does it really matter if LLM has conscious? if they produce working code, then it is useful, whoever if they have real conscious of fake intelligence.
we don't know what the conscious in human brain is either.
Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#232The fact that a LLM is essentially immutable would be my biggest argument against consciousness or self-awareness. It's a big file with a bunch of coordinates describing spatial relationships between tokens. When you give it a prompt, it uses those relationships to generate a string of tokens that is a statistically likely response to that prompt, then it stops. It's not changed by the experience. It doesn't remember…
There are people whose brains don’t form new memories anymore after an accident or surgery, and they eternally live in the time before it happened, and have no memory of what happened a minute ago. Still they are conscious.
They are conscious because even for short periods of time they do form memories and those change them even if only briefly. They think on their own too. It is a very limited level of consciousness though.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any time I bump into a device that acts like a human I'm going to treat it like a human. Because treating things that act human inhumanely is not something I want to learn how to do.
My instincts are pretty different here. - I'll try not to swear at/hit a printer: not because I see the printer as having human-like qualities of being capable but complex and unreliable, but because I want to be a person who can control his temper. - Treating an inhuman thing as human because it can mimic us in some way is not something that I want to do.
So if a machine does become conscious, you're happy being nasty to it until it is proven conscious?
I try not to make errors like that.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#234I think about Star Trek: TNG’s “Measure of a Man” a lot lately. We can be so confident to decide what is and isn’t alive from vibes alone. The conclusion I’m currently at is that I don’t know and probably can’t ever know. Maybe you’re all philosophical zombies. Maybe I am one too! But at some point we will get close enough that it hopefully becomes obvious that we must tread carefully. The entire episode is incredibl…
I think about this from the other end. It cannot be considered a conscious being. There just isn't a world in which we should start to think of a machine using ethics we reserve for humans. AI is essentially infinitely reproducible at zero cost, and won't suffer from decay etc. There's not scarcity to preserve. So, I'd turn off an AI in a moment to save property or real possessions or money. I'd sacrifice property an…
What is the connection between scarcity and consciousness?
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions. How can you have a subjective experience without a body? That's the point, in my opinion: your physical/chemical state (body) in a given moment is then translated into the higher abstraction of the emotion. An emotion that *you* feel, because you are self awa…
> How can you have a subjective experience without a body? Great q. Deepening it further-how can you have a subjective experience without consciousness, which isn't necessarily tied to physicality. Taking it one step further-can you have consciousness without a mind? Who's the first mind, the first cause of it all, that begot both the material and immaterial world? Fun stuff eh?
A lot depends on where you draw the boundary for consciousness. Michael Pollan (in his new book, _A World Appears_) distinguishes simpler sentience from more advanced consciousness, and the requirements for sentience (be aware of sense data, have preferences, be able to respond to senses appropriately) are met by plants and single celled life (e.g. moving up a nutrient gradient). Recent findings in plant science are particularly mind blowing. Some are in Pollan's book, more are in _The Light Eaters_.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#236My position: If some version of panpsychism is true, AIs are plausibly conscious We don’t know whether panpsychism is true Therefore, we don’t know whether AIs are conscious Hence, confident proclamations that they aren’t conscious have dubious validity
I believe in God and that the base of our reality is his consciousness, therefore anything of sufficient complexity has consciousness.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#237The analogy I make is between airplanes and birds.
Birds are alive, are conscious, flap their wings, and fly. Planes are not alive, are not conscious, do not flap their wings - and fly.
Similarly, current AIs are not alive, are not conscious - but think.
All prior entities that thought, were human, so the only experience humans had with other thinking entities were other humans. The huge mistake now being made is assuming that because they think, they're alive and conscious as well. Current AIs are neither, and are therefore profoundly and qualitatively different than humans - even though they do think.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#238I think about Star Trek: TNG’s “Measure of a Man” a lot lately. We can be so confident to decide what is and isn’t alive from vibes alone. The conclusion I’m currently at is that I don’t know and probably can’t ever know. Maybe you’re all philosophical zombies. Maybe I am one too! But at some point we will get close enough that it hopefully becomes obvious that we must tread carefully. The entire episode is incredibl…
I think about this from the other end. It cannot be considered a conscious being. There just isn't a world in which we should start to think of a machine using ethics we reserve for humans. AI is essentially infinitely reproducible at zero cost, and won't suffer from decay etc. There's not scarcity to preserve. So, I'd turn off an AI in a moment to save property or real possessions or money. I'd sacrifice property an…
Are you a vegan?
If not, then your comment's claim is false.
Anyway, the deeper solution is to acknowledge that all life is sacred, and infinities cannot be compared, and some decisions are impossible to make, and some tragedies cannot be averted, and "prioritization" is a distraction that forces choices when choices are not strictly necessary.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#239Discussions on LLM consciousness feel like a psychological campaign to distract us from the awful effects of data centers and the current economic recession heading into a depression.
We can talk about consciousness when the LLMs have proven useful for all of humanity, not just their billionaire owners.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
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