We discuss the biggest questions: "what's real?", "who matters?" and "how to make a better world?" with scientists, celebrities, activists, writers and philosophers. The Sentientism worldview is "evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings." It's a simple, yet radical, philosophy that's grounded in reality (naturalistic epistemology) and has compassion for all sentient beings (mostly human and non-human animals). Naturalism & sentiocentrism combined.
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Jared is a researcher at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Until the summer of 2023 he was a lecturer at the University of Washington School of Computer Science. While there he created a class on the philosophy of AI and created and taught an ethics course as well as teaching technical artificial intelligence courses. His satirical novel “The Strength of The Illusion” was published in the summer of 2023. Previous Sentientism guest Mark Solms called it “extraordinary”.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?”
Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
We discuss:
00:00 Clips!
00:56 Welcome
02:23 Jared Intro
– AI research, teaching philosophy, AI ethics and AI tech
– “What are the right things to do and how do we bring those things about”
– “AI is a sandbox… to test out these ideas”
– Jared’s philosophical novel, “The Strength of the Illusion” “A timely meditation on what happens when artificial intelligence clashes with human stupidity”
– “#philosophyofmind … what it means to think, to learn…”
05:12 What’s Real?
– “I grew up with a father that derided religion”
– A “very atheistic upbringing… in some parts I regret” vs. “more religious community centred upbringings”
– Not convinced re: god or spirituality but “that’s not to say that I want to discount the feelings of religious experiences”
– William James
– Irish grandmother “she hates the #catholic church with a passion”
– Father is a doctor encountering lots of “anti-science”
– Joining a gospel choir at University “I’m not religious but it’s a really fun and enlivening way to approach life”
– “It’s not been my life to combat religion… the ‘Four Horsemen’… Dan Dennett, Sam Harris…”
– “I think there’s value in being kind to each other when you talk about this [religion]”
– “Few people are willing to actually debate the tenets of their beliefs… that’s the tension between science and religion”
– “The unwillingness, by design, to accept alternative hypotheses and test their views is what perpetuates religion”
– Spirituality: “I haven’t been drawn… it seems a bit like #mysterianism… an appeal to mystery before the facts are out.”
– “Could we not explain consciousness, morality… I think that we can eventually explain those things through rigourous science”
– Rejections of the possibility of explaining consciousness: Searle’s Chinese Room, Nagel’s “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?”… “These appeals are in a sense spiritual… they’re appealing to some sort of mystery”
– “That explanation does not need to be a let down -just because we can explain the illusion doesn’t mean that the illusion doesn’t exist”
– “There’s a degree of bad blood”… history of scientists denying or avoiding or deriding things because the evidence isn’t yet there to enable study (e.g. #behaviourists ignoring mental states)
– “Scientists are imperfect and can be mean”
– Do AIs have epistemology – JW: “are they learning, can they know things?”
– #llms (large language models) like OpenAI’s #chatgpt “Do they understand language?”
– “They… seem to be able to use language OK… they make errors but humans make errors too”
21:25 What & Who Matters?
44:24 Who Matters?
01:09:25 A Better Future?
Follow Jared:
– https://twitter.com/jaredlcm
– https://jaredmoore.org/the-strength-of-the-illusion
…and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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