans and AI often treated differently in cases where they perform nearly identical processes?
Neural networks are not modelled on the way the brain works because no one knows how the brain works. At best a neural network is an extremely limited and highly idealized simulation of a model based ...
- 13.1k
16
votes
The Turing-Asimov Dilemma
The problem with this argument is that the three laws are a plot device and not laws at all. Not only has no robot been programmed with them, no robot could be.
You can lay down a general rule that ...
- 2,316
15
votes
When does simulating something produce a real effect of that thing?
I was just listening to an interview with David Chalmers where he opined that if one could accurately simulate the brain, consciousness would arise in the simulation. Are there any other instances ...
- 1,498
15
votes
Does or could ChatGPT understand text?
The argument is irrelevant. You can apply the same logic to say that humans don't understand text, since text doesn't exist in your brain. There are lots of software applications that read text- if ...
- 26.4k
14
votes
What do humans do uniquely, that computers apparently will not be able to?
Like many questions in philosophy, this is a question that is easy to phrase in natural English but has key subtleties that make it terribly hard to answer. The flippant answer is we don't know. ...
- 18.8k
13
votes
Does or could ChatGPT understand text?
ChatGPT never gets the text questions online users type. All it gets is electrons. […] The ubiquitous claim that ChatGPT is trained on text stored on the internet is simply bonkers.
This argument is ...
- 1,498
12
votes
The Turing-Asimov Dilemma
There is no dilemma.
Turing Test requires the subject to sit in another room. The subject is not available for observation, only his/her/it's answers are.
That limitation do not exist for Asimov's ...
- 1,100
12
votes
I prompt an AI into generating something; who created it: me, the AI, or the AI's author?
This is a conundrum applicable to any attribution of responsibility, not just AI. While I personally would attribute the plurality of responsibility of creation (of the resulting image, say, or text) ...
- 546
12
votes
Accepted
Does the success of AI (Large Language Models) support Wittgenstein's position that "meaning is use"?
Yes, indeed: According to the post-Tractatus Wittgenstein, words are "meaning families"; the specific "meaning" of a word is determined by (or perhaps is) its use in context. ...
- 2,988
12
votes
What do humans do uniquely, that computers apparently will not be able to?
Humans can take moral responsibility for their actions. Computers will never be able to do so.
Suppose an autonomous robot soldier kills an innocent person for no justifiable reason. The moral failure ...
- 1,292
12
votes
Who was the first philosopher to describe what we now call artificial intelligence?
People often don't realise how vague a term Artificial Intelligence is. It can be used to indicate anything from a synthetic mind with human-equivalent capacities (more properly called Artificial ...
- 23.8k
12
votes
Who was the first philosopher to describe what we now call artificial intelligence?
Ramon Llull is a good contender. From the Wikipedia article on the History of artificial intelligence:
Spanish philosopher Ramon Llull (1232–1315) developed several logical machines devoted to the ...
- 765
11
votes
Accepted
The Turing-Asimov Dilemma
The intersection of AI research and deontic logic is nonempty. One preliminary example of the framework for such an intersection is Wieringa and Meyer's "Applications of Deontic Logic in Computer
...
- 22.5k
11
votes
Do ChatGPT and other AI bots force a rethinking of anonymity?
Yes, but not in the way your question implies it. Automized language models will provide a huge challenge for anonymity, but likely not because we can't tell them apart, but rather because they are ...
- 8,140
11
votes
Why are humans and AI often treated differently in cases where they perform nearly identical processes?
The premise is flawed because humans and AIs do not use the same processes, at least currently.
As Davie Gudeman's answer already points out, humans and AIs at least at present do not use the same ...
- 741
11
votes
Could general-AI language generation be a test for sentience, sapience, or consciousness?
If several independent general AI were to, unprompted, develop their own language ab initio (or perhaps from other languages,) could this serve as a test for sentience, sapience, or general ...
- 35.6k
11
votes
Accepted
Will the use of AI reduce our capacity to think?
It depends on what you mean by "to think", but from the extended mind thesis it actually increases our ability to critically think. I no longer know most of the phone numbers of my friends ...
- 35.6k
10
votes
Why is it impossible for a program or AI to have semantic understanding?
As I see it, Searle is getting at the point that syntax is algorithmic — a system driven by predefined rules and procedures — but semantics is (as far as we can tell) not. In other words, it's easy ...
- 24.2k
10
votes
Why do some physicalists use the Turing Machine as a model of the brain?
The Church-Turing thesis suggests that any machine we can build is no more powerful than a Turing machine.
It is possible to run an approximate numerical simulation of physics, on a computer. A ...
- 18.9k
10
votes
The Turing-Asimov Dilemma
Your reasoning is faulty. There is no dilemma.
First and foremost, because your understanding of Asimov's laws is flawed. These are the imperatives which govern robot behavior in Asimov's fiction. ...
- 238
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible