Ten years ago I wrote a blog piece about the notion of computers gaining sentience. One of the problems is we don’t actually know how to define or test for sentience (id est, consciousness or self awareness). For most of human history, it was so clear to us whether or not we were engaged with another human being, sentience seemed intuitively obvious.
I get a little into the bushes about qualia (such as the quality of the hue of red rather than it’s composition as #FF0000) but even that concept is functionally shallow, and only serves as a way to differentiate human intelligence from non-human intelligence.
We’ve seen bigots use this kind of notion to argue, say, that Chinese people don’t think the same as western folk, or more recently that neurodivergents don’t think the same way as normal people.
Bro, last time I saw the word qualia I was reading James Pustejosvky’s generative lexicon 15 years ago. Yeah I remember arguing with my professor and leaving my masters degree behind…good (?!) Times.
We’ve had this conversation.
Ten years ago I wrote a blog piece about the notion of computers gaining sentience. One of the problems is we don’t actually know how to define or test for sentience (id est, consciousness or self awareness). For most of human history, it was so clear to us whether or not we were engaged with another human being, sentience seemed intuitively obvious.
I get a little into the bushes about qualia (such as the quality of the hue of red rather than it’s composition as #FF0000) but even that concept is functionally shallow, and only serves as a way to differentiate human intelligence from non-human intelligence.
We’ve seen bigots use this kind of notion to argue, say, that Chinese people don’t think the same as western folk, or more recently that neurodivergents don’t think the same way as normal people.
Bro, last time I saw the word qualia I was reading James Pustejosvky’s generative lexicon 15 years ago. Yeah I remember arguing with my professor and leaving my masters degree behind…good (?!) Times.