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Post by Pacifica on Aug 23, 2023 14:22:32 GMT
This is a twofold question for the people on here who believe in God:
1) Do you think conscious AIs could theoretically be created?
2) If yes, does that mean God would put souls in them?
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kizolk
Indecisive
Posts: 5,454
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Post by kizolk on Aug 23, 2023 14:45:34 GMT
1) Do you think conscious AIs could theoretically be created? I'm not the target audience of the second question, and I'm not sure what a Catholic would answer, but I can discuss that one: I'm a materialist in the sense that I don't believe in the mind-matter dichotomy. If only because using Occam's razor, it would seem superfluous to postulate an extra something we've never been able to attest experimentally, and that I can't find a good reason to doubt that the molecular arrangement of the brain could explain all of it. Of course I could be wrong, and if evidence suggested otherwise, I'd accept it. Anyway, I do think conscious AIs will be created one day. And depending on how you define consciousness exactly, maybe they already exist -- granted, it would be true only according to a very restricted notion of consciousness, but I do think we've passed the point where asking the question isn't completely moronic anymore.
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Post by Pacifica on Aug 23, 2023 14:57:26 GMT
I've actually wondered. Even regarding a plain computer like mine: could it be conscious in some kind of way? Not in the same way as a human being or even an animal, but...
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Post by Pacifica on Aug 23, 2023 15:03:54 GMT
That reminds me the official Catholic doctrine is (I think) that animals don't have souls. Yet it can hardly be denied that they (or at least many of them) have consciousness.
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kizolk
Indecisive
Posts: 5,454
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AI Souls
Aug 23, 2023 15:16:33 GMT
via mobile
Post by kizolk on Aug 23, 2023 15:16:33 GMT
That reminds me the official Catholic doctrine is (I think) that animals don't have souls. Yet it can hardly be denied that they (or at least many of them) have consciousness. I wasn't sure about the doctrine, but it was my impression as well. I'll post a video when I can, one I saw a couple of weeks ago and that would be very on topic. AIs having existential crises, but in a novel way, I thought.
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Post by Pacifica on Aug 23, 2023 15:22:42 GMT
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kizolk
Indecisive
Posts: 5,454
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Post by kizolk on Aug 23, 2023 23:49:25 GMT
Hope I didn't set your expectations too high lol
First, some context: this is a technical demo for a graphical engine--basically, a boring video game, mostly, except for a few details. Most really popular games in the past, IDK, 15 years, were based on the concept of open worlds: basically, huge virtual territories (known as maps) a player can freely roam, that most of the time are populated with many NPCs, non-playable characters, that you can talk to. Most of the time, they were/are immensely boring people; one of the reasons why is that most of the time they only have a few prerecorded lines/reactions, and keep repeating the same ones after a while, and you yourself can only choose from a very limited set of lines or actions the developers have put at your disposal beforehand. So, not enough freedom for really interesting interaction to take place.
What's new with this demo is that 1) you can talk to them, as in, with a mic, using natural language, 2) they understand it, 3) a reaction is generated by AI, and 4) they answer by speaking, with an AI generated voice.
Basically, the NPCs who populate that virtual world are chatbots, with something like "react like a regular person would in the street" as a prompt.
Here's the result (if you can't see it: the title is "I Tried to Convince Intelligent AI NPCs They are Living in a Simulation"):
To be clear: I'm not saying this is consciousness. And the limitations are obvious enough: some NPCs just make no sense, react in unlikely ways, the voices are still pretty stilted, etc. On the other hand, while nothing really new is happening if you take each element of the NPCs behavior separately, I think the combination of virtual avatar + voice + natural language comprehension + chatbot abilities, makes the whole thing quite otherworldy. And while the voices are indeed still rather bad, do notice the intonations: most of the time they fit rather well what the NPCs are saying.
Give it a few more years, and lines will start getting really blurred. Chatbots (and the language models that make them possible) are so advanced that you could say they've already passed the Turing test; I think soon enough we'll start seriously considering if they've passed the consciousness test.
Note that I'm not saying it's a good thing. I'm not saying it's a bad thing either. IDK what to make of that, but I think it's real.
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kizolk
Indecisive
Posts: 5,454
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Post by kizolk on Aug 23, 2023 23:54:37 GMT
Although actually I'm not sure if the game processes the audio coming from the player's mic, or if he's just dictating lines that are transmitted to the games in written form, which would explain the slight editing cuts we can see between the moment he says something and the NPC's answer... Will have to look into it. Not that it would change things a lot; the demo would still be pretty impressive.
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kizolk
Indecisive
Posts: 5,454
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Post by kizolk on Aug 24, 2023 0:01:19 GMT
Ok, I'm blind it seems: it clearly says "Hold down A to talk", with a mic icon, so indeed it seems like the game natively supports audio input. So, I'd guess the cuts in the video are due to the game needing some time to generate the NPC's answers + audio, and the player, in typical YouTuber fashion, didn't want it to ruin his video's rhythm so he cut that off.
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Post by Pacifica on Aug 24, 2023 8:28:39 GMT
They sound so depressed.
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Post by terentiusfaber on Aug 24, 2023 11:19:14 GMT
This is a twofold question for the people on here who believe in God: 1) Do you think conscious AIs could theoretically be created? 2) If yes, does that mean God would put souls in them? 1) Haven't a clue! I understand neither the psychology of self-awareness, nor IT, sufficiently to make an informed comment. 2) Assuming (1) is possible, no. Because they would not be beings created by God, but by man.
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Post by terentiusfaber on Aug 24, 2023 11:21:25 GMT
That reminds me the official Catholic doctrine is (I think) that animals don't have souls. Yet it can hardly be denied that they (or at least many of them) have consciousness. The Catholic scholastics teach that all life forms have souls, but only humans have immortal souls, we being created in the image and likeness of God. Animal and plant (and presumably fungal) souls disintegrate with the decomposition of the body.
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Post by Pacifica on Aug 24, 2023 11:39:07 GMT
Intringuing.
Are soul and consciousness completely separate things, so that you can have consciousness without a soul* or a soul without consciousness**?
*Like our theoretical AI. **Like plants, maybe (do you believe plants are conscious?) or a human in a deep coma (some people think the soul has departed from such patients; what's your opinion?).
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Post by Pacifica on Aug 24, 2023 11:48:19 GMT
Perhaps we should consider the fact that the meaning of words for "soul" has shifted with time. Latin anima literally meant breath, and thence the vital principle in a being, its very life, and thence the "soul". Could it be that by animals and plants having souls, the scholastics meant nothing more than that animals and plants have life?
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Post by terentiusfaber on Jan 19, 2024 21:29:17 GMT
Intringuing. Are soul and consciousness completely separate things, so that you can have consciousness without a soul* or a soul without consciousness**? *Like our theoretical AI. **Like plants, maybe (do you believe plants are conscious?) or a human in a deep coma (some people think the soul has departed from such patients; what's your opinion?). Just seeing this now, Sorry! For Catholics, self-consciousness is a faculty of the soul. Deep coma humans are still united body and soul as is shown when the occasional one regains consciousness. Separation of body and souls only occurs with bodily death and that might take a wee bit longer than clinical death. In the old days, there was discussion on how long it took the soul to leave the body after death. These discussions effectively came to an end with advances in medical science which could detect the absence of a heartbeat or brain function (less reliable). However, further reflection leads us to contemplate whether the death of the body requires more than no heartbeat nor brain function. So long as there are still functioning cells/tissues integral to the person then we must surely wonder whether the person can be said to be truly dead until all human life in the body has ceased.
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