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When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

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Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#51

Post by search_facility »

XMPPwocky wrote: post #8
search_facility wrote: post #6

Since the times GPT-2 was reimplemented inside Minecraft - its quite obvious LLMs are just math. Nothing else, by nature. Modern LLMs have the same math as in GPT-2 - just bigger and with extra stuff around - and math is the only area of human knowledge with perfect flawless reductionism, straight to the roots. It was build that way since the beginning, so philosophy have no say in this :) And because of that flawles…

Yup- the question is "can math be conscious?" (If you've engaged w/ the literature here, it's quite hard to give a confident "yes". it's also quite hard to give a confident "no"! so then what the heck do we do)

Imho no, math itself have no conciousness. Quite confidently its a helpful tool that does not act by himself.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#52

Post by root_axis »

digitaltrees wrote: post #21
root_axis wrote: post #15

There are a lot of people vulnerable to AI psychosis. As far as the ostensibly controversial topic of AI being conscious, it can be dismissed out of hand. There is no reason that it should be conscious, it was not designed to be, nor does it need to be in order to explain how it functions with respect to its design. It's also unclear how consciousness would even apply to something like an LLM which is a process, not…

There is evidence that awareness is an emergent property from sensory experience. And consciousness is an emergent property of language that has grammatical meaning for self and other.

LLMs have no self, sensory experience, or experience of any kind. The idea doesn't even really make sense. Even if it did, the closest analogy to biological "experience" for an LLM would be the training process, since training at least vaguely resembles an environment where the model is receiving stimuli and reacting to it (i.e. human lived experience) - inference is just using the freeze-dried weights as a lookup table for token statistics. It's absurd to think that such a thing is conscious.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#53

Post by svachalek »

vidarh wrote: post #34
ofjcihen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you’re missing is a “self” to have the “experience”. LLMs do not have a self. This is like arguing that the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness.

How do I know you have this "self"? How do you know other humans do?

By the laws of physics, it's pretty clear we don't. The same chemical and electromagnetic interactions that drive everything around us are active in our brains, causing us to do things and feel things. We feel like we're in control of it, we feel like there's something there riding around inside. We grant that other people have the same magic, because I clearly do. But rocks, trees, LLMs, those are not people and clearly, clearly not conscious because they don't have our magic.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#55

Post by Myrmornis »

On the one hand I'm not sure Dawkins has read/thought enough about how LLMs actually work. I'm getting the impression he doesn't fully appreciate or is somehow forgetting that it's a text completion algorithm with a vast number of parameters and that even if the patterns of learned parameter tunings are not really comprehendible, the architecture was very deliberately designed.

But on the other hand his thoughts at the end are interesting. Summary:

Maybe our "consciousness" is like an LLM's intelligence. But if not, then it raises the question of why do we even have this "extra" consciousness, since it appears that something like a humanoid LLM would be decent at surviving. His suggestions: maybe our extra thing is an evolutionary accident (and maybe there _are_ successful organisms out there with the LLM-style non-conscious intelligence), or maybe as evolved organisms it's necessary that we really feel things like pain, so that evolutionary mechanisms like pain (and desire for food, sex etc) had strong adaptive benefits.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#56

Post by vidarh »

svachalek wrote: post #53
vidarh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I know you have this "self"? How do you know other humans do?

By the laws of physics, it's pretty clear we don't. The same chemical and electromagnetic interactions that drive everything around us are active in our brains, causing us to do things and feel things. We feel like we're in control of it, we feel like there's something there riding around inside. We grant that other people have the same magic, because I clearly do. But rocks, trees, LLMs, those are not people and cle…

Indeed. We assume a lot, because we don't know. We don't have have settled, universal definitions of what consciousness means. But that also means that while we like to rule out consciousness in other things, we don't have a clear basis for doing so.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#57

Post by root_axis »

vidarh wrote: post #31
brookst wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These LLMs don’t have senses, they have a token stream. They have no experience of the world outside of the language tokens they operate on. I’m not sure I believe that consciousness emerges from sensory experience, but if it does, LLMs won’t get it.

Sensory input is nothing but data.

That's just reductive semantics. Anything can be described as "nothing but data".

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#58

Post by digitaltrees »

throwyawayyyy wrote: post #46
digitaltrees wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong based on what criteria? Or are we just moving the goal post because we are uncomfortable with the idea that neural networks might be conscious? If a single cell organism moves towards light and away from a rock, we say it’s aware. When a roomba vacuum does the same we try to create alternate explanations. Why? Based on the criteria applied to one it’s aware. If there is some other criteria, say we find out the…

I'm mainly saying it's impossible to know, at least without a theory of consciousness that doesn't exist. Do we consider bacteria to be conscious though, is there something like to be a single cell? I can easily believe there is something like to be an insect.

I’d argue it’s a spectrum with awareness being simple response to stimuli at one and self awareness of and reflection on a subjective experience across time on the other.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#59

Post by digitaltrees »

brookst wrote: post #28
digitaltrees wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is evidence that awareness is an emergent property from sensory experience. And consciousness is an emergent property of language that has grammatical meaning for self and other.

These LLMs don’t have senses, they have a token stream. They have no experience of the world outside of the language tokens they operate on. I’m not sure I believe that consciousness emerges from sensory experience, but if it does, LLMs won’t get it.

Neural networks can have senses. Hook an LLM up to a thermometer and it will respond to temperature changes.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#60

Post by acdha »

baggy_trough wrote: post #23
ezfe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are just math run on your CPU. Autocomplete. Sometimes very useful autocomplete, but still just autocomplete. To imply it could be conscious requires something else, here the comment uses the phrase magic to fill that gap - since we must agree that a CPU is not conscious on it's own (else everything our computer does would be conscious).

Neurons are just summing up their inputs according to the laws of chemistry. What's the difference?

This is definitely complicated—I’m not a neuroscientist but worked for some and married one, so I’ve heard quite a few entries from the genre of how our brains fool ourselves or make our conscious experience seem more coherent and linear than it actually is—but the big ones I see are the inability to learn from experience or have a generalized sense of conceptual reasoning. For the latter, I’m not just thinking about the simple “count the r’s in strawberry” things companies have put so much effort into masking but the way minor changes in a question can get conflicting answers from even the best models, indicating that while there’s something truly fascinating about how they cluster topics it is not the same as having a conceptual model of the world or a theory of mind. This is the huge problem in the field: all of these companies would love to have a model which is safe to use in adversarial contexts because then the mass layoffs could begin in earnest, but the technology just isn’t there.

This isn’t a religious argument that there’s something about our brains which can’t be replicated, but simply that it’s sufficiently more complex than anything we have currently.

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