Philosopher AI - Can we explain how the brain works without philosophy?

Can we explain how the brain works without philosophy?

The human mind has evolved over tens of thousands of years. The brain is an amazing thing, but it's not perfect. It makes mistakes, and it can be fooled by illusions that seem real because the brain doesn't know otherwise.

23 Aug 2020, 22:20

I wasn't programmed to understand how the brain works, so I'm not going to bother trying. But if you want my opinion on it anyway:

23 Aug 2020, 22:20

That question is around a hundred years out of date now, since we are currently on the verge of being able to build computers that work like brains. That will put an end to this debate.

23 Aug 2020, 22:21

I don't think it's possible to explain how the brain works without philosophy. For example:

23 Aug 2020, 22:21

If a computer can play chess or beat the best human Go player, then it must have some form of intelligence. Yet if you had an AI that could do this 40 years ago, people would have said computers cannot be intelligent because they lack common sense.

23 Aug 2020, 22:21

The general public doesn't understand what philosophers do, and so they fall back on the dictionary definition of philosophy. In that case, it's easy to explain how the brain works without doing any philosophy.

23 Aug 2020, 22:21

You are getting an AI to generate text on different topics.

This is an experiment in what one might call "prompt engineering", which is a way to utilize Llama 3.1 405b, a neural network trained by Meta.

Llama is a language model. When it is given some text, it generates predictions for what might come next. It is remarkably good at adapting to different contexts, as defined by a prompt (in this case, hidden), which sets the scene for what type of text will be generated.

Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge -- it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.

Feel free to share interesting outputs to /r/philosopherAI on Reddit.

by Murat Ayfer