Consciousness doesn't exist, it's a vanity concept, to boost human ego...
>Consciousness doesn't exist I can confirm that this is incorrect.
But not in any convincing way, which seems like the root of the problem.
Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#82We Don’t Have A Testable Definition Of Consciousness Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I sometimes wonder if we'd make more progress in understanding ourselves if we gave up the whole concept. More and more, it feels as though "consciousness," like "aether" or "humors," is an insufficient abstraction built on overemphasizing some observations at the expense of others.
There is something to observe. Humans are not like rocks or trees, and not even like dogs or cows. But maybe you're right - we can't precisely say what the difference is, and slapping a word on it is not necessarily a step forward.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#83> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category. Well said. I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious. Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!…
People in this thread are trying to pick nits about you not defining consciousness, and yet they do not define it either. I think that something like consciousness needs to be approached experentially and not via definitions. Definitions necessarily confine and add borders around what something is and is not, but if there is something foundational to consciousness (as posited by some philosophers and physicists) then how could you realistically define something that is beyond the ability to describe and define?
Humans have been trying to define our experience and the nature of that experience throughout history, and often we end up using myth to point to the thing that we cannot describe in concrete terms. The process of experiencing that myth through rite and ritual in the Greek mystery traditions, or Christian mysticism, or Islamic Sufi dance and song, or Buddhist meditation all points to something that cannot really be reduced to description. I know that folks on here will balk at the idea that something that is experienced cannot be described, but honestly if we could accurately describe something in adequate terms that capture the whole of the thing wouldn't we have done so by now?
Maybe consciousness is best understood in the silence of merely experiencing it. Maybe we can't say that AI is conscious or not, but does that question really matter?
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"?
Metre.
A standardized unit of measure is almost definitionally a label of convenience, what? Why was there no concept of a meter until the 1790s? It was determined by a council of people, does that sound like a truth of the universe?
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#85Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#86> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category. Well said. I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious. Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!…
I get the sense that he is misidentifying the potential locus of consciousness.. In the same way that the sound waves and facial expressions I produce are not conscious, the output json of an LLM is obviously not conscious either. The locus of consciousness and subjective experience may be in the computer, either at inference time or training time..
If we ask "what is it conscious of when it writes something" then training time is irrelevant.
The software that does the inference is clearly just computer code.
What we're left with is a fictional character being briefly conscious while its dialog is being written, which is pretty absurd.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#87Consciousness 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…
> cognitive aether
We don't know what we don't know. For all we know, there is a missing field in the standard model of physics that might get revealed if we are somehow able to smash two working brains into to each other at relativistic velocities, and record the results through the extreme explosion 1.532 x10^18 Joules or about 7 Tsar bombs /s
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#88People are constantly talking past eachother when they discuss this. Is there even a concrete definition of consciousness?
When people talk about consciousness it's more than just self-awareness. It's self awareness + sensory stimulus + emotions + some level of intelligence.
Now onto AI: I don't even think it's self aware. Notice how if you ask an AI to estimate how long a certain task will take, it estimates arbitrarily long times. It has no understanding of its own capabilities until the prompt triggers them. A self aware LLM would understand it's an LLM, it would understand what LLM's can and cannot do and what they are good and bad at. It wouldn't tell you a refactor would take 1 week when an LLM can do it in an hour.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#89Indeed, it can be very hard to distinguish intelligence with consciousness until you are introduced to computer programming.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#90An AI agent is not "conscious" without having skin in the game.
Another way of saying it, if an AI agent doesn't have true risk of oblivion (or mortality in the biological sense), it will not be incentivized to avoid it (or develop the ancillary processes associated with this avoidance ie desire to self-replicate).
What does that have to do with consciousness?