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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?

#81

Post by vixen99 »

morpheos137 wrote: post #50
RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #7

It is terribly sad when someone undeniably brilliant in a particular field fails to recognize their own incompetence in other areas - in this case mistaking advanced technology for magic.

the problem is asking if ai is conscious is like asking does ai have a soul. it is not a scientific question and presupposes humans are 'conscious' without even defining the term. to me it is 100% irrelevant if ai is conscious and all discussions about it are based on fallacies and assumptions. what matters to me about ai and matters to other people as well in terms of theory of mind about others is: can i predict ho…

Good - I was scanning down to see if anyone was going to say this.

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

#82

Post by NiloCK »

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…

The whole is composed of parts, ergo there is no whole. This seems incorrect to me.

We too are amalgamations of inanimate components - emerged superstructures.

Just cells. Just molecules. Just atoms.

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

#83

Post by ekianjo »

SuperV1234 wrote: post #12
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…

We are not fundamentally different. Chemical reactions are just math.

Amusing statement since we are far from being able to understand chemical reactions in depth. Most of our knowledge in chemistry is empirical. Nothing like math.

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

#84

Post by XMPPwocky »

SwellJoe wrote: post #63
XMPPwocky wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Not just any math: Matrix multiplication. Can matrix multiplication be conscious? And, I don't see how it can be. It is deterministic, when all variables are controlled. You can repeat the output over and over, if you start it with the same seed, same prompt, and same hardware operating in a way that doesn't introduce randomness. At commercial scale, this is difficult, as the floating point math on GPUs/TPUs when run…

Hm, it sounds like to you consciousness implies non-determinism, and so determinism implies a lack of consciousness - is that right? If so, why do you think so? And if not, what am I missing?

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

#85

Post by XMPPwocky »

search_facility wrote: post #51
XMPPwocky wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hm, say more about what your opinion's based on here?

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

#86

Post by markburns »

SwellJoe wrote: post #63
XMPPwocky wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Not just any math: Matrix multiplication. Can matrix multiplication be conscious? And, I don't see how it can be. It is deterministic, when all variables are controlled. You can repeat the output over and over, if you start it with the same seed, same prompt, and same hardware operating in a way that doesn't introduce randomness. At commercial scale, this is difficult, as the floating point math on GPUs/TPUs when run…

People often point to the relative simplicity of the architecture and code as proof that the system can’t be doing whatever it is that consciousness does, but in doing so they ignore the vast size of the data those simple structures are operating over. Nobody can actually say whether consciousness is just emergent behaviour of a sufficiently complex system, and knowing how a system is built tells you nothing about whether it clears the bar for that kind of emergence. Architectural simplicity and total system complexity aren’t the same thing.

Ie the intelligence sits in the weights and may sit there in the synapses in our brains too.

When we talk about machines being simple mimicking entities we pay no attention to whether or not we are also simple mimicking entities.

Most other assertions in this topic regarding what consciousness truly is tend to be stated without evidence and exceedingly anthropocentric whilst requiring a higher and higher bar for anything that is not human and no justification for what human intelligence really entails.

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

#87

Post by kingofmen »

SwellJoe wrote: post #63
XMPPwocky wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Not just any math: Matrix multiplication. Can matrix multiplication be conscious? And, I don't see how it can be. It is deterministic, when all variables are controlled. You can repeat the output over and over, if you start it with the same seed, same prompt, and same hardware operating in a way that doesn't introduce randomness. At commercial scale, this is difficult, as the floating point math on GPUs/TPUs when run…

Human brains are also deterministic, though somewhat more difficult to reset to a starting state. So this seems to prove that humans aren't conscious either.

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

#88

Post by solid_fuel »

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…

This is such a weird comment.

> Since the times GPT-2 was reimplemented inside Minecraft - its quite obvious LLMs are just math.

This was obvious since LLMs were first invented. They published papers with all the details, you don't need to see something implemented in Minecraft to realize that it's just math. You could simply read the paper or the code and know for certain. [0]

> math is the only area of human knowledge with perfect flawless reductionism, straight to the roots

Incorrect, Kurt Gödel showed with his Incompleteness Theorems in 1931 [1] that it is impossible to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for mathematics. Math is not perfectly reducible and there is no single set of "roots" for math.

> It was build [sic] that way since the beginning,

This is a serious misunderstanding of what mathematics is. Math is discovered as much as it is built. No one sat down and planned out what we understand as modern mathematics - the math we know is the result of endless amounts of logical reasoning and exploration, from geometric proofs to calculus to linear algebra to everything else that encompasses modern mathematics.

> And because of that flawless reductionism, complexity adds nothings to the nature of math things, this is how math working by design

This sentence means nothing, because math is not reducible in that way.

> so it can be proven there are no anything like consciousness simply because conciousness [sic] was not implented [sic] in the first place, only perfect mimicry.

Even if the previous sentence held, this does not follow, because while we are conscious the current consensus is that LLMs are not and most AI experts who are not actively selling a product recognize that LLMs will not lead to human-equivalent general intelligence. [3]

[0] https://github.com/openai/gpt-2

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_th...

[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/mathem...

[3] https://deepmind.google/research/publications/231971/

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

#89

Post by vixen99 »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #44

Its software. Software is not conscious.

I do appreciate how AI has been taught to spell properly as in the difference between its and it's. Here, initially I thought you'd left out the apostrophe in its, but then I realized you might be saying 'the reason it is not conscious is because of -its- software - the latter not being conscious. Context and interpretation are rather critical. (I know - a truism!)

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

#90

Post by 2snakes »

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?

Physical fields like dendritic integration, EM, diffusion, it isn’t binary logic. Brains are a different substrate. Metabolism power efficiency affects cognition too.
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