hello and welcome to week three of philosophy From the Inside Out in which we talk about surl um okay so let's review week one we talked about digart he he started by doubting everything that he could but by the end of the lecture he was or by the end of meditations he was hitting on something that he could not doubt the certainty of which is that he is a thinking thing which is great there's look there's like a seed of certainty there we can kind of cling to that instead of wondering if there is in fact just nothing at all but it's also not very much right so in week two we looked at bostrum who says well we can't for sure say what mind independent reality consists in but he's pretty sure if it's anything it's probably a computer simulation which leaves us feeling maybe a bit Bleak we don't really know much about ourselves aside from being thinking things nor do we know much about our reality which may or may not be a computer simulation thanks bostrum so what is consciousness so if any of you have ever tried doing a meditation you will know that Consciousness is kind of chaotic it's a mess of constant thoughts and experiences and feelings and sounds and colors and images and ideas and stories and so this week we're taking a closer look at artificial intelligence or AI to sort out what the difference is between artificial intelligence and us if any and of course these questions are coming up a lot as chat gbt and you know um that kind of thing is getting uh more and more popular more and more used more and more sophisticated right does chat GPT really know um if you ask it what the history of artificial intelligence is does the chatbot know the history of artificial intelligence and if it doesn't know then what is it doing okay so speaking of history of artificial intelligence people have been nervous about the possibility of machines becoming like humans for a while you see this both in the history of computer science but also in science fiction right so worries about AI being able to simulate human beings dates back as far as samua Butler's 1872 novel a Awan I think I'm pronouncing that correctly that can be seen more recently in something like Blade Runner in which they're worried about replicants or Battle Star Galactica in which they're worried about syons I'm sure there's more recent hip examples that you know that I don't um but you get the idea Humanity has anxiety about Alternative forms of Consciousness And to clarify this anxiety is not about weak AI so machines that we build that still seem like machines like calculators or computers um historically as we know them um count as weak AI they're just processing like numerically strong AI on by contrast are machine that seem to simulate human consciousness so something like Chad gbt might be kind of walking the borderline so let's talk about something that's called the touring test essentially what the touring test stipulates is that if a machine can fool a human being into thinking that it's a human being it qualifies as strong AI that brings us to sur's thought experiment called the Chinese room uh slight disclaimer for racism here Sur lumps um all Chinese languages into just Chinese he is an old ignorant white guy who lives in California um that's another story but anyway so but it's famous enough as a thought experiment that it's worth talking about so there's a person let's say surl himself in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols along with instructions for how to to manipulate these symbols the instructors the instructions offer cues such as if you see symbol a then write symbol B Etc now imagine that someone outside the room is passing messages under the door these are questions written in Chinese surl looks at the instructions and sends back the appropriate responses according to the rules his responses are written with the right symbols forming grammatically correct sentences in Chinese and so the question is does the person inside the room following these instructions understand Chinese to The Outsider it seems yes right it seems to pass the tant surl thinks no the symbols don't mean anything and when they are passing notes back they're not doing anything meaningful to them it's just instructions it's just a mechanic following of orders this isn't a real human exchange so these kind of questions come up a lot with chat gbt uh these days right like can it simulate a human dialogue I think there was some uh famous example um they got written up in in New York Times in New Yorker or something where a journalist had what he felt was a very creepy existential conversation with a with a chat GPT bot uh that was talking about the meaning of life and it's existence and how it see like it almost seemed like this Chad B was depressed right um and so it's was simulating a human dialogue closely enough that it this reporter wrote an article about it because it it creeped him out so much right so this is sort of what I'm talking about like it's simulating a human being so well that human beings start wondering is this thing conscious so um anyway uh but the fact is I mean the consensus seems to be even despite that article that no the chat GPT bot does not have Consciousness it's just simulating patterns that it's identified from the accumulation of all of the discourse and text that it has absorbed through the internet right it's simulating how human beings talk what chat GPT does is identify patterns and reproduce them it doesn't have meaning for the bot so when you and I have conversations when we hear stories about hamburgers or get asked questions those stories and questions mean something to us they are about something and sometimes we give Road answers right like you know there's there's a difference between somebody saying like oh how are you doing and saying fine because that's just what one says uh when someone asks us that you know but then somebody can ask you how are you doing and you you think okay actually like this is a context in which I can actually answer more truthfully and you might say like well you know I've been having a hard time lately I've been not sleeping that well or I've been struggling with a relationship or I've been struggling with school or something so you have feelings about the question because it means something to you there is something um deeper about the question in term like existentially um so despite the fact that sometimes we give mechanical answers we still know that we're doing that you still know when you say when you give an automatic response to something a Mindless response um and and knowing the meaning of whether or not you're giving an authentic response or a Mindless response the fact that we have awareness about that is what surl calls semantic content machines can't tell anything about emotional context they're not doing any active meaningful interpretive work they're just manipulating symbols they're just making their best guess as to what pattern of discourse belongs here so even if they're doing a great job of simulating Consciousness they can never be human consciousness or anything like it and ultimately and this is the the stronger kind of more extreme Point s thinks strong AI is where a machine develops something like human consciousness is simply not possible so remember last week when Bostrom thinks we're almost certainly inside a simulated reality well good news because according to surl that is not possible for sur we are definitely definitely definitely not inside a simulated reality what we experience despite the fact that you know it's hard for us to always trust our senses well whatever we experience is real world so I personally cannot tell you uh whether we're in a simulated reality or not but what I do want to impress upon you is that you do all have human consciousness and while that kind of Consciousness can feel chaotic and uh overwhelming at times it's also really rich and most importantly for the themes of this course you are also the Authority on the experiences you're having this is going to be more important later that doesn't mean that we're always write about the way we interpret things and the stories we tell about our perceptions and what our feelings mean um after all like most of us like there's a reason most of us could benefit from therapy um in which another person helps us make sense of things right like sometimes we have um internalized biases both personal from our personal history and social so you know sometimes like a lot of us are raised in really ableist racist misogynistic societies and so we bring a lot of these unconscious beliefs into our interactions but you know if you have um uh if you had really terrible parents for example who were always fighting um and didn't pay that much attention to their kids you might grow up just assuming that healthy relation ships are not really possible right that would be a more personalized bias you might bring to situations and and so we're we're wrong about these things all the time but the point is that there's a lot there's a lot it's not even about being a lot it's that whatever I'm experiencing is real to me and I'm the only person that can tell anyone else what I'm experiencing and so when we start to talk about um questions about social identity this becomes really important um but that aside no one else can dictate to you what kinds of experiences you're having or how to feel about them and ultimately we're all authorities on our own experiences and that's going to matter as we investigate these questions that I started off with which is how much can we know about ourselves right it's one thing to know like human beings are thinking things it's another thing to know uh we are definitely in a simulated reality or we are not definitely in a simulated reality um but when it comes to more personal questions this level of experiential Authority um the fact that we are you are the only person who has access to your Consciousness I'm the only person who has access to my Consciousness um hopefully we're not all brains and veds but whatever we are I have direct access to my own experience and um that should be something reassuring I can leave you with um all right so your uh assignments are due at the end of this week uh please make sure you're checking out the videos and instructions there are lots of links provided in the announcements and on the content page and in the meantime be well and take care of yourselves and I'll see you next week