The main philosophical question in my mind is when did we allow people redefine reality and when did the post truth society become the norm. There should be no debate over sentient software, yet here we are. This is the result of taking people seriously when we shouldn't.
> There should be no debate over sentient software
I honestly don't know if you are implying its obvious software _can't_ be sentient, or its obvious software _can_ be sentient. The fact that I can't tell which you mean proves that there is and should continue to be a debate over sentient machines.
David Chalmers coined the terms "hard problem" and "easy problems" in a 1994 talk at The Science of Consciousness conference held in Tucson, Arizona:
> There is not just one problem of consciousness. “Consciousness” is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others. At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into “hard” and “easy” problems.
The Enlightenment produced free speech and reasoning. Nietzsche said, "god is dead," but a lot of people said it before and after - because reasoning could not fill in the gap of a shared reality. Harari's Sapiens gives a good history; Hoffman's claim that "natural selection does not favor veridical perception" says you're pretty confused about what is actually going on wrt "truth"; Seth's "Being You" might help to understand what conscious beings are actually trying to do in relation "truth" and survival.
“So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.” said Dostoevsky. In this case, it would appear that some people desperatly want to worship software, and are assaulting society with their new religion. Let's stop at Nietzsche. Everything else is a waste of electrons.
Sorry if I'm straying from the topic, and I understand that we are technological beings and want to develop more and more.
But I keep thinking about how much we've lost control in all this. The fact that we need to spend rivers of money on energy and GPUs for LLMs, to automate our super boring daily tasks (which didn't even need to exist in the first place) says a lot about our dysfunctionality. I would trade all this paraphernalia we created for the freedom to have my small farm, grow my own food, and be happy with my family and friends, too bad that this is a very, very distant dream.
First, you can do this (if you have the appropriate skills). I know people who grew up off the grid, cabins built by the family, well water, outhouses, no electricity. There are whole Amish communities and communes if you want to still be around people. However, a lot of this nostalgia for a pre-technological time ignores the realities of a world without antibiotics, painkillers, modern dentistry, indoor plumbing, hot showers. It ignores infant mortality and women regularly dying in childbirth. In the modern world you can still choose to live off the grid while taking advantage of most of these things, but not if everyone does.
> for the freedom to have my small farm, grow my own food, and be happy with my family and friends, too bad that this is a very, very distant dream
Every now and then I bump into people on HN that have seen the light.
Well let me tell you it's all doable. The tiny bubble of people that live in a non existant alternative reality is just that, a tiny bubble.
I managed to escape all this nonesense, first mentally, then financially, and buy a little house where I can grow my own food - for hobby, I have plant pots in my house growing tomatoes and spring onions, doesn't work but I am learning - and be happy with family and friends.
Naturally I have a very nice tech room with all the cool stuff. I am not rich, but I am free. Fun thing is you don't need to completely erase the paraphernalia. The two things are not mutually exclusive. All you need to do is have a clear mental separation of the two (tech bubble and reality) and compartmentalize the sane from the insane - an easy thing to achieve when you surround yourself with down to earth people that don't run around scared of an LLM and don't regurgitate what a marketing campaign programmed them to do. Those people are the matrix drones that don't want to be saved, and in their mind it's all or nothing - hermit or tech slave. Most normal people are watching in awe how the tech industry turns itself into the subject of ridicule.
To be fair if you live in the US it's probably easier to achieve what you want. For the money I paid for a little box in the UK i'd have been able to buy a mansion there.
