> Much of Western thought traces back to serious work by Church theologians
Western thought traces back to the Greeks. Aquinas refers to Aristotle as "The Philosopher." Aristotle died over 300 years before Jesus was born.
> The Catholic Church, for all its many faults, retains a serious intellectual tradition.
On Aquinas, the Church Doctor, Bertrand Russell had the following to say:
"Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times."
We understand the fundamental laws of physics well enough to say there is not some mysterious soul influencing the brain. Just like we can say that the moon is not made from cheese.
> Modern physics, in other words, provides evidence for what philosophers call “causal closure of the physical”: physical events have purely physical causes (Loewer 1995, Papineau 1995), at least in the regime relevant to human life. Without dramatically upending our understanding of quantum field theory, there is no room for any new influences that could bear on the problem of consciousness.
> We understand the fundamental laws of physics well enough to say there is not some mysterious soul influencing the brain. Just like we can say that the moon is not made from cheese.
I don't see how this relates to the "seat of consciousness" (with)in a human body, or how the biological system works together to "form it". Or where thinking or memory storage or retrieval takes place. At least that was what I was talking about. You're talking about something else.
It is a theory that we think in the brain. As far as I understand it, and please prove me wrong, there are other, valid theories? It's unscientific to discard theories purely based on belief. You seem to be arguing from a certain belief, not from science.
The modern term for "soul" is "psyche".
Remember that the OP was asking: "How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream?" -- clearly refering to something... conscious?
> It is a theory that we think in the brain. As far as I understand it, and please prove me wrong, there are other, valid theories? It's unscientific to discard theories purely based on belief. You seem to be arguing from a certain belief, not from science.
The evidence that the brain is where thinking happens is overwhelming, the minor influence of the rest of the body notwithstanding. There are no other theories.
Plenty of examples of theories listed there, no? Picking a random one: "Open individualism states that individual personal identity is an illusion and all individual conscious minds are in reality the same being".
"the extended mind thesis says that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world"
To state it explicitly, I am not saying I believe in these alternative theories. I am also not stating anything about their probabilities. I just want to be accurate in my understanding, which is that multiple theories do exist and none of them have been proven or disproven. It is not known whether you only need a brain to think, or how much other regions like the nervous system spread throughout the body play a crucial role for "thoughts" to form.
If you discard a theory just because you judge there not to be sufficient evidence, you're working from a belief, and not from scientific reason.
In this particular thread, we're not even coming from "thinking" or "mind", but from sentience -- the stated idea that the "brain can feel pain", as brain alone (!). Depending on which physical regions and matter you include in "brain", it doesn't even have any structures that according to the current scientific consensus provide or relay perceptive data. Unless you believe in one of the many theories that place the mind outside of the physical structures of the brain.
I thought it was well known in the industry that CEOs are liars as this is exploited in the standard method of leveling the stage at a tech conference: have the keynote speaker rehearse then make adjustments until he has lies coming out of both sides of his mouth.
Maybe LLM coding agents change the equation by making it much easier to adapt and use foreign and probably incomplete code. Getting you closer to competing with the original authors in a shorter amount of time than generating new code from scratch.
Nobody disputes that I own the copyright in a sound recording I made just by pushing the red button on my recorder. So it is a mystery to me that copyright to any sort of human conditioned machine generation is in dispute.
The sound recording analogy breaks down at the point where the recorder makes no creative decisions. Pressing record captures what is already there. Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation. The closer analogy is hiring a session musician and telling them the key and tempo. You own the recording under work-for-hire if they signed the right contract, but the creative expression in the performance is theirs unless explicitly assigned. The button you push to start the model is not the same button as the one on the recorder.
> Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation.
LLMs don't make decisions. Their output is completely determined by an algorithm using the human prompt, fixed weights, and a random seed. No different than the many effects humans use in image or audio editors. Nobody ever questioned whether art made using only those effects on a blank canvas was subject to copyright.
Fourier theory says that any sound, however complex, can be synthesized by summing sines and cosines. That's what an LLM does, if you twist the metaphor enough. It synthesizes complex outputs from simpler basis functions that are, or should be, uncopyrightable.
The fact that it inferred those basis functions from studying copyrighted works doesn't seem relevant. Nor does the fact that the "Fourier sums" sometimes coincide with larger fragments of works that are copyrighted. How weird would it be if that didn't happen?
Nobody is doing that, though. You might get a watermarked screenshot or stock photo now and then, or a couple of mostly-verbatim paragraphs from Harry Potter.
In any case, if the copyright mafia insists on butting heads with AI, they'll find that the fight doesn't quite play out the way it has in the past.
Here's a random high school in Northern California. Everyone on the team is beating 16.7 seconds in the 100m. For the 1600m there are six kids with times under 4m30s and another seven with times under 4m40s, all in the last month.
Not sure that disproves the point :) Most people have never been anywhere close to competing with the top 6 athletes at a high school with ~2k students.
OK, so let's do the math. There's about 25k high schools in the USA. Let's suppose they all have a track team, and let's assume that they all have 5 team members who can break 04:30 for 1600m. Sure, at some schools that's too few, but at others it is too many.
That gives us 125k high schoolers in the USA who can break 04:30 for 1600m. There are about 18M high school students. So of just the high school population alone, about 0.7% of them can do this.
Assuming there are the 4x as many adults that can do this as there are high school students, that gives us slightly less than 0.2% of the total US population capable of this.
We just have different ideas of what constitutes "mere mortals." 1 in 150 high school students or even 1 in 500 from the general population doesn't sound super human to me at all. Talented, yes but not god like.
reply