Geoffrey Hinton

So I'm now going to say the same thing as when I told you I had the subjective experience to learn to think elephants without using the word subjective experience and without appealing to qualia.

I start off by saying, I believe my perceptual system is lying to me.

That's the subjective bit of it.

But if my perceptual system wasn't lying to me, there would be little pink elephants out there in the world floating in front of me.

So what's funny about these little pink elephants is not that they're made of qualia and they're in a theater.

It's that they're hypothetical.

They're a technique for me telling you how my perceptual system's lying by telling you what would have to be there for my perceptual system to be telling the truth.

And now I'm going to do it with a chatbot.

I take a multimodal chatbot.

I train it up.

It's got a camera.

It's got a robot arm.

It can talk.

I put an object in front of it, and I say, point at the object.

And it points at the object.

Then I mess up its perceptual system.

I put a prism in front of the camera.

And now I put an object in front of it and say, point at the object.

And it points off to one side.

And I say to it, no, that's not where the object is.