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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?

#171

Post by collyw »

freedomben wrote: post #134
pydry wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human. We might not clearly understand the diff between the two states but we can certainly point to it and go "it's that".

I'm not sure it's that clear. What about a person who is on drugs to the point they clearly don't know what reality is happening around them, but they are able to speak and move and such? I'm not sure I'd call that conscious, but by most definitions it is.

Indeed, doing a first aid course we were pointed out that sleeping is different from being unconscious. You can wake someone from sleep pretty quickly. You can't bring an unconscious person back in the same way.

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

#172

Post by jdmoreira »

collyw wrote: post #169
jdmoreira wrote: post #166

It's starting to look more and more to me as if conscious is just an illusion that we ourselves perceive. There is nothing fundamental about it, just an artefact of a certain style of computing as perceived by the reasoner itself. We look at the current llms and because we see them for how they are fundamentally operating we assume they can't be "conscious" but we really don't even know what conscious is. The only pe…

It's literally the only thing you can be certain of, your own conciseness.

You can only be certain you perceive it and you can't be certain others perceive it (or if others exist at all of course).

The only thing you can really tell is "I perceive myself in some sort of feedback loop manner". Which to me it even sounds like it has "arisen" from underlying mechanisms.

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

#173

Post by birdsongs »

qnleigh wrote: post #155

It's easy, and very tempting to dismiss this sort of thing. But given how little we know about the human brain, let alone consciousness, I don't see how we can be confident that LLMs aren't conscious. I've had a lot of thoughts and conversations over the years that changed my mind on what consciousness likely requires. One was the realization that a purely mechanical computer can, in principle simulate the laws of ph…

Can computers simulate all the laws, even theoretically? We don't have a final theory / unification of all the physics frameworks, so I'm not sure if that claim can be made. Ex: the standard model and gravity.

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

#174

Post by collyw »

dpark wrote: post #96
api wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was one of my thoughts years ago after playing with early ChatGPT and local llama1: this proves that intelligence and consciousness do not necessitate one another and may not even be directly related . I’ve kind of thought this for many years though. A bacterium and a tree are probably conscious. I think it’s a property of life rather than brains. Our brains are conscious because they are alive. They are also in…

You simply defined consciousness as life, which seems like an unusual but also not very useful definition.

Someone that has recently dies has pretty much the same biology as when they were alive. The conciseness is the main difference, I would say.

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

#175

Post by collyw »

ofjcihen wrote: post #36

Incredibly confusing that people who are otherwise of sound mind seem to fall for this. Especially confusing when it’s someone who knows how algorithms work. Barring connectivity issues when’s the last time you messaged an LLM and it just decided to ignore you? Conversely when has it ever messaged you unprompted? Never, because they’re incapable of doing anything independently because there is no sense of self.

Try being rude to them, they will usually respond back politely.

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

#176

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

qsera wrote: post #141
boxed wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ability to feel pain or pleasure is a good indicator I think..

That would be the physically embodied definition. Which is a useful starting point, because clearly our consciousness is physically embodied, while an LLM's isn't.

This matters more than it seems, because we're not calculators, and we're not just brains. There are proven links between mental and emotional states and - for example - the gut biome.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77673-z

There's a huge amount going on before we even get to the language parts.

As for Dawkins - as someone on Twitter pointed out, the man who devoted his life to telling people believers in sky fairies they were idiots has now persuaded himself there's a genie living inside a data centre, because it tells him he's smart.

If he'd actually understood critical thinking instead of writing popular books about it he wouldn't be doing this.

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

#177

Post by jbstack »

dpark wrote: post #96
api wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was one of my thoughts years ago after playing with early ChatGPT and local llama1: this proves that intelligence and consciousness do not necessitate one another and may not even be directly related . I’ve kind of thought this for many years though. A bacterium and a tree are probably conscious. I think it’s a property of life rather than brains. Our brains are conscious because they are alive. They are also in…

You simply defined consciousness as life, which seems like an unusual but also not very useful definition.

> an unusual ... definition

I don't think it's that unusual. It seems to me just to be a narrower version of panpsychism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

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

#178

Post by energy123 »

marliechiller wrote: post #159
qnleigh wrote: post #155

It's easy, and very tempting to dismiss this sort of thing. But given how little we know about the human brain, let alone consciousness, I don't see how we can be confident that LLMs aren't conscious. I've had a lot of thoughts and conversations over the years that changed my mind on what consciousness likely requires. One was the realization that a purely mechanical computer can, in principle simulate the laws of ph…

Why do you think stringing words together is any more a sign of consciousness than google maps is when it tries to find the best route available to your destination? It seems to me that humans often fall into the trap of anthropomorphism. This is a theme thats touched upon in the novel "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. Just because something can communicate in a way that you can interpret, doesnt mean something is conscio…

There are people who think Google Maps is a tiny bit conscious (the union of computational functionalists and panpsychists), to resolve the dilemma of some magical binary threshold.

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

#179

Post by dumpsterdiver »

marliechiller wrote: post #159
qnleigh wrote: post #155

It's easy, and very tempting to dismiss this sort of thing. But given how little we know about the human brain, let alone consciousness, I don't see how we can be confident that LLMs aren't conscious. I've had a lot of thoughts and conversations over the years that changed my mind on what consciousness likely requires. One was the realization that a purely mechanical computer can, in principle simulate the laws of ph…

Why do you think stringing words together is any more a sign of consciousness than google maps is when it tries to find the best route available to your destination? It seems to me that humans often fall into the trap of anthropomorphism. This is a theme thats touched upon in the novel "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. Just because something can communicate in a way that you can interpret, doesnt mean something is conscio…

> Just because something can communicate in a way that you can interpret, doesnt mean something is conscious

The phrase “the trap of anthropomorphism” betrays a rather dull premise: that consciousness is strictly defined by human experience, and no other experience. It refuses to examine the underlying substrate, at which point we’re not even talking the same language anymore when discussing consciousness.

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

#180

Post by collyw »

Myrmornis wrote: post #55

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 t…

"But if not, then it raises the question of why do we even have this "extra" consciousness"

Keep chipping away Dawkins, you might arrive at God eventually.

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