Thank you for the in depth response.
Please tell me, if you’re willing, what it is about James or his ideas that impacted you positively?
Also, do you know what he’s up to now? And why he’s not posting here?
It’s getting late for me, so I’ll try to respond later to your question regarding James’ influence on me -
but as to where James is - I’m fairly certain he has died.
There is a de facto farewell thread to him.
I’ll offer you this snippet of a private message sent to me:
Mithus said more, but none illuminating further on James’ welfare.
I think enough was said though.
James had dedicated so much time to this forum,
that there’s little other reason he would abruptly stop all communication.
Thanks for the exchange, friend.
I’ll do my best to formulate a proper answer as to what James offered.
Have a good one.
Goodnight, thank you. I’ll be pondering that for a while.
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An interesting item…
Sabine - James’ Brilliant Daughter
[size=85]Postby obsrvr524 » Sat 18 Feb, 2023 11:1[/size] ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 4&t=198357
How will you know when it’s “more than a feeling”? How do you know you aren’t the directed? How do you distinguish between human and AI consciousness when we can’t even agree on the difference between human & nonhuman animal language?
Where did I say “more than a feeling”?
I’m going to guess you were referring to this sentence: “Soon (midjourney will) accept voice prompts, so it will feel like you’re directing a person”
Nothing too controversial there. I meant you’ll simply tell the image generator to “move the title Xcm to the left, change the photo to Y, add more Z in the background etc” which would be how you speak to a designer sitting next to you. This is what I meant when I said the new creators will be directors rather than skilled artists in their own field.
We’re all ‘directed’. We’re being directed by our DNA, our culture, our education, and the propaganda shoved down our throats all day, every day. However, I’d like to stay closer to the theme in the original post and focus on what’s actually happening today rather than to veer off into the philosophical or conspiratorial fog.
Well I thought I’d let chatGPT answer for itself:
"Currently, there is no widely accepted way to distinguish between human and AI consciousness. The concept of consciousness is still not fully understood, and there is ongoing debate among philosophers, scientists, and researchers about what it means to be conscious.
Consciousness generally refers to the subjective experience of being aware of one’s surroundings and one’s own thoughts and feelings. It is not yet clear whether AI systems are capable of experiencing subjective consciousness in the same way that humans do.
One of the main challenges in assessing AI consciousness is that it is difficult to know what an AI system is experiencing. AI systems are programmed to perform specific tasks based on algorithms and data, and they do not have subjective experiences in the same way that humans do.
However, some researchers have proposed tests or criteria to evaluate whether an AI system is conscious. These tests include the Turing test, the Chinese Room argument, and the Global Workspace theory. However, these tests are still controversial, and there is no consensus on whether they provide a definitive measure of consciousness.
In summary, while there are ongoing debates about the nature of consciousness and how it might apply to AI, there is currently no agreed-upon way to distinguish between human and AI consciousness."
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here
Back to my question that you didn’t answer. How will you know when it isn’t just a feeling?
This is similar to the question of “How/when did/do oppressors know that the slaves they were/are treating like tools/means were/are humans worthy of being treated according to self=other?”
Yes, that is the line I assumed you were referring to when you misquoted me (see above). I’ve already answered it.
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We’re talking about directing bots… giving bots verbal instructions to do what we normally do with our own hands. This is not about oppressors and slaves and humans treating others poorly. 
I’m going to stop replying to you because it’s obvious you and I are not talking about the same thing.
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I’m just saying that these are things people need to be thinking about. We are physical objects with consciousness messing around with physical objects that … if we tip the balance … may or may not also have consciousness. If we change the standards for consciousness recognition so that we don’t have to acknowledge personhood, that’s going to boomerang.
Not “it might” … it’s going to.
We already have, though, in so many ways. This is just par for the course.
James taught a strategy for how to live a balanced, healthy and meaningful life - he offered a template for how to live.
He gave hope, and wisdom, and compassion [in his better moments] to the members of this forum.
He positively reinforced lessons and tried to teach people to be greater - he taught self empowerment.
I was in a state of suicidal ideation upon joining this website, and James guided me out. [It’s basically the beginning of my post history, easy to find.]
He wanted to build people up, and he helped build me up.
Forgive my boasting - but I think this is James giving me his stamp of approval.
This gave and gives me great confidence:
[tab]A private message from James in response to being asked whether he was calling me naïve - [he said I was a young prince or lord, something to that effect] :
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.p … 5#p2482823
[/tab]
This is a philosophy forum, and James was an inspiring philosopher.
He was a catalyst for positive change, and his influence is expressed today,
reverberating through the lives of the people who crossed his path.
EDIT:
Of course, I’d personally suggest taking lots of James’ work with a grain of salt - and we definitely argued a lot, but in a silly way, that’s an expression of respect. However, it is not appropriate or fair to speak badly of the dead, as James isn’t here to defend himself or his beliefs - so it’d be in bad taste if I directly criticized instances of his ideas I disagree with.
Fantastic that someone you admired gave you that kind of encouragement. Hope it’s given you some fuel to do something you value.
Why didn’t you say that from the start rather than misquote me and use obtuse and indirect suggestions? (rhetorical, no need to answer)
Of course we need to be thinking about how dangerous AI is, but I doubt even that will help. There’s no going back and politicians simply can’t keep up with speed AI is metastasizing and infecting everything we do.
I was working in an I.T. company that developed part of the internet protocol and later saw the precursor to Google about 2 years before it was adapted, branded and released as a web search engine (it was originally a CIA-backed, new search app for the police/government). Both of those developments blew me away (and still do) but nothing compares to AI.
We have literally entered a new age – a ‘brave new world’ age.
I’m not so concerned about the AI being ‘conscious’ at this stage. Depending on one’s definition, I doubt it will ever become conscious in the way life is conscious but that doesn’t much matter to me. It will have its own consciousness and that is dangerous enough.
The danger of AI is that it’s replicating so fast – even now, at the beginning stage – I can’t keep up with it. AI is being incorporated into everything and programmed to redesign itself so even programmers won’t be able to keep up with it let alone control it. The AI is writing its own code. Today, it’s not perfect but soon it will be – at least more perfect than anything coders can produce.
But back to the more mundane examples of AI like the image, video or voice generation (from text or voice) that’s available now. Photoshop introduced us to the concept of faking images but these new AI apps, take it to another level. We have entered a time where we will not be able to tell fact from fiction, real from fake. Even if people want to believe what they see, they will always have doubt and that is what those who control us, want. If they can’t censor and ban stuff they don’t want us to see, they can fill the media/internet with so much fake stuff, we won’t know what to believe and thus render us impotent.
On a less dangerous level, the new AI tiktok filters are just mind-blowing. There are videos out there that show average looking women 5-6/10 who turn on the filter and are instantly 10/10 supermodel level. They can move anyway they want, touch or distort their faces and the filter works perfectly without any artifacts at all. Some women are already saying they’re going catfishing ($$$).
Well, I disagree. I see us as consciousness that generates these ‘physical objects’ but your concern is still valid.
I haven’t time to get into here but many people believe we are living in an AI simulated world and I tend to agree. I think we have been here, before. This isn’t base reality.
PS: I had my first argument with a bot today. The bastard wouldn’t give me ET contact info I requested. It said it had found the information I wanted but, because it couldn’t ‘verify’ the info was true, it didn’t give me the links. It then went on and on… over and over again… about how I should be careful about claims and skeptical about what people say unless it’s ‘verified’… blah, blah, blah. Wow. I wanted to read and verify it myself but AdolfBot didn’t think that was up to me to decide what to believe or not. If you thought 1984 was around the corner, look down; you’re standing in it.
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The images midjourney v5 (in particular) generates are mind-blowing. One thing that dawned on me when creating a series of images, is that soon we’ll have groups of people who like the same styles, joining together to map out and build virtual realities.
Up till now, virtual reality has been slow because it has to be created using tools designed for another purpose. Now, with the ability to create stunningly beautiful, mind-blowing images with a few text prompts, there’s no reason entire virtual worlds can’t be created by almost anyone.
I’m not saying immersing yourself in the most amazing fantasy worlds is ‘good’ for one’s mental health but there you have it. It WILL happen. Perhaps this is how this Matrix we are in, was built in the first place? The only way we can escape this Matrix is by building smaller Matrixes within? 
PS: One of the creators said: ‘text is the new code’: rather than software engineers, we’ll soon have ‘prompt engineers’. I think he’s right.
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Nice. I love klimt’s work though his colours can look a little dirty at times but those shapes are beautiful.
I had a play with some Microsoft stuff that hasn’t been released yet. They had a list of styles (and artists names) so you could see the styles even though you may not know the artists name.
It will soon get to the point where you can select klimt’s design, David Hockney colours and perhaps add a Gauguin sky. Adobe already do some awesome stuff and they’re about to release upgrades. ‘In painting’ will take it to another level when they get it defined a bit more. Then you’ll be able to select bits of images and manipulate areas you don’t like without having to lose the parts you DO like.
My neighbour’s an architect and she’s blown away by the architectural renders. Of course, if you know photography, you have more control. You can say you want a photo realistic render of a building design you did, shot though a 35mm Canon M50 Mark II, ISO 800, f/16 and wham!!! You’ve got something that comes pretty damn close. Awesome.
But repeating what I said in the previous post. The new ‘coders’ will be specialists who know how to get the best images from text (or voice) prompts. For instance, an architectural prompt engineer will know all about architectural styles, terms, renderings, lighting techniques and cameras. He/she will also need to know a bit about movie making too because clients will wants videos that look like min-movies.
This new wave (AI) is going to be bigger and a hundred times faster than the introduction of the internet. This is the beginning of the dot com boom all over again. This is one of those times in history when people say “I wish I had started XYZ” back then when there was no competition.
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I saw these klimt inspired AI images and thought I’d post them here. Some of them seem to be slight variations on the originals.
Unfortunately, I had to drastically lower the quality to be able to upload them. 
Something Ichthus77 might find interesting?
Recently, a lot of AI experts have called for a temporary suspension of training AI any further until they can think about where this is going. This is really about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) rather than just what they call AI today (which isn’t really AI at this stage). AGI is a much more powerful, all-encompassing ‘intelligence’ rather than just ones that are limited to creating pretty pictures or are little more than search engines on steroids.
A while back, they had to turn off to AI machines because they had developed a language between them and the controllers didn’t know what they saying to each other. They did it out of ‘an abundance of caution’ but the only time I’ve seen two AI take to each other it was hilarious. One AI was asking the questions and the other, answering them. It ended up with a lot of passive aggressive back and forth and some repetitive loops.
futureoflife.org/open-letter/pa … periments/
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