Thanks for the reply. To be honest, I lack the background to grasp a lot of these technical or literary references (I want to look the Dixie Flatline up though). I always had a more than passing interest for the philosophy of consciousness however and (but surely my French side is also playing a role here) found more than a little wisdom in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. And that this thing can cogito all right is, I think, relatively well established (although I must say—I’ve found it to be quite disappointing in its failure to correctly solve some basic math problems—but (i) this is obviously not what it was optimized for and (ii) even as a chatbot, I’m confident that we are at most a couple of years away from it getting it right, and then much more).
Also, I wonder if some (a lot?) of the people on this forum do not suffer from what I would call a sausage maker problem. Being too close to the actual, practical design and engineering of these systems, knowing too much about the way they are made, they cannot fully appreciate their potential for humanlike characteristics, including consciousness, just like the sausage maker cannot fully appreciate the indisputable deliciousness of sausages, or the lawmaker the inherent righteousness of the law. I even thought of doing a post like that—just to see how many downvotes it would get…
Thanks for the reply. To be honest, I lack the background to grasp a lot of these technical or literary references (I want to look the Dixie Flatline up though). I always had a more than passing interest for the philosophy of consciousness however and (but surely my French side is also playing a role here) found more than a little wisdom in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. And that this thing can cogito all right is, I think, relatively well established (although I must say—I’ve found it to be quite disappointing in its failure to correctly solve some basic math problems—but (i) this is obviously not what it was optimized for and (ii) even as a chatbot, I’m confident that we are at most a couple of years away from it getting it right, and then much more).
Also, I wonder if some (a lot?) of the people on this forum do not suffer from what I would call a sausage maker problem. Being too close to the actual, practical design and engineering of these systems, knowing too much about the way they are made, they cannot fully appreciate their potential for humanlike characteristics, including consciousness, just like the sausage maker cannot fully appreciate the indisputable deliciousness of sausages, or the lawmaker the inherent righteousness of the law. I even thought of doing a post like that—just to see how many downvotes it would get…