I don't really see why you would want to interpret Scott as making stronger claims than as if he was just using intentional language in the normal way? If the normal meanings of words get a more reasonable text than unusual meanings, then go for the standard meaning?
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Replying to @xuenay @slatestarcodex
First, this is not the normal way; the normal use of "thinking" is to denote thinking. In context "the dishwasher thinks it's finished, but actually the motor is stuck" is perfectly understandable but is a metaphorical and humorous extension.
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Second, Scott very densely attributes mental actions to the program. He's an excellent writer, and if he didn't intend those to be literal, he would anticipate that some readers would take them as literal, and explicitly forestall that misunderstanding.
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Third, if the content of the article were "oh, look, what this program does can be humorously misinterpreted as mental, in the same way you attribute thoughts to a dishwasher," it would be obviously pointless, and Scott doesn't do that.
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Replying to @Meaningness @slatestarcodex
Maybe disagreement here is that I don't even know what the literal meaning of terms like "think" *is*. You seem to feel that "think" refers to some specific way in which humans think. I don't know how they do, to me it just means something like "process information".
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So when you say "if Scott didn't intend them to be read literally" I notice I'm confused, since to me the intentional reading *is* the literal meaning.
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"My phone believes we are somewhere else than we really are" isn't a humorous metaphor to me, it's just a way of saying that the bits in my phone which track its position don't match its actual location, and those bits are "beliefs" due to their functional role in the app.
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And the content of any set of bits in any application (or any set of neurons in any brain) whose function is to track something in the real world, can be called a belief, and this is just what "belief" literally means to me.
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Replying to @xuenay @slatestarcodex
OK... I think you are blinded by an ideology here. More or less no one outside the AI-verse thinks dishwashers have beliefs.
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Fortunately, those are not the only two possibilities!
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