Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 1001 posts

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#31

Post by RigelKentaurus »

We don't have a rigorous definition of consciousness, and there are so many questions. Is consciousness a thing that can exist independently on its own? Or is it a quality (like hardness or color) that can only be associated with something else? Is it an emergent property? Is it binary - are things either conscious or not? Or maybe there's no such thing as consciousness; it's just a word we came up with to describe the process of having thoughts and feelings?

My own intuition: it is an emergent, non-binary property that requires a physical substrate like a brain. If I am right, it means that animals have consciousness too (at varying degrees). If GPUs are the "brain", then AI is conscious, or will become so at some point.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#34

Post by ux266478 »

Edman274 wrote: post #9
kelseyfrog wrote: post #5

Consciousness is a label like fat, smart, man, grumpy, cool. Like money, property, or the idea of a week, it's something that we've loosely agreed to out of convenience, not because it's some intrinsic property of the mind. It's a useful label because it determines how we treat things - that's fine. But insisting on searching for it is like searching for cognitive aether. It's the social equivalent of phlogiston. Lik…

Do you believe in the existence of any noun words which serve as something other than a "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience"?

If we take the classical position that words point to real things in the world, "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience" is kind of just regurgitating the meaning of "word". The first half indicating the function, and the second half accounting for the fact we live in a world with a continuum of linguistic disparity.

Now, this position isn't the only position. But a relational model of language for example takes his assertion to an even more extreme place, and suggests they don't function as labels at all.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#35

Post by skybrian »

I think Chiang is right about this, but there is a related philosophical mystery. The trend from Deep Blue to AlphaGo to LLMs solving Erdos problems suggests that Peter Watts was onto something when he wrote Blindsight. Reasoning ability is apparently independent of consciousness?

We haven't really come to grips with that yet. What does it mean if nothing we write proves anything about anyone's consciousness?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#36

Post by shevy-java »

RigelKentaurus wrote: post #31

We don't have a rigorous definition of consciousness, and there are so many questions. Is consciousness a thing that can exist independently on its own? Or is it a quality (like hardness or color) that can only be associated with something else? Is it an emergent property? Is it binary - are things either conscious or not? Or maybe there's no such thing as consciousness; it's just a word we came up with to describe t…

> it is an emergent, non-binary property that requires a physical substrate like a brain. If I am right, it means that animals have consciousness too (at varying degrees). If GPUs are the "brain", then AI is conscious, or will become so at some point.

That's an interesting observation. Though, there are many simple animals. How do you define consciousness here? Is it automatically conscious because it is an animal? What, then, is an animal defined by you?

I don't see AI as conscious. The reason I think of it that way is the hardware. The hardware does not allow for that. Simulation is not comparable to neurons. But with another hardware, it could become conscious eventually. So your statement "will become at some point" may be true, though my definition is based on the underlying hardware and right now this one does not allow for true intelligence, so the whole AI field is a misnomer.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#37

Post by 34jahsg »

It is amusing to see so many venture capitalists suddenly become Marxists. You want your definition. Marx obliges:

"Contrary to idealism, which regards the world as the embodiment of an "absolute idea," a "universal spirit," "consciousness," Marx's philosophical materialism holds that the world is by its very nature material, that the multifold phenomena of the world constitute different forms of matter in motion, that interconnection and interdependence of phenomena as established by the dialectical method, are a law of the development of moving matter, and that the world develops in accordance with the laws of movement of matter and stands in no need of a "universal spirit."

Now go and implement other teachings of Marx, you dialectical venture capitalists!

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#38

Post by famouswaffles »

drfloyd51 wrote: post #26
speak_plainly wrote: post #19

“Counsciousness” is the ultimate moving goalpost, and historically, it’s been one of humanity’s most effective intellectual weapons. An indefinable black box we intentionally gatekeep to draw an arbitrary line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. I don’t know if AI is conscious or not, and I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious. historically, by claiming a monopoly on it, we’ve successfully manufactured the phi…

If we understand how a system “emulates” consciousness then we declare it an emulation. If we don’t quite understand how a system exhibits consciousness then we can say it might be conscious. Basically, we need to leave room for the universal answer (God) to fit into the definition. If we ever scientifically figure out how consciousness arises in our brains, I think we will have a bunch of very depressed people on ou…

>and thus a Godless understanding of how it works

We don't even have that much. Though, some people certainly think they do.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#39

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway713 wrote: post #22

Suppose one selects an arbitrary hot-button issue [X] with two opposing sides and one side has anything less than overwhelming support. And then that person writes an article titled "Side 1 of issue [X] is true". Not "maybe" or "possibly". Just a straight-up declaration by fiat. Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying? And before you say "persuasive" because you're thinking…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#40

Post by FelipeCortez »

ViktorRay wrote: post #3

Ted Chiang is brilliant. His novella “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” altered the course of my life. It changed the way I looked back at certain pivotal moments in my life and taught me to think about those pivotal moments differently than how I was thinking about them. Similar to what happens to one of the characters in the story who ends up changing their perception of a key moment in their life. I won’t go in…

don't you mean "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling"? I think that matches your description more, but I could be wrong
Post reply on HN