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The New AI Consciousness Paper

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Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#141

Post by hermitShell »

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…

I think this is an excellent point. I believe the possibility of 'computing' a conscious mind is proportional to the capability of computing a meaningful reality for it to exist in.

So you are begging the question: Is it possible to compute a textual, or pure symbolic reality that is complex enough for consciousness to arise within it?

Let's assume yes again.

Finally the theory leads us back to engineering. We can attempt to construct a mind and expose it to our reality, or we can ask "What kind of reality is practically computable? What are the computable realities?"

Perhaps herein lies the challenge of the next decade. LLM training is costly, lots of money poured out into datacenters. All with the dream of giving rise to a (hopefully friendly / obedient) super intelligent mind. But the mind is nothing without a reality to exist in. I think we will find that a meaningfully sophisticated reality is computationally out of reach, even if we knew exactly how to construct one.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#142

Post by zkmon »

advisedwang wrote: post #106
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.

> All that we care about is, whether something can be useful Anybody that thinks it's wrong to murder the terminally ill, disabled or elderly probably disagrees with you.

Anyone who knows that being conscious is not same as what you said, might disagree with you. Also, ever thought that chickens being killed all over America everyday, might have consciousness?

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#143

Post by armchairhacker »

dleary wrote: post #127
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 und…

> 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?

Opinion

Another example: when I hear the famous "Yanny or Laurel" recording (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel) I hear "Laurel". I can understand how someone hears "Yanny". Our perceptions conflict, but neither of us are objectively wrong, because (from Wikipedia) "analysis of the sound frequencies has confirmed that both sets of sounds are present".

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#144

Post by anonymous908213 »

estearum wrote: post #67
yannyu wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#145

Post by measurablefunc »

the_gipsy wrote: post #138
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.

Only if you agree with the standard extensional & reductive logic of modern science but even then it is known that all current explanations of reality are incomplete, e.g. the quantum mechanical conception of reality consists of incessant activity that we can never be sure about.

It's not obvious at all why computer scientists & especially those doing work in artificial intelligence are convinced that they are going to eventually figure out how the mind works & then supply a sufficient explanation for conscious phenomenology in terms of their theories b/c there are lots of theorems in CS that should convince them of the contrary case, e.g. Rice's theorem. So even if we assume that consciousness has a functional/computable specification then it's not at all obvious why there would be a decidable test that could take the specification & tell you that the given specification was indeed capable of instantiating conscious experience.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#146

Post by the_gipsy »

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?" "…

> congratulations! You're a genuine solipsist

Wrong, the genie is. The thought experiment is flawed/loaded.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#147

Post by tolleydbg »

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 this is actually a majority of everyone working on anything remotely related to artificial intelligence post-Searle.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#148

Post by horacemorace »

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…

> Abandoning dualism feels intuitively…

Intuition is highly personal. Many people believe that abandoning monism feels intuitively wrong and that dualism is an excuse for high minded religiosity.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#149

Post by IanCal »

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…

We do have forms of animal rights, including for livestock, and having them is not a controversial position.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#150

Post by vasco »

itsalwaysgood wrote: post #128
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?

An infant has phenomenological consciousness.

Electrons make no sense as a question unless I'm missing something.

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