This is not unique to the science of consciousness. Extreme scepticism can kill any science from the get-go. Sure, we can’t prove that other beings are conscious. But we also can’t prove that the external world exists, either. Does that mean we’re doing to stop doing physics? No, because some forms of extreme scepticism are simply unreasonable. If we wait around for solutions to these radical sceptical scenarios then we’re never going to get anywhere.

How do we know that certain wavelengths of light produce certain visual experiences (the colour red, green etc)? How do we know that electrical stimulation to certain parts of the brain can cause certain experiences (such as the hallucination of sounds or smells etc.)? That’s because we test on consciousness indirectly all the time, through first-person reports. So to say that we cannot test any hypothesis related to consciousness is demonstrably false.

Interesting. And yeah I fid see that Claire Obscure Expedition 33 stuff actually haha.

Thank you for your perspective and your advice! I appreciate it.

Hahaha that’s okay it’s better than nothing. Thank you!

Thank you for the detailed response. Most opinions on this topic are very much so based on vibes rather than real experience, so it’s interesting to hear an informed opinion from someone on the inside.

I hope to become a software developer one day too (it’s a slow process, because I’m teaching myself in my free time) so I sometimes worry if all the effort I’m putting in is even worth it if LLMs will be doing all the programming in a few years. Do you think that’s a concern? Will these tools continue to develop to that point or are they hitting a wall, like some people are saying?

There is a lot of data that is out of reach (such as the experience of a dog) but we can generalize from the data we do have access to and see if we can pick up any meaningful patterns and then generalize from there. That’s how all science is done

If there’s a new force or field, then it’s still physical,

That depends how you define your terms, but under most definitions I don’t think that this is always going to be the case

But that’s not what you’re talking about, I think. It’s more like the notion of life

I’m not taking about life, I’m talking about consciousness which is a separate topic

And yes, you can consider consciousness as some sort of other fundamental order, but it’s not scientifi

Why?

it specifically cannot be since we can not measure it.

We can measure it indirectly (eg by people telling us about their conscious experiences) which is good enough for empirical study

Wow, lasts 10+ years and has 3D capabilities. That sounds pretty good. What model is it?

That’s pretty neat please let me know what your twin says

Even your fellow coworkers can be screwed over if you don’t give two weeks notice

I think this user is posting on Mastodon but because they @ asklemmy it shows up as a thread in there.

You can follow a lemmy account from Mastodon?

The use of hashtags also suggests that this was originally a Mastodon post

Nor do I think they need an AGI to do this.

Yeah I guess theres a lot of interesting stuff we can do with AI without necessarily achieving AGI. What about programming? Even if we don’t get AGI soon, do you still think LLMs will be snatching up a sizeable chunk of programming jobs?

Interesting. Stuff like this makes me suspicious of the current LLM hype. I know it’s not necessarily language models per se being used by these vehicles, but still. If we were really on the cusp of AGI then I’d expect us to have at least cracked autonomous driving by now.

That’s interesting I wonder why it wasn’t working for me

Wow 97% is a lot. Interesting info tho thanks

Waymo really seems to be winning out over Tesla with the self-driving thing. I wonder how much of that is really just because Waymo cars have a remote human driving them in situations where a Tesla would just crap out

It didn’t work for me either. I wonder if it’s already been fixed. The Google team seems to be really on top of it wherever there’s public criticism of their AI models. I remember a post on hacker news pointing out a “what year is it” bug for Google search summary. It to get the problem fixed in like two or three hours or so

CodeBerg sounds great but this doesn’t seem like a longterm solution. If CodeBerg ends up getting really big then it will get overrun with slop as well. We need to find a way to cut the slop problem off at its source, but I have no idea how that could actually work.