[ExI] GPT-4 on its inability to solve the symbol grounding problem

[Darin Sunley]

I would go so far as to say, following Chalmers, that the phenomenon of
qualia is one of the most important and least understood and appreciated
deep hints as to the fundamental nature of the universe. It is all
pervasively experienced - indeed we experience literally nothing else - and
yet it cannot be localized in spacetime and appears utterly causally
disconnected from any measurable physical phenomena. The entire phenomena
bears a not-so-passing resemblance to ancient descriptions of the soul and
related theological-anthropologic metaphysical constructs.

Even what little apparent progress has been made - the reconstruction of
visual imagery from probes in mammalian visual cortices - is illusory. Even
if the image in our visual field is found literally written in dendrite
links and neurotransmitter densities, it brings us no closer to
understanding what is the nature of a piece of paper that /experiences/ the
picture written upon it.

On Sat, Apr 8, 2023 at 3:29 PM Darin Sunley <dsunley at gmail.com> wrote:

> A bit late to the party, but I'll take my swing at it:
>
> The phenomenal conscious experience of redness is a thing our brain does,
> not a thing 700 nm light does.
>
> Not only this, but there is no actual causal link between any specific
> phenomenal conscious experience that we have been taught to label
> "redness", and photons of 700 nm light. Different neural architectures can,
> and may very well do generate different phenomenal conscious experiences
> (qualia) in response to 700 nm light, and many neural architectures, while
> capable of detecting 700 nm light striking their visual sensors, may
> generate no phenomenal conscious experience in response thereto at all.
>
> The question of what a phenomenal conscious experience is, what generates
> it, how it is generated in response to photons of a specific energy
> striking a sensor, and what causes it to be one thing and not something
> else, is all under the umbrella of Chalmers' "hard problem" of
> consciousness.
>
> The first hard thing about the hard problem of consciousness is convincing
> some people that it exists. Or as someone (it may have been Yudkowskyor
> Scott Alexander) pointed out, p-zombies are indistinguishable from normal
> humans, /except/ in the specific case where they happen to be philosophers
> writing about phenomenal conscious experience and qualia.. :)
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 8, 2023 at 11:51 AM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> I keep showing this image, attempting to communicate something:
>>
>> [image: 3_functionally_equal_machines_tiny.png]
>> Sure, our elementary school teacher told us the one on the left is red,
>> the one in the middle is green, and the one on the right is just the word
>> 'Red'.
>>
>> But it is evident from all these conversations, that nobody here
>> understands the deeper meaning I'm attempting to communicate.
>> Some people seem to be getting close, which is nice, but they may not yet
>> be fully there.
>> If everyone fully understood this, all these conversations would be
>> radically different.
>> Even if you disagree with me, can anyone describe the deeper meaning I'm
>> attempting to communicate with this image?
>> What does this image say about qualities, different ways of representing
>> information, and different ways of doing computation?
>>
>> How about this, I'll give $100 worth of Ether, or just USD, to anyone who
>> can fully describe the meaning attempting to be portrayed with this image.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 8, 2023 at 10:27 AM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Apr 8, 2023 at 9:31 AM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Apr 8, 2023, 10:45 AM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sat, Apr 8, 2023 at 3:43 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
>>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> There is phenomenal consciousness. That I would call awareness of
>>>>>> first person non-sharable information concerning one's internal states of
>>>>>> mind.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> It is this phenomenal consciousness to which I refer. If you do not
>>>>> think there something it is like to be a large language model then we have
>>>>> no disagreement.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I believe there is something it is like to be for either the LLM, or
>>>> something inside it.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Not sure what you mean by something inside it. A philosopher named
>>> Thomas Nagel wrote a famous paper titled something like “What is it like to
>>> be a bat?” That is the sense that I mean here. Do you think there something
>>> it is like to be GPT-4? When you ask it a question and it replies, is it
>>> aware of its own private first person experience in the sense that we are
>>> aware of our private experience? Or does it have no awareness of any
>>> supposed experience?
>>>
>>> -gts
>>>
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>>>
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>
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