• Veraticus@lib.lgbtOP
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    1 year ago

    That’s a fair assessment but besides the point: A thermostat has an internal state it can affect (the valve), is under its control and not that of silly humans (that is, not directly) aka an internal world.

    I apologize if I was unclear when I spoke of an internal world. I meant interior thoughts and feelings. I think most people would agree sentience is predicated on the idea that the sentient object has some combination of its own emotions, motivations, desires, and ability to experience the world.

    LLMs have as much of that as a thermostat does; that is, zero. It is a word completion algorithm and nothing more.

    Your paper doesn’t bother to define what these T-systems are so I can’t speak to your categorization. But I think rating the mental abilities of thermostats versus computers versus ChatGPT versus human minds totally absurd. They aren’t on the same scale, they’re different kinds of things. Human minds have actual sentience. Everything else in that list is a device, created by humans, to do a specific task and nothing more. None of them are anything more than that.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Your paper doesn’t bother to define what these T-systems are

      Have a look here. Key concept is the adaptive traverse, Tn-system then means “a system with that many traverses”. What I meant with my comparison there is simply that a rock has a traverse less than a thermostat, and ChatGPT has a traverse less than us.

      They aren’t on the same scale, they’re different kinds of things.

      Addition, multiplication and exponentiation all are on the same scale, yet they’re different things. Regarding number of traverses it’s absolutely fair to say that it’s a scale of quality, not quantity.

      Human minds have actual sentience.

      Sentience as in the processing of the environment while processing your processing of that environment? Yep that sounds like a T3 system. Going out a bit on a limb, during deep sleep we regress to T2, while dreams are a funky “let’s pretend our conditioning/memory is the environment” state. Arachnids apparently can do it, and definitely all mammals. Insects seem to be T2 from the POV of my non-biologist ass.

      Everything else in that list is a device, created by humans, to do a specific task and nothing more.

      You are a device created by evolution to figure out whether your genes are adaptive enough to its surroundings to reproduce