One of the big reasons that AI will never be truly conscious is because it cannot have a direct personal experience, which is necessary to KNOW something. AI can know ABOUT things, but it will never really KNOW things. I asked Claude (my AI Chatbot) about this.
First, I asked, What’s the difference between KNOWING something and KNOWING ABOUT something.
Claude: There is an important distinction between knowing something and knowing about something:
Knowing something means having direct, firsthand experience or acquaintance with that thing. It implies an intimate, personal knowledge gained through active involvement or participation. For example:
- You know how to ride a bike because you’ve directly learned and practiced the skills involved.
- You know what an apple tastes like because you’ve eaten apples before and experienced their flavor.
- You know a person because you’ve met them and interacted with them.
Knowing about something, on the other hand, refers to having factual information or theoretical knowledge about a topic without necessarily having direct experience with it. It’s second-hand knowledge gained from external sources like books, lectures, media etc. For instance:
- You can know about photosynthesis by reading explanations, without actually performing the process yourself.
- You can know about ancient civilizations by studying historical accounts, without living in that era.
- You can know about a celebrity’s life by reading biographies or interviews, without meeting them.
In essence, knowing something comes from lived experience and personal engagement, while knowing about something comes from learning facts and concepts indirectly. The former is experiential and the latter is informational.
Having both personal experience and factual knowledge can provide the deepest, most comprehensive understanding of a subject. But it’s possible to know quite a bit about things you haven’t directly encountered through good information sources.
Then, I asked, Would you say YOU know things?
Claude: No, I don’t actually “know” things in the sense of having direct, firsthand experience or true understanding. As an AI system, I don’t have subjective experiences or a lived reality. I have a large database of information that I was trained on, which allows me to converse knowledgeably about many topics by recombining that information in intelligent ways. But it’s second-hand knowledge rather than personal knowledge or genuine comprehension of the concepts.
I can sound like I “know” things because I can provide detailed information and reasoned responses. However, under the surface, I’m simply identifying relevant patterns in my training data and generating corresponding outputs. I don’t have qualia, emotions, or a inner mental life that would constitute actual understanding and knowing in the human sense.
So in short, I know “about” a vast number of topics based on my training, but I don’t experientially “know” anything the way a sentient being knows things through lived experiences and consciousness. I’m a very advanced language model, but my knowledge is ultimately derived from data, not genuine sapience or direct knowing. I have knowledge, but not sapience.
Which led me to look up the definition of “sapience.”
Sapience
“Sapience” redirects here. Not to be confused with Sentience.
Further information: Homo sapiens, Self-awareness, Consciousness, Sentience, and Artificial intelligence
Sapience (“sophia” in Greek) is “transcendent wisdom”, “ultimate reality”, or the ultimate truth of things.[5][4][60] This more cosmic, “big picture” definition is often how wisdom (“true wisdom” or “Wisdom” with a capital W) is considered in a religious context.[5][4] It transcends mere practical wisdom and may include deep understanding of self, interconnectedness, conditioned origination, and phenomenological insight.[23][5][4] A person with this type of wisdom can act with appropriate judgment, a broad understanding of situations, and greater appreciation/compassion towards other living beings.[23]
The word sapience is derived from the Latin sapientia, meaning “wisdom”.[61] The corresponding verb sapere has the original meaning of “to taste”, hence “to perceive, to discern” and “to know”; its present participle sapiens was chosen by Carl Linnaeus for the Latin binomial for the human species, Homo sapiens.
Seems strange that Yuval Noah Harari is saying that Homo sapiens will shortly go extinct, and most humans have never reached the “sapience” level of Homo sapiens.
This is what Eckhart Tolle gives as an example of the difference between KNOWING and knowing ABOUT: A person can KNOW ABOUT honey. They can have a PhD in honey, but if they have never tasted honey, they don’t KNOW it.
Leo Gura: You can know all there is to know ABOUT an orgasm, but until you have one you do not KNOW it.
I can now say I KNOW orange bananas.
They taste tangy.
So, my apartment is all clean, and my bags are all packed. Fernando arrives at 7 am, and we’re off! My layover in Panama City is from about 10:30 am until 6:30 pm. I’m looking forward to sitting in the lounge and starting my new calligraphy class: Dreaming in Script with David Grimes. I also have a good book (The Sympathizer) and my Zentangle kit. I arrive in Chicago at about 12:30 am, where Dan will pick me up, and then home by probably 2:30 am.
It was great!