I found this diavlog entertaining, but not particularly enlightening—the two of them seemed to mostly just be talking past each other. Pigliucci kept on conflating intelligence and consciousness, continually repeating his photosynthesis analogy, which makes sense in the context of consciousness, but not intelligence, and Eliezer would respond by explaining why that doesn’t make sense in the context of intelligence, and then they’d just go in circles. I wish Eliezer had been more strict about forcing him to explicitly differentiate between intelligence/consciousness. Frustrating.… but worth watching regardless.
Note that I’m not saying I agree with Pigliucci’s photosynthesis analogy, even when applied to consciousness, just that it seems at least to be coherent in that context, unlike in the context of intelligence, in which case it’s just silly. Personally, I don’t see any reason for consciousness to be substrate-dependant, but I feel much less confident in asserting that it isn’t, just because I don’t really know what consciousness is, so it seems more arrogant to make any definitive pronouncement about it.
Pigliucci is not a nobody: he is a university professor, authored several books, holds 3 PhD’s.
Still, he made an utterly confused impression on me. I don’t think people must agree on everything, especially when it comes to hard questions like consciousness,but his views were so weak and incoherent that it was just too painful to watch. My head still aches… :(
I found this diavlog entertaining, but not particularly enlightening—the two of them seemed to mostly just be talking past each other. Pigliucci kept on conflating intelligence and consciousness, continually repeating his photosynthesis analogy, which makes sense in the context of consciousness, but not intelligence, and Eliezer would respond by explaining why that doesn’t make sense in the context of intelligence, and then they’d just go in circles. I wish Eliezer had been more strict about forcing him to explicitly differentiate between intelligence/consciousness. Frustrating.… but worth watching regardless.
Note that I’m not saying I agree with Pigliucci’s photosynthesis analogy, even when applied to consciousness, just that it seems at least to be coherent in that context, unlike in the context of intelligence, in which case it’s just silly. Personally, I don’t see any reason for consciousness to be substrate-dependant, but I feel much less confident in asserting that it isn’t, just because I don’t really know what consciousness is, so it seems more arrogant to make any definitive pronouncement about it.
That diavlog was a total shocker!
Pigliucci is not a nobody: he is a university professor, authored several books, holds 3 PhD’s.
Still, he made an utterly confused impression on me. I don’t think people must agree on everything, especially when it comes to hard questions like consciousness,but his views were so weak and incoherent that it was just too painful to watch. My head still aches… :(