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The New AI Consciousness Paper

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Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#91

Post by catigula »

I generally regard thinking about consciousness, unfortunately, a thing of madness.

"I think consciousness will remain a mystery. Yes, that's what I tend to believe... I tend to think that the workings of the conscious brain will be elucidated to a large extent. Biologists and perhaps physicists will understand much better how the brain works. But why something that we call consciousness goes with those workings, I think that will remain mysterious." - Ed Witten, probably the greatest living physicist

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#93

Post by nehal3m »

zkmon wrote: post #92

I don't see why it matters so much whether something is conscious or not. All that we care about is, whether something can be useful.

At the minimum it raises philosophical and ethical questions. If something is conscious, is it ethical to put it to work for you?

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#94

Post by fpoling »

When discussing consciousness what is often missed is that the notion of consciousness is tightly coupled with the notion of the perception of time flow. By any reasonable notion conscious entity must perceive the flow of time.

And then the time flow is something that physics or mathematics still cannot describe, see Wikipedia and other articles on the philosophical problem of time series A versus time series B that originated in a paper from 1908 by philosopher John McTaggart.

As such AI cannot be conscious since mathematics behind it is strictly about time series B which cannot describe the perception of time flow.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#95

Post by ottah »

fpoling wrote: post #94

When discussing consciousness what is often missed is that the notion of consciousness is tightly coupled with the notion of the perception of time flow. By any reasonable notion conscious entity must perceive the flow of time. And then the time flow is something that physics or mathematics still cannot describe, see Wikipedia and other articles on the philosophical problem of time series A versus time series B that…

As such humans cannot be conscious...

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#96

Post by jquery »

wk_end wrote: post #76

> For some people (including me), a sense of phenomenal consciousness feels like the bedrock of existence, the least deniable thing; the sheer redness of red is so mysterious as to seem almost impossible to ground. Other people have the opposite intuition: consciousness doesn’t bother them, red is just a color, obviously matter can do computation, what’s everyone so worked up about? Philosophers naturally interpret t…

To me, the absurdity of the idea of p-zombies is why I'm convinced consciousness isn't special to humans and animals.

Can complex LLMs have subjective experience? I don't know. But I haven't heard an argument against it that's not self-referential. The hardness of the hard problem is precisely why I can't say whether or not LLMs have subjective experience..

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#97

Post by syawaworht »

metalcrow wrote: post #85
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…

As a very beginner practicer i've come to that conclusion myself, but how can the two be separate? If there is no self (or at least, there is a self but it exists in the same way that a nation or corporation "exists"), how can there be something to experience being? What separates the two?

My own experiential insight is not definitely not complete, so of course the guidance of a master or of course your own direct practice should be preferred.

But to the extent I have observed awareness, the idea of an entire "experiencer" is an extrapolation and fabrication. See how you generate that concept. And then, look closely at what's actually going on, there is "consciousness" of the components of the aggregate. (Maybe not dissimilar to some of the lower level mechanisms proposed in the article).

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#98

Post by layer8 »

catigula wrote: post #88
wk_end wrote: post #76

> For some people (including me), a sense of phenomenal consciousness feels like the bedrock of existence, the least deniable thing; the sheer redness of red is so mysterious as to seem almost impossible to ground. Other people have the opposite intuition: consciousness doesn’t bother them, red is just a color, obviously matter can do computation, what’s everyone so worked up about? Philosophers naturally interpret t…

FWIW I have gone from not understanding the problem to understanding the problem in the past couple of years because it's not trivial to casually intuit if you don't actually think about it and don't find it innately interesting and the discourse doesn't have the language to adequately express the problem, so this is probably wrong.

I’ve sort-of gone the opposite way. The more I introspect, the more I realize there isn’t anything mysterious there.

It’s true that we are lacking good language to talk about it, as we already fail at successfully communicating levels of phantasia/aphantasia.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#99

Post by ctoth »

yannyu wrote: post #21

Let’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…

> A conscious textual agent would need something like a unified narrative environment with real feedback: symbols that maintain identity over time, a stable substrate where “being someone” is definable, the ability to form and test a hypothesis, and experience the consequences.

So like a Claude Code session? The code persists as symbols with stable identity. The tests provide direct feedback. Claude tracks what it wrote versus what I changed - it needs identity to distinguish its actions from mine. It forms hypotheses about what will fix the failing tests, implements them, and immediately experiences whether it was right or wrong.

The terminal environment gives it exactly the "stable substrate where 'being someone' is definable" you're asking for.

We missing anything?

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#100

Post by jquery »

gizajob wrote: post #60
dboreham wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Consciousness" is just what we call the thing we can't quite define that we believe separates us from other kinds of machine.

We’re not a machine

Where's the non-machine part of the human body that doesn't follow physical laws?
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