AI has gone through a lot of stages of “only X can be done by a human”-> “X is done by AI” -> “oh, that’s just some engineering, that’s not really human” or “no longer in the category of mystical things we can’t explain that a human can do”.
LLM is just the latest iteration of, “wow it can do this amazing human only thing X (write a paper indistinguishable from a human)” -> “doh, it’s just some engineering (it’s just a fancy auto complete)”.
Just because AI is a bunch of linear algebra and statistics does not mean the brain isn’t doing something similar. You don’t like terminology, but how is re-enforcement “Learning”, not exactly the same as reading books to a toddler and pointing at a picture and having them repeat what it is?
Start digging into the human with the same engineering view, and suddenly it also just become a bunch of parts. Where is the human in the human once all the human parts are explained like an engineer would. What would be left? The human is computation also, unless you believe in souls or other worldly mysticism. So why not think eventually AI as computation can be equal to human.
Just because Github CoPilot can write bad code, isn't a knock on AI, it's real, a lot of humans write bad code.
I think it is incredibly sad that a person can be reduced to believing humans don't have souls. Do something different with yourself so you can discover the miracle of life. If you don't believe there is anything more to people and to the world than mechanical processes, I would challenge you to do a powerful spiritual activity.
Religious texts are something that can be interesting after sensing some spirituality, but probably not before. I don't think anybody who is not spiritual can become so by reading religious texts.
We give our minds too much credit, we keep arguing if AI is, or can ever be, conscious, without ever defining what consciousness is. I would say that humans aren't conscious in the way we think we are. There is no free will, we don't decide what we think about, if you think about thinking, where does the first thought come from?
What are the odds you have it figured out? Why can't you try to prove yourself wrong. The odds are you haven't figured it out either, so why have you stopped trying. You say the soul exists, so why is the onus on me to prove it doesn't, but you don't have to prove anything.
But, I will argue that there is physical evidence for the soul and for the spiritual beyond our everyday comprehension. That physical evidence is psychedelics. If you take psychedelics once with a person who is dear to you, I'm certain you will come out on the other side much assured they have a soul, that there is much more to people than what you see in everyday life.
I'm more from Zen Buddhism background, so agree about not trusting 'text'. That language is limited for communication. I think a lot of the issues here, are just about miss-interpreting language.
But for Psychedelics, I have always fallen on the side that they can also cause delusion. I guess because they are mind altering, then potentially they are altering perceptions to be something even less real than someone had without psychedelics.
The other reason I have not depended on them, is because no matter the impressions they leave, however mind expanding, it is still isolated inside my own head. They don’t provide proof of anything outside myself. The results are still limited to the individual’s point of view. But also agree, that they can be valuable if someone is so buried in dogma it helps them break out to look around. So, guess for psychedelics, it depends on where someone is at, and trying to achieve.
With all addiction dogma aside, or arguments on what is addictive, or not, aside. My struggles to overcome addiction have led me to not trust mind altering substances. That even if our own un-altered perceptions are an illusion, so is the altered perception. So being in an altered state is not gaining ground on understanding.
On other hand Psychedelics do help with some addictions, so guess mileage can vary.