We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent – here’s how
theconversation.com
AI may appear human, but it is an illusion we must tackle.

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

https://archive.ph/Fapar

  • cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.mlEnglish
    12·
    6 hours ago

    The straw man is you continuing to argue against equating LLMs with the functioning of the brain, something I never said here.

    I’m not claiming you ever said they functioned exactly the same way. Im simply stating that you’re way off base when you claim that they appear to operate using the same principles or that all evidence suggests the human mind is nothing more than a probability machine. That’s not a straw man. You literally said those things.

    There is zero evidence that all the complexity of the brain is inherent to the way our reasoning functions.

    You’re betraying your own ignorance about neuroscience. The complexity of the brain is absolutely linked with its ability to reason and we have plenty of evidence to show that. The evolutionary process does not just create needless complexity if there is a more efficient path.

    Again, we don’t have a full understanding of how the brain accomplishes tasks like reasoning. It may be a lot more complex than what LLMs do, or it may not be. We do not know.

    This is such a silly statement especially when you’ve been claiming that both the brain and AI appear to work using the same principles. If you truly believe the mind is such a mystery then stop making that claim.

    You decided to ignore that to focus on braying about tech companies and LLMs instead.

    I don’t really care about your arguments concerning embodiment because they’re so beside the point when you just blowing right by the most basic principles of neuroscience.

    I bring up tech companies because they’ve had a massively distorting effect on how many computer scientists think the world works. You’re not immune to it either simply because you’re a critic of capitalism. A ruthless criticism of that exists includes the very researchers whose work you’re taking at face value.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
      11·
      3 hours ago

      Im simply stating that you’re way off base when you claim that they appear to operate using the same principles or that all evidence suggests the human mind is nothing more than a probability machine.

      I literally said these things, and you never gave any actual counter argument to either of them.

      You’re betraying your own ignorance about neuroscience. The complexity of the brain is absolutely linked with its ability to reason and we have plenty of evidence to show that. The evolutionary process does not just create needless complexity if there is a more efficient path.

      You’re betraying your ignorance of how biology works and illustrating that you have absolutely no business debating this subject. Efficiency is not the primary fitness function for evolution, it’s survivability. And that means having a lot of redundancy baked into the system. Here’s a concrete example for you of just how much of the brain isn’t actually essential for normal day to day function. https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116

      This is such a silly statement especially when you’ve been claiming that both the brain and AI appear to work using the same principles.

      There’s nothing silly in stating that the underlying principles are similar, but we don’t understand a lot of the mechanics of the brain. If you truly can’t understand such basic things there’s little point trying to have a meaningful discussion.

      I don’t really care about your arguments concerning embodiment because they’re so beside the point when you just blowing right by the most basic principles of neuroscience.

      That’s literally the whole context for this thread, it just doesn’t fit with the straw man you want to argue about.

      A ruthless criticism of that exists includes the very researchers whose work you’re taking at face value.

      Whose work am I taking at face value specifically? You’re just spewing nonsense here without engaging with anything I’m saying.