If she’d run him over with her car or raped him, no big deal. But drugs! Drugs are bad, or something, idk.

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They definitely know how to make customers happy, something EA never understood, but I’m old enough to remember when Valve used to be horrible 15 years ago. They’d sell you broken games with no return system. They’d straight up delete games out of your library with no recourse, amounting to outright theft. The EU rolled out regulations targeting Steam’s shady practices. They’ve been okay since.

Turing’s machines are notdigital by their construction

I won’t argue with you, because some of what you wrote isn’t even wrong.

However, on the off chance that you actually care about what is true, I urge you to take a theoretical computer science course. Lectures from MIT and Carnegie Mellon are available on YouTube.

Stop watching podcasts with pseudo-intellectual media grifters and read the actual research literature by real philosophers and mathematicians on these otherwise arcane topics.

Yes, of course you can prove things in philosophy. Have you ever heard of syllogistic reasoning? The basis of… you know… proofs?

All science is philosophy. Hence the P in PhD. Not all philosophy is science. Hope that helps.

Here is what we know for sure:

There can be no enumerable list of axioms for the true statements of mathematics. No computational procedure could exist to determine whether propositions are valid, provable, or even equivalent. And no matter how you formulate the number-theoretic axioms, a mathematician would always have insights (for instance, about whether a Diophantine equation has a solution) that are both clearly “true” and obviously unprovable. This holds true for all digital systems.

Here is what we don’t know for sure:

The metaphysical implications.

Your distinction between science and philosophy is incorrect. Science is inductive and abductive. It can’t “prove” things. It’s not deductive. Mathematics and philosophy can prove things.

Philosophy also determines the formal systems we use as a basis of reasoning, for instance, in science.

You will find what I said in any philosophy of mathematics textbook dealing with the subject. In fact, I am paraphrasing the Oxford logician Joel David Hamkins.

You’re welcome to also read Shapiro’s famous paper for a rephrasing. These results have been well understood for half a century, although because the implications are ultimately metaphysical and not mathematical, we can’t be sure of the wider consequences, if any.

Valve is a company that garnishes 30% of all video games sales. It doesn’t matter what their corporate structure is at that point. It could be two guys with buckets on their heads and they’d make bank.

You’re misunderstanding the implications of both the halting problem and Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem.

What Turing and Gödel independently proved is that a human observer can (theoretically) always have insights about mathematics and programming that are incomputable. That is, you cannot program or axiomatize or formalize or digitize everything that a mind can do. Period.

Analog computers are sufficiently different from digital systems to potentially emulate brain activity. But digital (discrete) methods are probably too constrained.

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I don’t see why there would be any fundamental difference between analog and digital computing.

Then why not take a course on Theoretical Computer Science? Or do you not care about the differences?

The situation is the following.

1. Brains are analog computers, which are digitally irreducible.
2. There are stringent limitations on Turing machines (digital computers),
3. We can’t extract semantics from syntax, and so…

We’ll probably need analog computation, currently in its infancy, to get artificial (inorganic) consciousness.

I study metaethics and philosophy of mathematics. These problems are real, and I am being honest with you.

The simplest way to understand this problem is as follows.

1. Analog computation is not digitally reducible. (Brains are analog computers.)

2. Turing’s infamous Halting Problem.

I can write more about this and point you to more technical discussions if you want.

It is not presumptuous at all. Inference to the best explanation is how you know (almost) anything.

1. This table isn’t conscious.

This is my justified belief. No inferential claim is guaranteed and all objective claims are inferential (which is why scientific claims aren’t absolute).

That said, I have strong reasons to think that tables aren’t conscious. They might be, but I’m epistemically compelled to believe otherwise.

2. ChatGPT isn’t conscious.

Ditto. It would be irrational for me to believe otherwise given the strong evidence.

That you “don’t know for sure” is an implied disclaimer for every scientific claim.

If the evidence is ambiguous, we say so. Regarding ChatGPT, the evidence is unambiguous.

3. I am conscious.

This is a non-inferential claim that I know through direct contact with reality. It is a priori.

This is called the problem of other minds. Of course I can’t be certain about the consciousness of others. I can only be certain about my own.

We do have a way of measuring the correlates of consciousness. But we have no clue how to detect the presence of subjective experience using quantitative methods.

Philosophy departments (which is where any discovery on this front will originate) are heavily defunded. If you’re waiting for physicists or biologists to figure this out you’ll be waiting even longer.

That doesn’t change the fact that I am conscious.

Also, I never said computers can’t be conscious. I said that digital computers (Turing machines) probably can’t. Quantum and analog computers have no such theoretical constraints and they’re far, far more prevalent given that they’re found in every living creature.

Unironically, I am on the fence about whether a lot of folks are genuinely conscious. Their morality is so twisted I don’t believe it.

Brains aren’t impressive because of their compute (which is both immense and absurdly efficient) or their ability to predict the future (technically the main function of evolved minds). They’re impressive because they’re conscious. The fact that organic brains can also engage in hierarchical abstraction, which no digital computer (or Turing machine) can do by definition, is icing on the cake.

(The halting problem and Godel’s incompleteness and Traski’s undefinability theorems all seem to suggest that analog, not digital computation is more likely to be involved in consciousness, if at all.)