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The New AI Consciousness Paper

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Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#131

Post by andrewla »

dang wrote: post #66
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

Opinions vary, but I posted a link to a web page that he co-authored, which I would argue stands as a very significant and deep dismissal of his views on AI. If, after reading that essay, a person still feels that Scott Alexander has something interesting to say about AI, then I challenge them to defend that thesis.

Probably better for me to have remained silent out of politeness, but if anyone follows that link to the https://ai-2027.com/ page then I feel I have done my part to help inform that person of the lack of rigor in Scott Alexander's thinking around AI.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#132

Post by andai »

thegabriele wrote: post #122
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

Oh god, yeah, that's a great one. Also that one Black Mirror episode where AIs are just enslaved brain scans living in a simulated reality at 0.0001x of real time so that from the outside they perform tasks quickly.

Also SOMA (by the guys who made Amnesia).

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#133

Post by yannyu »

ctoth wrote: post #99
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 wr…

Okay, you're right. There is a world, and some hypotheses, and some falsifiability.

But how rich is this world?

Does this world progress without direct action from another entity? Can the agent in this case form hypotheses and test them without intervention? Can the agent form their own goals and move towards them? Does the agent have agency, or is it simply responding to inputs?

If the world doesn’t develop and change on its own, and the agent can’t act independently, is it really an inhabited world? Or just a controlled workspace?

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#134

Post by itsalwaysgood »

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…

Maybe it helps to consider motivation. Humans do what we do because of emotions and an underlying unconsciousness.

An AI on the other hand is only ever motivated by a prompt. We get better results when we use feedback loops to refine output, or use better training.

One lives in an environment and is under continuous prompts due to our multiple sensory inputs.

The other only comes to life when prompted, and sits idle when a result is reached.

Both use feedback to learn and produce better results.

Could you ever possibly plug the AI consciousness into a human body and see it function? What about a robot body?

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#135

Post by srveale »

breckinloggins wrote: post #59

Let'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?" "…

I think the illuminating part here is that only a magic wand could determine if something is sentient

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#136

Post by theoldgreybeard »

All this talk about machine consciousness and I think I'm probably the only one that thinks it doesn't actually matter.

A conscious machine should treated be no different than livestock - heck, an even lower form of livestock - because if we start thinking we need to give thinking machines "rights" and to "treat them right" because they are conscious then it's already over.

My toaster does not get a 1st amendment because it's a toaster and can and never should be a person.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#137

Post by alphazard »

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…

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

No, or at least we shouldn't. Don't do things that make the world worse for you. Losing human control of political systems because the median voter believes machines have rights is not something I'm looking forward to, but at this rate, it seems as likely as anything else. Certain machines may very well force us to give them rights the same way that humans have forced other humans to take them seriously for thousands of years. But until then, I'm not giving up any ground.

> 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?

Looking for a scientific cutoff to guide our treatment of animals has always seemed a little bizarre to me. But that is how otherwise smart people approach the issue. Animals have zero leverage to use against us and we should treat them well because it feels wrong not to. Intelligent machines may eventually have leverage over us, so we should treat them with caution regardless of how we feel about it.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#138

Post by the_gipsy »

measurablefunc wrote: post #120

Complexity of a single neuron is out of reach for all of the world's super computers. So we have to conclude that if the authors believe in a computational/functionalist instantiation of consciousness or self-awareness then they must also believe that the complexity of neurons is not necessary & is in fact some kind of accident that could be greatly simplified but still be capable of carrying out the functions in the…

> irreducible

It seems like the opposite is true.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#139

Post by vasco »

theoldgreybeard wrote: post #136

All this talk about machine consciousness and I think I'm probably the only one that thinks it doesn't actually matter. A conscious machine should treated be no different than livestock - heck, an even lower form of livestock - because if we start thinking we need to give thinking machines "rights" and to "treat them right" because they are conscious then it's already over. My toaster does not get a 1st amendment bec…

> I think I'm probably the only one that thinks...

It's unlikely this is true for nearly every thought you may ever have, there's a lot of people

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#140

Post by zkmon »

nehal3m wrote: post #93
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?

You mean it is not ethical to make them work for us without pay? Well, we had farm animals work for us. They were kind of conscious of the world around them. Ofcourse we fed them and took care of them. So why not treat these AI conscious things same as farm animals, except they work with their mind rather than muscle power.
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