[ExI] Zombies

[Jason Resch]

On Mon, May 1, 2023, 6:18 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> Hi Jason,
>
>
> On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 1:39 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>> As I see it, the two camps are:
>>> 1. Those who believe behaving in every discernable way as if one
>>> understands is different from genuine understanding.
>>> 2. Those who believe behaving in every discernable way as if one
>>> understands is no different from genuine understanding.
>>>
>>> As laid out, neither camp is falsifiable, as "in every discernable way"
>>> covers everything that could be tested for, but the law of parsimony favors
>>> the second camp, as it has only one notion of "understanding", one defined
>>> by behavior, rather than postulating the existence of another form of
>>> "genuine understanding", different from "behaviors if one understands", and
>>> it is a form which cannot be tested for using any objective means.
>>>
>>
> By "genuine understanding", I'm assuming you are talking about something
> like it has an ability to experience a redness quality, so can say: 'oh
> THAT is what redness is like.
>

I was more talking about LLMs vs. human brains. Gordon said that human
brains had true or genuine understanding, whereas LLMs have no
understanding whatsoever, only "understanding" -- an appearance of
understanding. I don't know what camp 1 means by genuine understanding.
Gordon seemed to believe it involves consciousness, in which case the
debate on genuine understanding collapses into the zombies are possible vs.
zombies are impossible debate.



> And, if they discovered which of all our descriptions of stuff in the
> brain was a description of that redness, and if they could reliably
> demonstrate that to anyone, as we start repairing and doing significant
> engineering work on the subjective consciousness, (doing things like
> endowing people with new colorness qualities nobody has ever experienced
> before)
>

We've done that to monkeys already. Did you read that paper?

would that not force everyone in the number 2 camp to admit their camp has
> been falsified?
>

I don't think the qualia question is necessarily relevant to the question
of whether there is a form of understanding which exists but cannot be
detected, although I do see a parallel with qualia: qualia being something
that exists and which some people argue cannot be detected (they believe
zombies are possible).

Jason
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