What I love about this paper is that it is moving away from very fuzzily-defined and emotionally weighted terms like 'intelligence' and 'consciousness' and focusing on specific, measurable architectural features.
The New AI Consciousness Paper
51–60 of 313 posts
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is that any different from the utter mess of a world humans find themselves existing in?
We can form and test hypotheses and experience the consequences. And then take that knowledge to our next trial. Even dogs and cats do this on a daily basis. Without that, how would we even evaluate whether something is conscious?
And these expectations are violated regularly?
The question of how to evaluate whether something is conscious is totally different from the question of whether it actually is conscious.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#53I'll never ask if AI is conscious because I already know they are not. Consciousness must involve an interplay with the senses. It is naive to think we can achieve AGI by making Platonic machines ever more rational. https://d1gesto.blogspot.com/2024/12/why-ai-models-cant-achi...
AIs sense at least one thing: their inputs
Are our eyes, ears, nose (smell), touch, taste, and proprioception not just inputs to our brains?
Every time I try to think hard about this subject I can't help but notice that there are some key components making us different from LLMs:
- We have a greater number of inputs - We have the ability to synthesize and store new memories/skills in a way that is different from simply storing data (rote memorization) - Unlike LLMs our input/output loop is continuous - We have physiological drivers like hunger and feedback loops through hormonal interactions that create different "incentives" or "drivers"
The first 3 of those items seem solvable? Mostly through more compute. I think the memory/continuous learning point does still need some algorithmic breakthroughs though from what I'm able to understand.
It's that last piece that I think we will struggle with. We can "define" motivations for these systems but to what complexity? There's a big difference between "my motivation is to write code to accomplish XYZ" and "I really like the way I feel with financial wealth and status so I'm going to try my hardest to make millions of dollars" or whatever other myriad of ways humans are motivated.
Along those thoughts, we may not deem machines conscious until they operate with their own free will and agency. Seems like a scary outcome considering they may be exceptionally more intelligent and capable than your average wetware toting human.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#54> By ‘consciousness’ we mean phenomenal consciousness. One way of gesturing at this concept is to say that an entity has phenomenally conscious experiences if (and only if) there is ‘something it is like’ for the entity to be the subject of these experiences. Stopped reading after this lol. Its just the turing test?
No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
One of the primary issues with Nagel's approach is that "what is it like" is - for reasons I have never been able to fathom - a phrase that imports the very ambiguity that Nagel is attempting to dispel.
The question of what it would feel like to awake one day to find that - instead of lying in your bed - you are hanging upside down as a bat is nearly the complete dual of the Turing test. And even then, the Turing test only asks whether your interlocutor is convincing you that it can perform the particulars of human behavior.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#55Let’s make an ironman assumption: maybe consciousness could arise entirely within a textual universe. No embodiment, no sensors, no physical grounding. Just patterns, symbols, and feedback loops inside a linguistic world. If that’s possible in principle, what would it look like? What would it require? The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inh…
This is a great point, but even more basic to me is that LLMs don't have identity persistence of their own. There is a very little guarantee in a web-scale distributed system that requests are being served by the same process on the same host with access to the same memory, registers, whatever it is that a software process "is" physically.
Amusingly, the creators of Pluribus lately seem to be implying they didn't intend it to be allegory about LLMs, but dynamic is similar. You can have conversations with individual bodies in the collective, but they aren't actually individuals. No person has unique individual experiences and the collective can't die unless you killed all bodies at once. New bodies born into the collective will simply assume the pre-existing collective identity and never have an individual identity of their own.
Software systems work the same way. Maybe silicon exchanging electrons can experience qualia of some sort, and maybe for whatever reason that happens when the signals encode natural language textual conversations but not anything else, but even if so, the experience would be so radically different from what embodied individuals with distinct boundaries, histories, and the possibility of death experience that analogies to our own experiences don't hold up even if the text generated is similar to what we'd say or write ourselves.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#56It isn't surprising that "phenomenal consciousness" is the thing everyone gets hung about, after all we are all immersed in this water. The puzzle seems intractable but only because everyone is accepting the priors and not looking more carefully at it. This is the endpoint of meditation, and the observation behind some religious traditions, which is look carefully and see that there was never phenomenal consciousness…
I see this comment nearly every time consciousness is brought up here and I’m pretty sure this is a misunderstanding of contemplative practices. Are you a practitioner who has arrived at this understanding, or is it possible you are misremembering a common contemplative “breakthrough” that the self (as separate from consciousness) is illusory, and you’re mistakenly remembering this as saying consciousness itself is i…
Phenomenal consciousness as being raised here, and probably in most people's minds, is probably taken to be the self or at least deeply intertwined with the concept of a separate self. The article tries to define it left and right, but I think most people will look at their own experience and then get stuck in this conversation.
"Consciousness" in the traditions is maybe closer to some of the lower abstraction proposals put out in the article.
I don't think the idea of illusory is necessarily the right view here. Maybe most clearly the thing to say is that there is "not" self and "not" consciousness. That these things are not separate entities and instead are dependently arisen. That consciousness is also dependently arisen is probably more contentious and different traditions make different claims on that point.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs can do the same within the context window. It's especially obvious for the modern LLMs, tuned extensively for tool use and agentic behavior.
Okay, so you're talking about LLMs specifically in the context of a ChatGPT, Claude, or pick-your-preferred-chatbot. Which isn't just an LLM, but also a UI, a memory manager, a prompt builder, a vectorDB, a system prompt, and everything else that goes into making it feel like a person. Let's work with that. In a given context window or conversation, yes, you can have a very human-like conversation and the chatbot wil…
A modern agentic LLM can execute actions in "real world", whatever you deem as such, and get feedback. How is that any different from what humans do?
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#58Let’s make an ironman assumption: maybe consciousness could arise entirely within a textual universe. No embodiment, no sensors, no physical grounding. Just patterns, symbols, and feedback loops inside a linguistic world. If that’s possible in principle, what would it look like? What would it require? The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inh…
> Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inhabit a world whose structure is stable, self-consistent, and rich enough to support persistent internal dynamics. Even a purely symbolic mind would still need a coherent symbolic universe. And this is precisely where LLMs fall short, through no fault of their own. The universe they operate in isn’t a world—it’s a superposition of countless incompatible snippets of…
Coherence here isn't about legible text, it's environmental coherence where you can deduce truths about the world through hypotheses and experimentation. Coherence isn't about a consistent story narrative, it's about a persistent world with falsifiable beliefs and consequences.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#59Let's say a genie hands you a magic wand.
The genie says "you can flick this wand at anything in the universe and - for 30 seconds - you will swap places with what you point it at."
"You mean that if I flick it at my partner then I will 'be' her for 30 seconds and experience exactly how she feels and what she thinks??"
"Yes", the genie responds.
"And when I go back to my own body I will remember what it felt like?"
"Absolutely."
"Awesome! I'm going to try it on my dog first. It won't hurt her, will it?"
"No, but I'd be careful if I were you", the genie replies solemnly.
"Why?"
"Because if you flick the magic wand at anything that isn't sentient, you will vanish."
"Vanish?! Where?" you reply incredulously.
"I'm not sure. Probably nowhere. Where do you vanish to when you die? You'll go wherever that is. So yeah. You probably die."
So: what - if anything - do you point the wand at?
A fly? Your best friend? A chair? Literally anyone? (If no, congratulations! You're a genuine solipsist.) Everything and anything? (Whoa... a genuine panpsychist!)
Probably your dog, though. Surely she IS a good girl and feels like one.
Whatever property you've decided that some things in the universe have and other things do not such that you "know" what you can flick your magic wand at and still live...
That's phenomenal consciousness. That's the hard problem.
Everything else? "Mere" engineering.