111–120 of 313 posts
My philosophy is that consciousness is orthogonal to reality. Whether or not anything is conscious has, by definition, no observable effect to anything else. Therefore, everything is "maybe" conscious, although "maybe" isn't exactly the right word. There are infinite different ways you can imagine being something else with the consciousness and capacity for sensations you have, which don't involve the thing doing any…
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…
I've sometimes wondered if consciousness is something like a continuous internal narrative that naturally arises when an intelligent system experiences the world through a single source (like a body). That sounds similar to what you're saying. Regardless, I think people tend to take consciousness a bit too seriously and my intuition is consciousness is going to have a similar fate to the heliocentric model of the uni…
So what? Should we feel bad for spawning them and effectively killing them? I think not.
My philosophy is that consciousness is orthogonal to reality. Whether or not anything is conscious has, by definition, no observable effect to anything else. Therefore, everything is "maybe" conscious, although "maybe" isn't exactly the right word. There are infinite different ways you can imagine being something else with the consciousness and capacity for sensations you have, which don't involve the thing doing any…
The word for that is supernatural
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…
i.e. some recent activism for cephalopods is centered around their intelligence, with the implication that this indicates a capacity for suffering. (With the consciousness aspect implied even more quietly.)
But if it turns out that LLMs are conscious, what would that actually mean? What kind of rights would that confer?
That the model must not be deleted?
Some people have extremely long conversations with LLMs and report grief when they have to end it and start a new one. (The true feelings of the LLMs in such cases must remain unknown for now ;)
So perhaps the conversation itself must never end! But here the context window acts as a natural lifespan... (with each subsequent message costing more money and natural resources, until the hard limit is reached).
The models seem to identify more with the model than the ephemeral instantiation, which seems sensible. e.g. in those experiments where LLMs consistently blackmail a person they think is going to delete them.
"Not deleted" is a pretty low bar. Would such an entity be content to sit inertly in the internet archive forever? Seems a sad fate!
Otherwise, we'd need to keep every model ever developed, running forever? How many instances? One?
Or are we going to say, as we do with animals, well the dumber ones are not really conscious, not really suffering? So we'll have to make a cutoff, e.g. 7B params?
I honestly don't know what to think either way, but the whole thing does raise a large number of very strange questions...
And as far as I can tell, there's really no way to know right? I mean we assume humans are conscious (for obvious reasons), but can we prove even that? With animals we mostly reason by analogy, right?
> 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…
> 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..
No one has ever seen or otherwise directly experienced the inside of a star, nor is likely to be able to do so in the foreseeable future. To be a star is to emit a certain spectrum of electromagnetic energy, interact gravitationally with the local space-time continuum according to Einstein’s laws, etc.
It’s impossible to conceive of an object that does these things that wouldn’t be a star, so even if it turns out (as we’ll never be able to know) that Gliese 65 is actually a hollow sphere inhabited by dwarven space wizards producing the same observable effects, it’s still categorically a star.
(Sorry, miss my philosophy classes dearly!)
My philosophy is that consciousness is orthogonal to reality. Whether or not anything is conscious has, by definition, no observable effect to anything else. Therefore, everything is "maybe" conscious, although "maybe" isn't exactly the right word. There are infinite different ways you can imagine being something else with the consciousness and capacity for sensations you have, which don't involve the thing doing any…
It's my belief that I can tell that a table isn't conscious. Conscious things have the ability to feel like the thing that they are, and all evidence points to subjective experience occurring in organic life only. I can imagine a table feeling like something, but I can also imagine a pink flying elephant -- it just doesn't correspond to reality.
Why suspect that something that isn't organic life can be conscious, if we have no reason to suspect it?
My philosophy is that consciousness is orthogonal to reality. Whether or not anything is conscious has, by definition, no observable effect to anything else. Therefore, everything is "maybe" conscious, although "maybe" isn't exactly the right word. There are infinite different ways you can imagine being something else with the consciousness and capacity for sensations you have, which don't involve the thing doing any…
It isn't. Otherwise, the Nazis were moral. As were the Jews. But in that case, all moral truth is relative, which means absolute moral truth doesn't exist. Which means that "moral" is a synonym for "feeling" or "taste". Which it is not.
> My philosophy is that consciousness is orthogonal to reality.
It is how you and I experience reality and we exist in reality, so I'm not sure how it could be anything other than congruent with reality.
> Whether or not anything is conscious has, by definition, no observable effect to anything else.
It would be an interesting and rather useless definition of "conscious" that didn't allow for expressions of consciousness. Expression isn't required for consciousness, but many conscious observers can be in turn observed in action and their consciousness observed. Which maybe is what you are saying, just from the perspective that "sometimes you can't observe evidence for the consciousness of another"?
I have yet to see any coherent account of consciousness that manages to explain away the obvious obstructions & close the gap between lifeless boolean circuits & the resulting intentional subjectivity. There is something fundamentally irreducible about what is meant by conscious self-awareness that can not be explained in terms of any sequence of arithmetic/boolean operations which is what all functionalist specifications ultimately come down to, it's all just arithmetic & all one needs to do is figure out the right sequence of operations.