BlueMonday1984Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st March 2026
Amoeba_GirlGood news! We’ve solved consciousness.
BigMuffN69“ Not all self-models are sentience. A thermo- stat has a feedback loop. A PID controller models its own error history. Neither is sentient. The question is what makes the difference, and the answer is representational capacity.”
Absolute cop out. My thermostat has a lil computer capable of executing code. If i give it enough memory and time, it is capable of running any program. If you are going to bite this bullet, like you actually have to address this shit, or say fine fuck it, your ti-89 and samsung fridge are sentient. Just because they arent currently running the right program is silly.
Also they argue mysticism about natural language creates sentience so i guess before humans sentient creatures didnt exist 🫠
Thorne Lawler@BigMuffN69 Cognitive science does not have a working definition for ‘intelligence’ or ‘sentience’. We can define ‘consciousness’ circularly in terms of GCS score, but that’s the same approach as defining intelligence in terms of its role in a Turing test.
Anyone who claims to have a functional definition for any of these terms is trying to sell you something.
When (if) this actually changes, it will be massive, significant world news.
Until that time, it’s a useful metric for spotting con-artists and morons.
Anyone who claims to have a functional definition for any of these terms is trying to sell you something.
When (if) this actually changes, it will be massive, significant world news.
Until that time, it’s a useful metric for spotting con-artists and morons.