ronin1066 t1_j4wj26z wrote
Reply to comment by 1bunch in Steven Pinker on the power of irrationality | Choosing ignorance, incapacity, or irrationality can at times be the most rational thing to do. by IAI_Admin
Sounds similar to the idea that our brains are geared to survival and often pure reason can be a hindrance to that. So our senses are not necessarily geared to give us a completely accurate model of the world, but rather one that will keep us alive.
I think it would be interesting if an AI had a more accurate version of reality but we didn't believe it and considered it a failed experiment. Not that I think we're that far off of reality, just an idea for a novel maybe.
WhatsTheHoldup t1_j4ws0mo wrote
>Not that I think we're that far off of reality, just an idea for a novel maybe.
I think we're pretty far off.
Why do humans deserve higher consideration than a rock? Than a single celled organism? Than a plant? Than a cow?
Because the reality we live in is that we do deserve it. All our structures of law, morality, ethics, etc reinforce this.
We can exclude a lot of those by creating a concept of "sentience/sapience/consciousness" which no one can actually properly define. But we're still left with the cow, dolphin, octopus, crow and many other species who we can't rationally justify not having rights.
We may have inadvertently just created ai that now fit those categories and made the problem worse. When the ai tells us it's sapient and deserves the same considerations we do, will we believe it or reject it?
(I'm not claiming Google's ai is actually sentient, but one day an ai might be and what happens if they engineers are fired who point that out?)
The only answer is that we are humans so we care about what happens to humans. We aren't cows and we never will be, so we don't care about rationally answering the question for cows nor ai.
An AI can either cut through this bullshit, or perhaps scarier, learn it and encourage us.
generalmandrake t1_j4zt5hf wrote
I’m pretty sure I had that exact same thought once. Humans might build a super computer one day they can actually determine the true nature of existence. But because it involves concepts that the human brain can’t grasp it wouldn’t make any sense to us and people just assume that the computer is broken and turn it off.
I like the analogy of trying to explain to a dog how a car engine works. You could sit there all day for years explaining it to the dog and you’ll never get through to them because the dog brain simply isn’t built to understand something like that since it involves concepts and processes that are beyond a dog’s reach cognitively.
For some reason many people seem to think that humans are capable of understanding almost anything, but this doesn’t really make much sense. We are just a more sophisticated version of dogs when it comes to cognition, but it is downright illogical to think that the human brain doesn’t have a ceiling when every other animal brain on earth has a ceiling. I mean, just ask anyone what physical reality actually is or where everything came from and you’ll never get a logical answer from anyone. I don’t necessarily think it’s even due to a lack of information and scientific data, I think the answer to the big question most likely involves certain concepts which the human brain had no evolutionary reason for being able to comprehend. Maybe we could build a computer that could do it, but like I said, the answer may not make any sense to us. I guess that is basically H.P. Lovecraft’s theory as well.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments