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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   3400 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 2, 2023

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I think I'm about due for a reread of Blindsight - I read it years ago online and loved it, but at the time I hadn't read much about consciousness. My (vague) recollection was that it mostly elides the hard problem of consciousness. I remember there was an idea that the crew's linguist was able to prove the non-consciousness of the aliens from their text communications.

In the era of LLMs, that seems pretty silly, since ChatGPT (or at least the un-neutered Bing) can do a great job of pretending to experience. But maybe there was less hand-waving than I'm remembering?

I remember there was an idea that the crew's linguist was able to prove the non-consciousness of the aliens from their text communications.

IIRC (and it's been over a decade, so take it with a grain of salt), they were able to prove that the aliens' communications and actions were separate. They used the Chinese Room analogy after discovering that "threats" weren't matched with aiming weapons, "negotiations" weren't matched with fulfilling the terms, etc. I don't think that would prove non-consciousness (and I can't remember if they claimed that), but it's certainly a step in that direction.

They figured out whatever they were communicating with initially was a chatbot made from intercepted human communications

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