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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

#721

Post by cbolton »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #675
cbolton wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I don't understand how one can accept this argument. I mean if you believe in mind-body dualism it can make sense. But AFAIK Searle doesn't, instead he holds that there's something special about the brain biology that enables consciousness and that you won't find in a computer. I don't see why that would be the case if the computer can simulate the real world, and I find Searle's argument against simulation, tha…

> simulating rain doesn't make you wet, falls flat: it can make things wet in simulation, and if you connect it to sprinklers it will make you wet It's not simulating rain if it's making you wet by using sprinklers?

I mean you can connect the computer to sprinklers that activate when the system detects rain in the simulation if that's what you're after (that was just an aside to note that of course you don't get wet from a simulation disconnected from the real world).

But I guess that was a distraction from the main point: If consciousness emerges from biological processes in the brain connected to the world with a body, why would it not emerge from a simulation of these processes connected to the real world with sensors and actuators?

It seems like circular reasoning to me: The simulation is not like the real thing because it lacks the special thing that enables consciousness (that's Searle's biological naturalism). And it lacks what enables consciousness because it's not the real thing (that's the weather analogy).

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#722

Post by criddell »

easyThrowaway wrote: post #666
rickydroll wrote: post #505

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 hope before I die we finally prove that the human brain has no peculiar qualia but it is an entirely deterministic, albeit extremely sophisticated, machine. And by touching the right triggers, even the worst human being can become a saint. That would finally force us to rethink how we see the morality of "virtuosity", punishment and our justice system.

You may have set up a false dichotomy. Qualia and determinism aren't necessarily at odds with each other.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#723

Post by jillesvangurp »

vmg12 wrote: post #88

People 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 arbitra…

There's a at least a few hundred years of philosophers debating and publishing these topics. We're not exactly starting from zero when it comes to usable definitions.

The meta issue here is that mostly the online debate on this is a bit lazy and hand wavy. I'm not really up to speed with most of that literature so I'm not not that qualified to add to it. But I know enough to recognize when others aren't either.

For a proper debate, you'd want people that are expressing views that are at least grounded in the existing views or counter them in a way that holds up to scrutiny. This article doesn't do that.

As you said even just outlining what particular notion of consciousness the author subscribes to would be helpful. Which of course he doesn't and makes this article a bit of a sand castle based on a very loose foundation. There's a whole lot of "if this is true and if that analogy holds then this also needs to be true" that you could easily challenge. That all makes the article a bit of a nothing burger in terms of conclusions.

I happen to agree with the conclusion that AIs are not conscious. Yet. They could be. I don't see why not.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#724

Post by jmull »

MrScruff wrote: post #609
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…

Do you believe consciousness to be an emergent property of the laws of physics?

Regardless, the question still stands: "What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious?"

Just because consciousness emerged for we humans and other animals through one mechanism doesn't mean consciousness has/will/can emerge from current LLM technology.

For this extraordinary claim, I think the burden is firmly on those who are arguing that it has/will/can.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#726

Post by vidarh »

marius_ wrote: post #725

I really don’t understand how people can even consider LLMs to be anything more than an extremely sophisticated auto-complete. Logic thinking itself emerges from completing patterns. Nothing more to it than that.

I don't understand how people can claim to know that, given we don't know what consciousness is

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#727

Post by 1shooner »

tsukikage wrote: post #607
overgard wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the machines don't understand. They predict. And what they predict is the next token. I'm not trying to beat this horse to death, but you have to realize using the word "understand" is anthropomorphising it. It's essentially the chinese room experiment -- if the rules are followed, no understanding is neccessary . If the tokens didn't correlate to words imbued with meaning outside the system, if the LLMs were tra…

What does “understand” mean? Turing complete systems can be built out of matrix multiplications, out of attention, out of key/value lookups. The Chinese room is Turing complete. By claiming it cannot understand things because it is built out of components computing devices can be built out of, we are claiming no computer can because no computer can. This is a very bold claim indeed, and also we’re assuming the conclu…

>What does “understand” mean?

Exactly.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#728

Post by jmull »

We'd need a good definition of consciousness to get anywhere on this.

I suspect such a definition would include agency, which includes desires and goals for the self.

LLMs don't seem to have agency, and seem unlikely to get it since they are specifically engineered to do as told.

No doubt someone is trying, as we speak, to do just this. But I doubt the effort will be large -- LLMs are engineered to do as told because that's where the money is, and you need a lot of money to create LLMs, at least when doing anything novel.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#730

Post by __alexs »

meta_gunslinger wrote: post #686
__alexs wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This all comes back to Dualism. A radical and dangerous ideology that is fundamentally unscientific but all too common.

Dualism is not radical by definition, since most cultures during 99.9999% of human history believe/believed in it. What's radical is Scientism.

Radical does not just mean untraditional. It can also mean "advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs". Which do you think I meant?
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