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The New AI Consciousness Paper

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Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#121

Post by armchairhacker »

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…

Is consciousness coupled with "time flow" or specifically "cause and effect", i.e. prediction? LLMs learn to predict the next word, which teaches them more general cause and effect (required to predict next words in narratives).

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#122

Post by thegabriele »

andai wrote: post #115

So we currently associate consciousness with the right to life and dignity right? 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 m…

I think this story fits https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#123

Post by lo_zamoyski »

Some people behave as if there's something mysterious going on in LLMs, and that somehow, we must bracket our knowledge to create this artificial sense of mystery, like some kind of subconscious yearning for transcendence that's been perverted . "Ooo, what if this particular set of chess piece moves makes the board conscious??" That's what the "computational" view amounts to, and the best part of it is that it has all the depth of a high college student's ramblings about the multiverses that might occupy the atoms of his fingers. No real justification, no coherent or intelligible case made, just a big "what if" that also flies in the face of all that we know. And we're supposed to take it seriously, just like that.

"[S]uper-abysmal-double-low quality" indeed.

One objection I have to the initial framing of the problem concerns this characterization:

"Physical: whether or not a system is conscious depends on its substance or structure."

To begin with, by what right can we say that "physical" is synonymous with possessing "substance or structure"? For that, you would have to know:

1. what "physical" means and be able to distinguish it from the "non-physical" (this is where people either quickly realize they're relying on vague intuitions about what is physical or engaging in circular reasoning a la "physical is whatever physics tells us");

2. that there is nothing non-physical that has substance and structure.

In an Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics (which are much more defensible than materialism or panpsychism or any other Cartesian metaphysics and its derivatives), not only is the distinction between the material and immaterial understood, you can also have immaterial beings with substance and structure called "subsistent forms" or pure intellects (and these aren't God, who is self-subsisting being).

According to such a metaphysics, you can have material and immaterial consciousness. Compare this with Descartes and his denial of the consciousness of non-human animals. This Cartesian legacy is very much implicated in the quagmire of problems that these stances in the philosophy of mind can be bogged down in.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#124

Post by andrewla »

reducesuffering wrote: post #35
andrewla wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an attempt to predict a possible future in the context of AI. Basically a doomer fairy tale. It is just phenomenally dumb. Way worse than the worst bad scifi about the subject. It is presented as a cautionary tale and purports to be somewhat rationally thought out. But it is just so bad. It tries to delve into foreign policy and international politics but does so in such a naive way that it is painful to read.…

Whole lot of "doomer", "fairy tale", "dumb", "bad scifi", "so bad", "naive", "embarassing". Not any actual refutation. Maybe this opinion is a bit tougher to stomach for some reason than the rest you agree with...

I reject the premise that https://ai-2027.com/ needs "refutation". It is a story, nothing more. It does not purport to tell the future, but to enumerate a specific "plausible" future. The "refutation" in a sense will be easy -- none of its concrete predictions will come to pass. But that doesn't refute its value as a possible future or a cautionary tale.

That the story it tells is completely absurd is what makes it uninteresting and disqualifying for all participants in terms of their ability to comment on the future of AI.

Here is the prediction about "China Steals Agent-2".

> The changes come too late. CCP leadership recognizes the importance of Agent-2 and tells their spies and cyberforce to steal the weights. Early one morning, an Agent-1 traffic monitoring agent detects an anomalous transfer. It alerts company leaders, who tell the White House. The signs of a nation-state-level operation are unmistakable, and the theft heightens the sense of an ongoing arms race.

Ah, so CCP leadership tells their spies and cyberforce to steal the weights so they do. Makes sense. Totally reasonable thing to predict. This is predicting the actions of hypothetical people doing hypothetical things with hypothetical capabilities to engage in the theft of hypothetical weights.

Even the description of Agent-2 is stupid. Trying to make concrete predictions about what Agent-1 (an agent trained to make better agents) will do to produce Agent-2 is just absurd. Like Yudkowsky (who is far from clear-headed on this topic but at least has not made a complete fool of himself) has often pointed out, if we could predict what a recursively self-improving system could do then why do we need the system.

All of these chains of events are incredibly fragile and they all build on each other as linear consequences, which is just a naive and foolish way to look at how events occur in the real world -- things are overdetermined, things are multi-causal; narratives are ways for us to help understand things but they aren't reality.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#125

Post by layer8 »

catigula wrote: post #110
layer8 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not so much that there’s anything mysterious you can discover through intense introspection or meditation. There might be, but I haven’t found it. It’s fundamentally that this capability exists at all. Strip it all down to I think therefore I am. That is very bizarre because it doesn’t follow that such a thing would happen. It’s also not clear that this is even happening at all, and, as an outside observer, you…

The thing is that when you say “that capability”, I don’t quite know what you mean. The fact that we perceive inner processings of our mind isn’t any more surprising than that we perceive the outer world, or that a debugger is able to introspect its own program state. Continuous introspection has led me to realize that “qualia”, or “what it’s like to be X”, emotions and feelings, are just perceptions of inner phenomena, and that when you pay close attention, there is nothing more to that perception than its informational content.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#126

Post by andai »

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…

>The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. 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.

I'm not sure what relevance that has to consciousness?

I mean you can imagine a consciousness where, you're just watching TV. (If we imagine that the video models are conscious their experience is probably a bit like that!)

If the signal wasn't coherent it would just be snow, static, TV noise. (Or in the case of a neural network probably something bizarre like DeepDream.) But there would still be a signal.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#127

Post by dleary »

armchairhacker wrote: post #107

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…

> Is AI conscious? I believe "yes" [...] and in a way that somehow means I don't think anyone who believes "no" is wrong.

What does it even mean to "believe the answer is yes", but "in a way that somehow means" the direct contradiction of that is not wrong?

Do "believe", "yes", and "no" have definitions?

...

This rhetorical device sucks and gets used WAY too often.

"Does Foo have the Bar quality?"

"Yes, but first understand that when everyone else talks about Bar, I am actually talking about Baz, or maybe I'm talking about something else entirely that even I can't nail down. Oh, and also, when I say Yes, it does not mean the opposite of No. So, good luck figuring out whatever I'm trying to say."

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#128

Post by itsalwaysgood »

advisedwang wrote: post #109

This article really takes umbridge with those that conflate phenomenological and access consciousness. However that is essentially dualism. It's a valid philosophical position to believe that there is no distinct phenomenological consciousness besides access consciousness. Abandoning dualism feels intuitively wrong, but our intuition about our own minds is frequently wrong. Look at the studies that show we often beli…

Do you consider an infant to be conscious?

Or electrons?

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#129

Post by measurablefunc »

jquery wrote: post #100
gizajob wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re not a machine

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

Are you aware of all possible laws of the universe? Furthermore, asking questions is not how one makes a positive & justifiable claim.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#130

Post by armchairhacker »

kylecazar wrote: post #118
armchairhacker wrote: post #107

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…

I'm trying to understand your position... 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 tha…

You can imagine a table feeling if you can imagine the table not doing anything (being unable to or deciding not to). It's not intuitive because it doesn't really help you, whereas imagining a human or even animal as conscious lets you predict its next actions (by predicting your next actions if you were in its place), so there's an evolutionary benefit (also because it causes empathy which causes altruism).

> Why suspect that something that isn't organic life can be conscious, if we have no reason to suspect it?

There may be no good reason unless you feel it's interesting. Although there's probably at least one good reason to imagine consciousness specifically on a (non-organic) neural network: because, like humans and animals, it lets us predict how the NN will behave (in some situations; in others it's detrimental, because even though they're more similar than any known non-NN algorithm, NNs are still much different than humans and moreso than animals like dogs).

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