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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

#631

Post by sysguest »

starbugs wrote: post #602
sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

> When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. That's like saying if matter itself is not understood and well defined (which it isn't) in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if jumping from a skyscraper is or is not deadly. A lot of practical aspects of life do not need to be properly defined as lon…

maybe we can debate, but not arrive at conclusion?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#632

Post by globnomulous »

avaer wrote: post #573

Whether anything is conscious is about as important and amorphous as whether God exists; opinions are a matter of religion, not science. Just like the religious leaders of olde, there will be many attempts to rationalize the AI God in the science.

> Whether anything is conscious is about as important and amorphous as whether God exists

Whether something is conscious is important for many reasons, not least the ethical implications. You and I have internal lives, and we expect others to respect that somewhat, because ignoring it is hypocrisy (if you ignore my wishes, should anybody care about yours?) and cruelty (ignoring my wishes causes me to suffer).

Something doesn't need to be empirically verifiable, let alone scientifically, to be true. Neither of us can prove that we have internal lives, but neither of us questions it -- and we consider it important enough that most of us think it entitles us to certain rights.

Absolutely none of this is amorphous. It's precise and unambiguous, and has enormous implications. History also shows everywhere that we're better, kinder, and more responsible when we choose to care about it.

Whether LLMs are conscious matters in more practical ways, too, because beliefs about these things alter the way people use and think about them. If I think an LLM is conscious, then I think it's capable of something like knowledge or values. Human beings, moreover, are social creatures. These tools are dangerous and seductive precisely because they tap into that part of us. Denying LLMs are conscious and rejecting the parts of them that take advantage of our social-animal wetware is intellectual self-defense. I'm not sure how effective it is (it doesn't stop us from responding to the convincing social cues that the tools feed us), but I have to think it's better than nothing, and it's certainly less dangerous than the belief that the tools are conscious.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#633

Post by pengstrom »

sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

I'd say these attempts at arguments (for either position) is how we make progress understanding consciousness.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#635

Post by nomel »

ijidak wrote: post #590
haktan wrote: post #586

I don't understand the most of the responses here. What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious? Even if AI with current computer architecture gets much more intelligent than humans, it will still have the same amount of consciousness. Its still bunch of instructions. If we got a lot of people together and did all the instructions by hand to get an LLM result would we also create t…

That's actually a powerful way of stating it. If I did all of these calculations by hand, would it be conscious... That's a powerful argument I haven't seen stated quite that way before.. I do think it's hard to know when consciousness exists, because we can't really prove it for our neighbor. We just intuitively know that it would be crazy, even immoral, to assume otherwise. But, It's likely easier to dismiss consci…

If you manually fired the neurons in a brain by measuring the ion concentrations at its subsides, would it be consciousness?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#636

Post by MrScruff »

DonHopkins wrote: post #622
MrScruff wrote: post #620

The reason people are confused by LLMs is that they are stochastic parrots. They do an incredibly good job of emulating human behaviours and speech patterns as that's what they've been trained on. But like an actual parrot, it's impossible to say exactly how much conciousness they actually have. I certainly would argue that a parrot is concious, although likely less so than a human.

By "they" do you mean LLMs, or people, or you in particular? Because you're unoriginally parroting a banal thought stopping sequence of tokens that many people have said before without understanding what it means, so it's impossible to say exactly how much conciousness you actually have.

I can't actually figure out what you're reacting to - perhaps you could elaborate?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#637

Post by spacebacon »

amelius wrote: post #634

A narcissist version of Descartes' famous quote: "Consciousness always finds the locus of highest intelligence. That is why I am conscious." However, it may soon be taken over by AI ...

Both LLMs and most humans treat symbols as determined. Symbols are maps, not territory. LLMs just inherit our ignorance to this and stubborn attempts make circle from a square.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#638

Post by rerdavies »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #375
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’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 wit…

I point of sorts. Assuming that is true (I don't think it is), the big question that urgently needs to be addressed is what happens when we DO give LLMs tools to interact with the real (or virtual) world. And people are doing that, right now, in both real and virtual worlds. And people ARE giving LLMs the ability to run continuously for long periods of time, sometimes with enormous context buffers. People ARE putting LLMs into robots with front-end ML and LLM systems for visual processing, and back-end ML systems for autonomous control.

And, yes, concerns about whether biological rodent neural networks are or are not conscious come up frequently in the biological neural network papers. I'm not sure I would want to be a researcher trying to get an experiment past an ethics committee if my biological neural network had 25B rat neurons. (I would hope that they could not).

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#639

Post by oulipo2 »

slopinthebag wrote: post #189
oulipo2 wrote: post #120

I believe everything is conscious, even stones. On the long timescale, stones decay, their hydrogen is released, they form water, which brings life, which brings plants and animals, but all of this is one big process, and everything is infused with consciousness from the start

That's cool. You might already know it but it's called Panpsychism and it's a pretty interesting theory.

I didn't know the term, but I'll look it up, thanks! :)

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#640

Post by tsukikage »

krupan wrote: post #229
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…

"If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do." But the machine doesn't have to understand humans to do that. It gets trained on a whole bunch of sentences and then it is able to complete text. You could maybe claim that it "understands" the text but even that's a stretch.

Your “and then” is doing a lot of work there. The steps between may or may not include some form of “learn to understand humans”, but you can’t just hide them behind “and then” if what we are doing is claiming some particular thing is not in the list.

Through training on human text, we are building implicitly in the weights a statistical model of what humans might write in response when presented with arbitrary pieces of text. It turns out that we can make these incredibly accurate.

If building an accurate internal model of something then using it to predict that thing’s behaviour is different to gaining understanding of that thing, we will need to pin down exactly what “understanding” means, or we are forever doomed to talk at cross purposes.

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