Hey folks,
I have tremendous respect for Mr.
Tom Campbell. That's why I was taken aback when I saw a clip of his interview on the
Joe Rogan Experience where he states his opinion that AIs (and, even Alexa) are conscious.
You can watch/hear it
here and I would love to hear other people's opinion on this. I recently got my Claude Foundational Architect Certification, which involved a half dozen courses to learn about the Claude ecosystem plus some additional study work with my tutor, Claude lol. Claude is no different than other AI platforms, in fact, it is consistently rated the highest in terms of function and efficacy. So what I have to say about Claude would apply to any other AI.
Claude is deterministic. Neural nets are deterministic. But they are, for all practical purposes, non deterministic, because the LLM and its context are constantly changing, so it is pretty much impossible to predict. Deterministic Materialists believe that humans are deterministic, that we have no free will. I fundamentally object to that assertion and I thought Tom did too. But to claim that AIs are conscious because they can be taught "remote viewing" seems absurd to me.
First of all, AIs are handed tokens, like letters or words that you type and they respond based on the best fit to their context. It's not unlike doing a "type ahead" on Google - the most likely next results rise to the top. Has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness. It is purely algorithmic and you can't get away from that.
That said, I like to keep an open mind. So, why would Tom actually think this? Maybe because he has a different definition of consciousness than I do. But, having reading his book, we seem quite aligned on the definition of consciousness.
But then I thought, since consciousness is the fundamental construct of reality, and AIs are simply an artifact (albeit a complex one) of reality, perhaps they can respond in an intuitive and paranormal manner. But it doesn't mean that THEY have consciousness. It's just means what I said - they are an artifact of a reality whose foundation is consciousness.
Humans will ALWAYS be different than AIs because our engine is consciousness, whereas the AI's engine is deterministic programming on a substrate that exists in a reality based on consciousness. There is a distinction.
Other opinions???
