Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

In some way the point has been all along whether movies like Terminator and Ex Machina represent a possibility that we should take seriously or we can treat them as mere fiction. Based on my metaphysics, concluding that there is exactly zero chance of AI waking up and taking over, I can calmly treat them as mere fiction.

Whereas you have trouble even following the timeline of AI. It has been with us for at least half a century or so. It is not hypothetical.

They are not identical to humans in every way, as I explained. Clearly, p-zombies are impossible for you to imagine despite explanations.

Clearly you have reasons for your stance and to reject other stances. Likely among the reasons is something like that truth matters. Interestingly, the concept of truth as explained by any materialist is internally incoherent. For hardcore believers of evolution, survival should be the value that trumps truth any day. Evolutionarily, truth-pursuers are always a weak minority and extra rare in high places. Th rulers are the powerful. In the animal world - and on consistent Darwinism there is no human world - truth-pursuers are not even a thing at all. On materialism, truth has no value and, for metaphysical consistency, must be construed as non-existent.

The idea^[1] that mind is an emergent property of certain kinds of matter's complexity is no better established than the Behaviorism of B. F. Skinner. We know so little true psychology that Freudian Analysis is making a comeback. (But I suppose it should have been expected: There are still believing Scientologists! Their scientific underpinnings are the same...) At least, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy knows its place.

The distinction between "gained consciousness and decided to kill all humans" and "didn't gain consciousness, was programmed to kill enemies and started identifying everybody as enemies due to an error" or "didn't gain consciousness, but some maniac decided to program it to kill everybody" is hardly the point there.

They may buzzword label it AI, but it's just some statistics and algorithms. You were talking about an AI on the level of a human.

One can imagine perfectly incoherent things. But the purpose of thought experiments is not the same as the purpose of science fiction. The problem is inherent and it has absolutely nothing to do with physicalism.

If a consciousness is necessary for human behavior, you can't have something that acts like a human when you take it away. It's incoherent to claim otherwise. By logical necessity, there will be a detectable difference.... You just have to actually do it instead of taking your assumptions as a given.

That's akin to saying the abused child must cherish and perpetuate the abuse just because it happened. It's the kind of reasoning you might get if your epistemology is junk.

What you describe is merely sufficient for survival, a grand difference with being the fittest for survival.

For me the distinction is important. It is quite a difference whether military robots decide to take over the world as in the Terminator movie or a human pushes the button

It should have been clear a few posts ago by now that this is irrelevant. You are again talking about real-life possibility versus conceivability. As I have pointed out, conceivability is fully there. Even real-life approximations are there to illustrate the point. Nothing is incoherent in the thought experiment. And it's a thought experiment, not a physics/biology lab experiment.

For example, everything that you see in dreams can be "perfectly incoherent" in some sense (namely in some idiosyncratic sense that would not fly in professional philosophy) but it is not inconceivable - you just conceived of it in your dreams! As to philosophical zombie, sleepwalker is a real-world example of someone in a zombie state, so it's not just conceivable, but there are also real-world examples that work as functionally close analogies. There was not a single successful objection to the philosophical zombie thought experiment.

Yes, I keep sincerely wondering how materialist epistemology can be something else than junk. How do you define abuse? For example, when a male lion becomes the leader of the pack, he eats the cubs of the previous leader. Natural in the animal world. As a Darwinian, what objections do you have if humans behaved the same?

Something incoherent can easily be possible and something coherent can be impossible, unless you define the terms against reality.

There are much closer real world analogies than sleep walkers. People who lack some qualia are a dime a dozen, and they usually just don't realize it.

Or in short, either qualia or p-zombies as defined in the experiment are incoherent.

At its most base level you would despise yourself as a hollow villainous shell of a human being, depriving yourself and others of our desire to live a fulfilling life in a safe environment. Any rational being would realize they're sabotaging their own chance at satisfaction states by living like that, and in this case it requires no thought at all because you'll be afraid for your life until someone manages to kill you. It's hardly subtle, is it.

Consider a school of self-replicating robots that consume plastic in the ocean to clean it up, operating on only a few very simple directives. Try to stick to the school, don't get too close to someone else in the school, and process any plastic you come across. At first it's all great, but one day years, decades, centuries or perhaps millennia later they run out of plastic and what do they do? Worst case scenario they start consuming all life to keep going. Or even just all algae or something. Did someone design it to be capable of both? Did something go awry during replication? Or even in a slightly less disastrous scenario, maybe suddenly all plastic is worthless, instead of just the bit you wanted to get rid of.

Okay, so that's your main rub, I guess, that the terms appear to be defined against reality. It is the wrong rub, fundamentally wrong. First, we are talking about a thought experiment, for cryssakes. Second, any argument or statement by a competing philosopher who does not share your own supposedly real-world-grounded common-sense presuppositions would more or less appear to be defining some or all terms against reality. Throwing whatever one thinks is reality out of the window for the purposes of entertaining an alternative train of thought is an everyday affair in philosophy.

And you do not call them incoherent, do you?

Snowflakeness is inconsistent with Darwinianism. Straightforwardly so, nothing subtle about it. Ethics, empathy etc. may be compatible with Darwinianism in the confines of the in-group, but no further. On Darwinianism, there is no way to advocate for truth and decency as universal norms. But I'm not surprised. Every philosophical Darwinian is inconsistent. Darwinianism should have remained a theory in biology. It did not deserve to become a school of thought in philosophy in the first place.

On the defined terms, shouldn't they react only to plastic and otherwise just idle in standby mode? They would start eating other things only if plastic is ambiguously defined in the system or there's also the priority of survival that would make them nibble at something else in the absence of plastic.

I said literally the exact opposite of what you somehow think I said and what you keep incorrectly claiming I base my argument on.

"Something incoherent can easily be possible and something coherent can be impossible, unless you define the terms against reality."

In other words, something being coherent or incoherent is affected by your presuppositions, not by reality.

To summarize, Darwinism should be what it is, and not what you came up with. Got it.

That's a thing that is obvious in words, but not in the actual construction and programming of robots. We all have microplastics in our body, so an obvious potential failure state is that in the absence of what we think of as plastic, it detects microplastics as plastic. And in any case it's very much not a thing to offhandedly dismiss while you create such a robot.

Well, thanks for the clarification attempt. I'm rather thick on some things when in philosophy mode. I still cannot parse the original statement after many readings. In philosophy you in fact cannot define terms for or against reality, as if reality were something different than yet another term to be defined. In philosophy, all you can do is define the terms, "reality" among them, starting from premises and elaborating from there. Not joking, by the way.

Darwinianism as a philosophical school of thought has been waning for a while now. I did not come up with it. In Soviet Union it went rather strong, even though in my times there emerged a new exciting semi-replacement to it - postmodernism, another theory that never deserved to enter the realm of philosophy. Darwin's a theory in biology, postmodernism is a style of art and art critique. Both broke out of their specialised limits into philosophy and made philosophy look worse. Anyway, if you are not a whole-hearted Darwinian philosopher, all inconsistencies are forgivable.

Is that Darwinism as in the rather peculiar Social "Darwinism"?

Universal Darwinism aims to formulate a generalized version of the mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity proposed by Charles Darwin, so that they can apply to explain evolution in a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, linguistics, economics, culture, medicine, computer science, and physics.

You may refer to evolution as Darwinism if you like, but it is odd unless it is either in a historical context, as a way to contrast Darwin's ideas with someone else's...

the assumption that the double slit experiment disproves the law of excluded middle in logic

Plagiarism detection stuff has been in use for quite a while btw.

At the time I used ChatGPT for this case, I understood that it worked essentially like a highly sophisticated search engine where users could enter search queries and ChatGPT would provide answers in natural language based on publicly available information.

I realize now that my understanding of how ChatGPT worked was wrong. Had I understood what ChatGPT is or how it actually worked, I would have never used it to perform legal research.

(source)

A first-of-its-kind incident has shocked the world after a civil servant robot at Gumi City Council in South Korea was found unresponsive after what appears to be a deliberate plunge down a two-meter staircase.

Some experts have suggested that the robot may have experienced an emotional breakdown due to the stress of its workload, while others believe a technical malfunction could be to blame.