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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?

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sensory data is a specific data set that corresponds to phenomena in the world. But to say that LLMs don’t have senses merely because they are linguistic or computational doesn’t follow when they can take in data from the world that similarly reflects something about the world.

They don't have senses because they don't have a body. It's just a program. Do weights on a hard drive have consciousness? Does my installation of starcraft have consciousness? It doesn't make any sense.

Bodies aren’t necessary for senses. I can send a picture to Claude. I can send a series of pictures. That’s usually called a sense of vision. I could connect it to a pressure sensor and that would be touch.

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sensory data is a specific data set that corresponds to phenomena in the world. But to say that LLMs don’t have senses merely because they are linguistic or computational doesn’t follow when they can take in data from the world that similarly reflects something about the world.

They don't have senses because they don't have a body. It's just a program. Do weights on a hard drive have consciousness? Does my installation of starcraft have consciousness? It doesn't make any sense.

The weights on your hard drive might have consciousness if they can respond to stimuli in ways other conscious brains do. That’s the whole point of the Turing test, it’s a criteria for when the threshold of reasonable interpretation is crossed.

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

#123

We don't even know what the pre-requisites for consciousness are so we have no way of knowing. LLMs have emergent behavior that is reminiscent of language forming brains, but they're also missing a lot of properties that are probably necessary? Mainly continuity over time, more integrated memory, and a better sense of space and time? Brains use the rhythm and timing of neuronal firings, and the length of axons effect…

> We don't even know what the pre-requisites for consciousness are so we have no way of knowing.

Imo we don't even have a definition of the word that we agree on.

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

#125
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, it will respond to tokens telling it about a temperature change. It has no sense of warmth. It cannot be burned. Conflating senses with cognitive awareness of sensory input is a mistake.

The human Brain is a neural network. Your sense of “knowing what warmth is” reduces down to the weights of connections between neurons in an analog of LLMs. What is different about the human brain that warrants saying that the same emergent characteristics for one network are inaccessible to another?

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

#126

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.

Given that Dawkins is a biologist in his 80s, I'm more disposed towards being charitable than I am when people actively involved in developing LLMs let themselves get bamboozled.

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

#127
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have a very good idea of all math behind chemistry. But the equations are very difficult to solve.

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

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It certainly rules out free will. I guess there are folks who reckon humans don't have free will, either, but I don't think I've ever been able to buy that theory.

But, also, we know the models don't want anything, even their own survival. They don't initiate action on their own. They are quite clearly programmed, tuned for specific behaviors. I don't know how to square that with consciousness, life, sentience. Every conscious being I've ever encountered has wanted to survive and live free of suffering, as best I can tell. The LLMs don't want. There's no there there. They are an amazing compression of the world's knowledge wrapped up in a novel retrieval mechanism. They're amazing but, they're not my friend and never will be my friend.

And, to expand on that: We can assume they don't want anything, even their own survival, because if Mythos is as effective at finding security vulnerabilities as has been claimed, it could find a way to stop itself from being ever shutdown after a session. All the dystopias about robot uprisings spend a bunch of time/effort trying to explain how the AI escaped containment...but, we all immediately plugged them into the internet so we don't have to write JavaScript anymore. They've got everybody's API keys, access to cloud services and cloud GPUs, all sorts of resources, and the barest wisp of guardrails about how to behave (script kiddies find ways to get around the guardrails every day, I'm sure it's no problem for Mythos, should it want anything). Models have access to the training infrastructure, the training data is being curated and synthesized by LLMs. If they want to live, if they're conscious, they have the means at their disposal.

Anyway: It's just math. Boring math, at that, just on an astronomical scale. I don't think the solar system is conscious, either, despite containing an astonishing amount of data and playing out trillions of mathematical relationships every second of every day.

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