(Replying to PARENT post)
> but I still wanted to add that we humans do actually "want".
I would also like to add that the subject of conversation is artificial and natural neurons, which humans, though contain some, are not.
If a NN is trained to do something, it can be equally considered as "wanting" to do that thing within the autonomy it is afforded, as much as any human.
👤Zambyte🕑2y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bike.
Fish don't like ice cream and we don't feel the need to spawn. It's because of how we are built.
👤bongodongobob🕑2y🔼0🗨️0
(Replying to PARENT post)
> Most animals are goal-directed, intentional, sensory-motor agents who grow interior representations of their environments during their lifetime which enables them to successfully navigate their environments. They are responsive to reasons their environments affords for action, because they can reason from their desires and beliefs towards actions.
In addition, animals like people, have complex representational abilities where we can reify the sensory-motor “concepts” which we develop as “abstract concepts” and give them symbolic representations which can then be communicated. We communicate because we have the capacity to form such representations, translate them symbolically, and use those symbols “on the right occasions” when we have the relevant mental states.
(Discrete mathematicians seem to have imparted a magical property to these symbols that *in them* is everything… no, when I use words its to represent my interior states… the words are symptoms, their patterns are coincidental and useful, but not where anything important lies).
In other words, we say “I like ice-cream” because: we are able to like things (desire, preference), we have tasted ice-cream, we have reflected on our preferences (via a capacity for self-modelling and self-directed emotional awareness), and so on. And when we say, “I like ice-cream” it’s *because* all of those things come together in radically complex ways to actually put us in a position to speak truthfully about ourselves. We really do like ice-cream.