>Anyway, I have no beef with either side, and I know I won't be able to convince anyone here that science can also be viewed as a religion with its own biases. Plus I believe that most of the time science is great. I just don't know about this quest for true AI. It feels religion-y to me.
People definitely have a tendency to anthropomorphize "true AI" that is very religion-y. This doesn't mean that we need to throw out science as a religion among religions, it means that we need to throw out quasi-religous thought about "true AI" and be careful whenever we step off the sure ground established by current scientific knowledge.
>Say I have a choice - pizza or pasta. If I choose pizza, then free will says I also could've chosen pasta. Determinism says if I chose pizza, then the "choice" was always going to be pizza. If you say both that I could've chosen pizza or pasta, and that I was fated to choose pizza, that makes no sense to me.
That's not what compatibilism says. Compatibilism says: you weren't fated to choose pizza, period, and if we reran the whole experiment enough times, so to speak, you would in fact choose pizza some of the time and pasta some of the time, without our being able to predict better than just collecting percentage statistics.
> People definitely have a tendency to anthropomorphize "true AI" that is very religion-y. This doesn't mean that we need to throw out science as a religion among religions, it means that we need to throw out quasi-religous thought about "true AI" and be careful whenever we step off the sure ground established by current scientific knowledge.
Okay, I agree with that. I like the description of religion-y AI as anthropomorphizing. I'd say the same thing about throwing out pieces of religions rather than the whole thing. I'm not religious myself, by the way. I just think if they went back to being just about hope and support then that would be a good thing. So many other values have been tacked on that some seem to have desecrated themselves.
> That's not what compatibilism says. Compatibilism says: you weren't fated to choose pizza, period, and if we reran the whole experiment enough times, so to speak, you would in fact choose pizza some of the time and pasta some of the time, without our being able to predict better than just collecting percentage statistics.
Still sounds like free will to me. I guess my brain's not ready to interpret what you're saying.
People definitely have a tendency to anthropomorphize "true AI" that is very religion-y. This doesn't mean that we need to throw out science as a religion among religions, it means that we need to throw out quasi-religous thought about "true AI" and be careful whenever we step off the sure ground established by current scientific knowledge.
>Say I have a choice - pizza or pasta. If I choose pizza, then free will says I also could've chosen pasta. Determinism says if I chose pizza, then the "choice" was always going to be pizza. If you say both that I could've chosen pizza or pasta, and that I was fated to choose pizza, that makes no sense to me.
That's not what compatibilism says. Compatibilism says: you weren't fated to choose pizza, period, and if we reran the whole experiment enough times, so to speak, you would in fact choose pizza some of the time and pasta some of the time, without our being able to predict better than just collecting percentage statistics.