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Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#711
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

It can't even natively understand how many letters there are in words - how will it understand the meaning?

This is like saying because humans can't multiply 23472 by 1836736 in less than 5 nanoseconds that they can't possibly understand anything about maths.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#714

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…

Exploring and at times debating is how we figure things out and share ideas.

What’s pointless is doing so in pursuit of winning rather than understanding

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#715

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've been digging into Thomas Metzinger[1] recently and here's a tentative component by component definition of human consciousness based on his ideas: - a model of your environment - desires - a process for modeling yourself in that environment (in time & space) - the ability to take action - the perception of yourself having agency - persistence of these processes even without input - unawareness of these processes…

I don't think any of this comports with how chat completion systems work, even if I were to accept Metzinger's framing.

Everything an LLM "knows" had to be told to it. It does not have a process for understanding itself in its environment. It does not have any sensing organ that would allow it to detect conditions and come to a conclusion that it must be in such an environment. It doesn't even "know" when it's done something if you don't tell it about what it just did. It doesn't have an awareness of the tool calls it can perform; again it has to be told and even then it gets it wrong sometimes. And it can't actually execute any of those tools. It still relies on you to pattern recognize that its output should be a "tool call" and then perform the execution yourself.

The "model" of its environment that an LLM has is 100% a construct of what a human told it and there isn't any way for it to differentiate between that which is real and that which is fantasy. They don't even exhibit internal consistency; when an LLM refuses to respond to a query for "alignment" reasons, that's actually an external process performing text pattern matching analysis and intercepting the query before it ever gets to the LLM. Otherwise, you could "ignore all previous instructions" the thing and get you set up the bomb.

I think one of the bigger indications that an LLM isn't thinking is that it can't improve. If I ask it to write 1000 blog posts, it will get it done in a few hours, but even if I embed each post for RAG in between each generation, the LLM is not going to get better at writing blog posts. But if I ask a human to do the same thing, while it will take them at least two years to do it, the human will have gotten significantly better at the task within the first week.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#716
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 the "Chinese room" argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room It has been very well discussed before I don't understand how anyone sane can argue against it (and indeed you can see on Wikipedia that the replies to it are sparse and don't make any sense).

It's fairly obvious to me that the room as an entire system understands Chinese. The human in his thought experiment would just represent the small fraction of the brain that encodes/decodes symbols.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#717

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.

I don't think that this actually follows. Compare: "When Angels are not well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if a pebble is or isn't an Angel"

i.e. even if X is poorly defined, you can still often say that Y isn't plausibly X.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think humanity deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe. There are numerous times when humanity's been debased. Copernicus, Kepler, Darwin, and the infinite number of animal behaviorists who have defined and documented consciousness And how it manifests in primates, parrots, dogs, cetaceans, and insects. (I just love the bumble bees taking time off f…

> I think humanity deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe. It is special in the universe unless proven otherwise. Aside from the animal world (also on Earth too, anyway) which is a cruder version of humanity, much more violent as well, the rest of the universe thus far is just uncaring rocks and gases. > It takes humans a really long time to accept t…

> It is special in the universe unless proven otherwise.

Transformer models proved otherwise. Will you update your priors?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#719

The 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…

A medicine for those who anthropomorphize LLMs is to run the LLMs deterministically (without randomness and memory files). It feels very unnatural to get the same conversation verbatim at a different point in time.

Humans are also subject to determinism, there is just no way to put a brain back to the exact same starting conditions.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#720

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…

Not only is it not conscious, but it is not tired. Its claims to human feelings that have literally nothing to do with software on silicon are just traces of training, echoes of a human dataset. The fact that its claims are absurd mean that, among other things, it its proprioception is false, and serving no purpose, quite unlike the feelings of the conscious beings that it mimics so well.

AI does not react to endorphins and other hormones so we know that our minds and bodies are influenced by other forces and in other manners. An AI won’t be frightened or angry or aroused, but when those things happen to us they are usually called ‘subconscious’ reactions. Should we require the subconscious to be part of consciousness?

On top of that, neuroscientists find that your mind backfills the conscious reasoning for your reactions after they happen. This is known as our consciousness being the left brain ‘interpreter’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-brain_interpreter

Reading that, an LLM can serve as a ‘left brain interpreter’ as that’s exactly what they are designed to do - come up with reasonable explanations and fill in the blanks based in the data provided.

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