Daniel Dennett's last interview: 'AI could signal the end of human civilisation' | The ... - 0 views
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If there isn’t an inner me experiencing my thoughts, feelings and the things I see and hear, what is going on
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‘What’s happening in the brain is there are many competing streams of content running in competition and they’re fighting for influence. The one that temporarily wins is king of the mountain, that’s what we can remember, what we can talk about, what we can report and what plays a dominant role in guiding our behaviour – those are the contents of consciousness.’
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Those acquainted with the workings of large language models, the technology behind ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, will recognise a similarity in Dennett’s description of consciousness and the architecture of generative AI: parallel processing streams producing outputs that compete for salience.
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Dennett’s central mission was to demystify consciousness andbring it within the realm of science So why do we find it so intuitive to think of ourselves as an inner being, an occupant in our bodies? ‘It’s a sort of metaphor. I like to say it’s a user illusion,’
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Imagining an inner person allows us to communicate our motivations to other human beings and in turn communicate them to ourselves
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While language allows us to articulate our inner lives, it also divides cultures, right down to the way we process information. Dennett explains it using the example of our perception of colour: ‘Different cultures have different ways of dividing up colour,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of experiments that show that what colours you can distinguish depends a lot on what culture you grew up in.’
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westerners process people’s faces differently to non-westerners. The very movement patterns of our eyeballs are dictated by culture.
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‘I think that some of the multiculturalism, some of the ardent defences of multiculturalism, are deeply misguided and regressive and I think postmodernism has actually harmed people in many nations
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Recognising these cultural differences didn’t lead Dennett into moral relativism. ‘I am relieved not to have to confront some of the virtue-signalling and some of the doctrinaire attitudes that are now running rampant on college campuses,
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Take the most obvious cases: the treatment of women in the Islamic world; the horrific reactions to homosexuality in many parts of the world that aren’t western. I think that there are clear reasons for preferring different cultural practices over others.
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If we don’t create, endorse and establish some new rules and laws about how to think about this, we’re going to lose the capacity for human trust and that could be the end of civilisation.’