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Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

theatlantic.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#371

Post by tvshtr »

Taek wrote: post #281
tvshtr wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there even an agreed and actionable definition of consciousness? I'm worried that if such a thing existed some humans would fail to measure up.

To the best of my knowledge, there is not an agreed and actionable definition of consciousness, and any attempt to make one comfortably fails to cleanly divide humans from machines. It's more of a vibey term, and as such it is genuinely very difficult (perhaps impossible even) to concretely determine whether an LLM possesses consciousness. LLMs successfully express a lot of consciousness-like traits. At some point yo…

As I've mentioned somewhere else already and you pointed out; the issue is that consciousness is a loose term and and it's a semantical issue that should be resolved first. It won't be, because the murkiness is beneficial to the corpus, amongst other things. And to your point about the appearance of "consciousness" being enough imho Chiang explains fairly well why it's not.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#372

Post by FelipeCortez »

aspenmayer wrote: post #137
FelipeCortez wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not OP, but they probably mean the novella that they mentioned, which is also new to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Fr...

Both stories are in the compilation Exhalation, but OP’s description matches what I remember from the story I mentioned more than the one you linked

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#373

Post by saimiam »

dnautics wrote: post #368
cauch wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, for me, the thing is that when you do basic ML, you discover that ML will very often find data pattern that fit the goal but does not correspond to a real mechanism. So, I think there is a flaw in the logic of saying that human text have a pattern of "consciousness mechanism" and therefore LLM will learn "consciousness mechanism" in order to return sentence continuation that is convincing. There is probably…

I think, for me, the thing is that when you tutor undergrads in abstract math, you discover that students will very often find data pattern that fit the goal but does not correspond to a real mathematical principle. sometimes humans making claims about AI intelligence or consciousness also identify spurious patterns that do not correspond to the problems of intelligence or hard consciousness.

Not just undergrads. Even folks who believe in astrology or numerology depend on finding patterns in unrelated events to explain human behaviours.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#374

Post by [deleted] »

high_priest wrote: post #186
sigmar wrote: post #66

>So what context would cause me to seriously consider the possibility that engineers had created a computer program that is conscious and an intentional user of language? Let me outline one potential sequence of steps. The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs; there are many reasons for this, but for the purposes of this discussion the most relevant o…

There is no soul in a human. Just a bunch of systems nudging each other to action. What people call soul is literally the same as the concept of personality. In essence, the way all systems in your body have been calibrated to exist. I believe that the moment an artificial inteligence is going to "receive" a soul, is the moment it is going to be made to sustain itself. Either as a larger package (some bots working to…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#375

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

Nevermark wrote: post #269
cauch wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, for me, the thing is that when you do basic ML, you discover that ML will very often find data pattern that fit the goal but does not correspond to a real mechanism. So, I think there is a flaw in the logic of saying that human text have a pattern of "consciousness mechanism" and therefore LLM will learn "consciousness mechanism" in order to return sentence continuation that is convincing. There is probably…

I didn't make the claim that a model can learn consciousness. Understanding is not consciousness. Their training is all about understanding. There is nothing in their architecture or training that credibly optimizes for rich self-awareness. Given non-persistent experience, non-continuous operation, no ability to build up generalizations and aggregate experience of their own self-awareness over time, they seem to be s…

I’m also fixated on the term “experience” in the context of this debate. To me, consciousness is something that one “experiences”, and the two concepts are intertwined.

I am far from convinced that the training and inference regimes of LLMs would qualify as “experience” by any sense of the word.

Now, if we hooked up a plethora of audiovisual and tactile sensors with live feedback directly to a neural network rich with transformers, that was always powered on and fully autonomous, we may be getting there. But we’d probably also be on the verge of manmade horrors beyond our comprehension.

Biological rodent neural networks in a Petri dish stimulated by electrical impulses - more or less conscious than LLMs?

Human on life support, unable to respond to any external stimuli, “braindead” - more or less conscious than LLMs?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#376

Post by Xeoncross »

lgessler wrote: post #326
Nevermark wrote: post #194

> My intention is to highlight the fact that LLM conversations are cleverly disguised examples of sentence continuation Regardless of bigger issues, this kind of statement reveals a deep misunderstanding. Problem type does not limit problem complexity. Nor does problem type limit solution complexity or power. If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do. And there is…

Raphaël Millière has a very useful term for this kind of vacuous dismissal, the redescription fallacy ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.03910 , page 9): > Recent debates have been clouded by a misleading inference pattern, which we term the “Redescription Fallacy.” This fallacy arises when critics argue that a system cannot model a particular cognitive capacity, simply because its operations can be explained in less abstr…

> or (more pointedly) that brain activity could not possibly implement cognition because it can be described as a collection of neural firings.

This sounds like a dismissal of the argument through a characterized straw man.

That is, it seems that reducing the complexity of the brain to "collection of neural firings" is not being honest about everything involved to a much greater degree than saying neural networks are a "collection of statistical calculations".

I too believe LLM's will grow in complexity, but presently I can not even fathom how they can be compared to the complexity of a system such as the human brain.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#377

Post by Nevermark »

cauch wrote: post #288
Nevermark wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't make the claim that a model can learn consciousness. Understanding is not consciousness. Their training is all about understanding. There is nothing in their architecture or training that credibly optimizes for rich self-awareness. Given non-persistent experience, non-continuous operation, no ability to build up generalizations and aggregate experience of their own self-awareness over time, they seem to be s…

I use "consciousness" because it's the point of the original argument, but in fact, I think my whole comment still work well if you replace "consciousness" with "understanding". My point is that the fact that AI can reproduce convincingly human sentence continuation does not imply that the AI has no choice but ending up using a mechanism that "understand" rather than just have learned data patterns that are very effe…

> the fact that AI can reproduce convincingly human sentence continuation does not imply that the AI has no choice but ending up using a mechanism that "understand" rather than just have learned data patterns

Taken as an absolute without any addition context you are right.

But we are not talking about abstractions but specific successful models. The number of parameters models they have may seem large, but they are very small relative to the training data that they have to summarize. That cannot do it without discovering that patterns that make sense out of it.

And we can verify that. Simply discuss completely disparate topics, with some kind of intersection. Converge several highly unlikely topics, there are so many it would take billions of years to exhaust unlikely combinations.

If the model is only interpolating it will produce gibberish.

But that isn't what happens.

The fact that models can be near expert, and sometimes expert, across vast areas of human knowledge is a clue. If they don't understand that, then the question is, why do we think people understand things. Does having an answer mean a human understands something, or is their intuition and stream of conscious reasoning also not understanding? To be even handed about what we mean by understanding.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#378

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

sdenton4 wrote: post #109
sigmar wrote: post #66

>So what context would cause me to seriously consider the possibility that engineers had created a computer program that is conscious and an intentional user of language? Let me outline one potential sequence of steps. The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs; there are many reasons for this, but for the purposes of this discussion the most relevant o…

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. Is a car a body? Does an AI situated in a car therefore get to have desires and emotions? Is a taupe box with a webcam attached a body? (For that matter: Is a quadropelegic body a body? Do quadropelegics have desires and emotions? Obviously, yes and yes.) Why i…

> If I'm not experiencing any particular emotion in a given moment, am I concious?

No, you’re not. I think even baseline emotional responses to stimuli is table stakes for “consciousness”.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#379

Post by eranation »

Taek wrote: post #272
RagnarD wrote: post #237

The 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 ass…

Can you provide a precise definition of consciousness?

It's just like being in love. No one can tell you your in love, you just know it.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#380

Post by sfn42 »

tsunamifury wrote: post #312
Nevermark wrote: post #194

> My intention is to highlight the fact that LLM conversations are cleverly disguised examples of sentence continuation Regardless of bigger issues, this kind of statement reveals a deep misunderstanding. Problem type does not limit problem complexity. Nor does problem type limit solution complexity or power. If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do. And there is…

Come on, I invented parts of this technology at Google and am baffled why this is debated. We discovered math that decodes data storage in langauge and is able to use sophisticated continuation cohorts from ALL OF HUMAN RECORDED KNOWLEDGE to respond to you in a call/response model with very good synthesis capabilities. Its super useful, but not life or conciousness. Its a simulated echo from our collective recorded b…

Right? It's a computer program. Of course it isn't conscious.
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