DrBob, 🧠 Mechanic

What Is It Like to Be a #Smartphone?

As the philosopher #ThomasNagel observed in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” in 1974, we humans are unable to inhabit the consciousness of any other animal

We can’t know the “subjective character” of other animals’ experience any more than they can understand ours

We are…able to see that, excepting perhaps the simplest of life forms, an animal has a #Consciousness — or at least a beingness. The animal, we understand, is a living thing with a mind, a sensorium, a nature. We know it feels like something to be that animal, even though we can’t know what that something is.

https://www.newcartographies.com/p/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-smartphone

What Is It Like to Be a Smartphone?

Large language models reflect our own idea of intelligence back to us. A true AI would be inscrutable.

New Cartographies
Oct 30, 2024 at 8:24amWeb
Show threadDrBob, 🧠 MechanicOct 30, 2024

“All of this raises another possibility. It may be that we are already surrounded by AIs but have no idea that they exist. Their beingness is invisible to us, just as ours is to them. We are both objects in the same place, but as beings we inhabit different universes. Our #smartphones may right now be having, to borrow Nagel’s words, “experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own.”

Look at your phone. You see a mere tool, there to do your bidding, and perhaps that’s the way your phone sees you, the dutiful but otherwise unremarkable robot that from time to time plugs it into an electrical socket.”

#Consciousness