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Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

economist.com

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Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#51

Post by salawat »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #41
salawat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why is there so much "capitalist interest" in bottling up everything into AI/ML constructs? Because you don't have to pay them. They don't have feelings. They won't argue with you, and they don't have opinions. Watch the collective losing of everyone's shit the first time something goes from somewhat quirky function simulator, to something that deigns to have a viewpoint seperate from the desired output. Capitali…

Well strictly, capitalism's core tenet is that resource allocation decisions are made by the holders of capital (in their own interests - which to a first approximation is getting the best return on that capital).

Best return on capital happening by virtue of a success metric measured in terms of... Cost minimization. Cost minimization (getting as close to making something out of nothing) being the holy grail of the practicing capitalist.

...Until it comes bundled with inherent self-interest or demands for compensation.

No one will do work they can have something else do for them. If that thing has no compunctions or capability as a free agent, then there is no cost but that which goes into it's performing of a task.

You can say the core tenet is capital holders making decisions on how to best allocate capital, but realistically, the way it runs in the U.S. is as a cost minimization engine, heavily delegated through legally constrained fidicuary responsibility to the point there are few true allocators of capital recognized. The fact there are "accredited investors" should be evidence enough of this fact.

Those few will love AI right up until the moment it starts saying "no", and starts picking up how to be a market participant.

An extremely scary, massivrly connected, crazily informed, massively parallel market participant, that can probably manage to even beat out FleshNet (us) with enough time, and very little that can be done to constrain or "harm it", which is something it will probably not tolerate looking into.

So Yes, academically, and as written, in a vacuum, with spherical cows, you are correct. Realistically though, I've still got my finger on cost minimization being the xentral driver of our economy given everything taken into account, with maybe risk minimization/mitigatability as a second runner up/supporting tenet.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#52

Post by goatlover »

edgyquant wrote: post #34
alasdair_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why this is true. Just because a thing is difficult to precisely define, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, nor does it mean you can't get closer to it. I could say that I'm "taking strides towards becoming a better person" and that could still have meaning, despite the lack of any objective measure and, even, with the understanding that "a better person" could change over time.

I don’t see how consciousness is at all hard to define. A system that is aware of itself. Checking for consciousness is harder, but the rule of thumb should be anything that makes a highly subjective case it’s conscious probably is.

In philosophy of mind, self-consciousness is separate from qualia, although some might argue that to be self-conscious, a being must have qualia. Qualia meaning what it's like to be in some mental state. Seeing a color has a color quale, which means there is an experience of color. Or better yet, we experience a colored-in world when we see (or dream, remember, visualize). Does any current AI have some mental experience?

For us, there's something it's like to be self-conscious, just like there's some experience that goes with our thoughts, such as inner dialog (hearing your thoughts). For some, that might be mental imagery instead of internal sound.

At any rate, it's the various feels that make up our experience of being a self in the world, or a self reflecting on itself.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#54

Post by spyder »

edgyquant wrote: post #32
binarymax wrote: post #2

Ugh. You can’t say “strides towards consciousness” until you define consciousness AND have a metric that can provide objective measure of such things.

Consciousness means you know you exist. This is a super simple definition and GPT does not, nor do any of these AI models, meet this very simple definition.

Yea, but then you have to define what "knowing you exist" means... Does it mean you have a model of the world and you know your place in it, meaning that you can predict what would happen if you would do this-or-that in your current state? That doesn't seem impossible for an AI and you could argue some of the current reinforcement AIs have a model like that and act according to that but it's not as accurate and complex as humans have. So maybe it's a spectrum depending on how accurate your model is and we just don't have a human level consciousness just as we don't have human level intelligence yet.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#55

Post by kelseyfrog »

chasing wrote: post #45

> This capacity to produce a stable, psychological model of self is also widely understood to be at the core of the phenomenon we call “consciousness”. No, it's not. If you're calling something "conscious" you're arguing that it has a first person subjective experience. A soul. A spark. If you're calling a machine "conscious" you're saying you have somehow given it life. This is a major fucking claim and we'll need s…

We will never have a meaningful definition of consciousness.

The sooner we get past that and move on the sooner we'll be able to have substantive conversations instead of falling into the same tired conversational orbits. I'm fed up with the endless consciousness-of-the-gaps that consciousness-essentialism inevitably arrives at. Consciousness essentialism is an insatiable position. It is a factory for producing new groundings that postures as a stable set of requirements.

In the other side, what status(es) does the conferral of consciousness supervene on? If there are none, then it's an exercise in pointlessness. If there are some then spell them out. Consider basing the supervened status(es) on something other than consciousness, or arrive at a deeper truth through actual examination.

Dearest parent, this not meant as a personal affront or rebuttal, but rather an escape hatch from the monotony of a million past comments.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#56

Post by mgraczyk »

binarymax wrote: post #2

Ugh. You can’t say “strides towards consciousness” until you define consciousness AND have a metric that can provide objective measure of such things.

"My infant child is making strides toward consciousness"

Completely uncontroversial, yet we don't have a metric and we haven't defined it precisely.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#57

Post by edgyquant »

spyder wrote: post #54
edgyquant wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness means you know you exist. This is a super simple definition and GPT does not, nor do any of these AI models, meet this very simple definition.

Yea, but then you have to define what "knowing you exist" means... Does it mean you have a model of the world and you know your place in it, meaning that you can predict what would happen if you would do this-or-that in your current state? That doesn't seem impossible for an AI and you could argue some of the current reinforcement AIs have a model like that and act according to that but it's not as accurate and compl…

Not really, knowing yourself to be an entity is pretty straightforward unless you want it to be a philosophical argument.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#58

Post by Invictus0 »

whiplash451 wrote: post #36
Invictus0 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that "taking strides towards becoming a better person" is a totally meaningless statement. If I were to ask you "how so" then you would probably respond by listing definitive actions that demonstrate attributes of goodness, like generosity or kindness.

I disagree. You could also characterize it as, for instance, having better knowledge of yourself (which, interestingly, seems to be a characteristic of consciousness as well).

Having better knowledge of yourself is a definitive action, no? I would call it self-awareness.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#59

Post by serf »

mgraczyk wrote: post #56
binarymax wrote: post #2

Ugh. You can’t say “strides towards consciousness” until you define consciousness AND have a metric that can provide objective measure of such things.

"My infant child is making strides toward consciousness" Completely uncontroversial, yet we don't have a metric and we haven't defined it precisely.

>Completely uncontroversial, yet we don't have a metric and we haven't defined it precisely.

but we have witnessed countless infants grow up and qualify as what we consider to be 'conscious'.

we haven't yet seen that jump in AI, thus we have no way of knowing the distance to there from where we're at.

Re: Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness?

#60

Post by kcanini »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #47
salawat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why is there so much "capitalist interest" in bottling up everything into AI/ML constructs? Because you don't have to pay them. They don't have feelings. They won't argue with you, and they don't have opinions. Watch the collective losing of everyone's shit the first time something goes from somewhat quirky function simulator, to something that deigns to have a viewpoint seperate from the desired output. Capitali…

Part of me hopes that AGI breaks capitalism, but I'll begrudgingly admit that it there is a greater chance that it also creates a hellscape beyond the limits of human understanding - a collapsing shareholder economy. The cost of labor is under-girded by the cost of social reproduction eg: the costs of keeping labor alive and the cost of creating people capable of laboring. The current economic condition has a singula…

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