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The New AI Consciousness Paper

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Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#61

Post by empath75 »

estearum wrote: post #46
syawaworht wrote: post #42

It 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…

> Consciousness is the only thing we can be absolutely certain does actually exist.

A lot of philosophers would disagree with this.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#62

Post by gizajob »

rbanffy wrote: post #29
meowface wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's very unlikely any current LLMs are conscious, but these snarky comments are tiresome. I would be surprised if you read a significant amount of the post.

I believe the biggest issue creating a testable definition for conscientiousness. Unless we can prove we are sentient (and we really can't - I could just be faking it), this is not a discussion we can have in scientific terms.

It’s really trivial to prove but the issue is that sentience is not something you need to negate out of existence and then attempt reconstruct out of epistemological proofs. You’re not faking it, and if you were, then turn your sentience off and on again. If your idea comes from Dennett then he’s barking up completely the wrong tree.

You know at a deep level that a cat is sentient and a rock isn’t. You know that an octopus and a cat have different modes of sentience to that potentially in a plant, and same again for a machine running electrical computations on silicon. These are the kinds of certainties that all of your other experiences of the world hinge upon.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#63

Post by gizajob »

meowface wrote: post #7
gizajob wrote: post #2

I look forward to other papers on spreadsheet consciousness and terminal emulator consciousness.

I think it's very unlikely any current LLMs are conscious, but these snarky comments are tiresome. I would be surprised if you read a significant amount of the post.

What, all two brief pages of it

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#64

Post by estearum »

empath75 wrote: post #61
estearum wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Consciousness is the only thing we can be absolutely certain does actually exist. A lot of philosophers would disagree with this.

Yeah sure, it's irrelevant to my actual question which is whether GP thinks consciousness doesn't exist or whether they're mistakenly replacing consciousness for self.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#65

Post by randallsquared »

breckinloggins wrote: post #54
wagwang wrote: post #25

> 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 th…

The "what it's like" is often bound up with the additional "what would it be like to wake up as", which is a different (and possibly nonsensical) question. Leaving aside consciousness transfer, there's an assumption baked into most consciousness philosophy that all (healthy, normal) humans have an interior point of view, which we refer to as consciousness, or in this paper and review as "phenomenal consciousness". Sometimes people discuss qualia in reference to this. One thing that I've noticed more very recently is the rise of people claiming that they, themselves, do not experience this internal point of view, and that there's nothing that it is like to be them, or, put another way, humans claiming that they are p-zombies, or that everyone is. Not sure what to make of that.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#66

Post by dang »

andrewla wrote: post #17

Scott Alexander, the prominent blogger and philosopher, has many opinions that I am interested in. After encountering his participation in https://ai-2027.com/ I am not interested in hearing his opinions about AI.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#67

Post by estearum »

yannyu wrote: post #58
estearum wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Right but as empirically demonstrated by LLM outputs, they can in fact make "true" predictions/deductions from their environment of tokens.

They sometimes get it wrong, just like all other conscious entities sometimes get their predictions wrong. There are (often) feedback mechanisms to correct those instances though, in both cases.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#68

Post by gizajob »

dboreham wrote: post #15
unfunco wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason you phrased the question that way, instead of just asking whether it was written by AI?

Will we know AGI has been achieved when it stops using em-dashes?

Any AI smart enough not to use em-dashes will be smart enough to use them.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#70

Post by [deleted] »

estearum wrote: post #46
syawaworht wrote: post #42

It 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…

[deleted]
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