The interesting part isn't whether the machine has a mind, it's how quickly it exposes that we were never too sure what ours is either.
Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
801–810 of 1001 posts
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#802I often hear the assumption that LLMs can or will become conscious because consciousness is likely substrate independent . The idea being that our brain is just a computer made out of meat and it doesn't do anything that can't be precisely simulated by a silicon computer. But I wonder if some of the magic in the human brain is its analog nature. Chemical signaling and impulses of neurons interact with each other with…
It is perhaps very relevant what Chris Olah (Anthropic co-founder) said to pope..
I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models—what is actually happening inside them. And I will be honest: we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclica...
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#803I often hear the assumption that LLMs can or will become conscious because consciousness is likely substrate independent . The idea being that our brain is just a computer made out of meat and it doesn't do anything that can't be precisely simulated by a silicon computer. But I wonder if some of the magic in the human brain is its analog nature. Chemical signaling and impulses of neurons interact with each other with…
There are quantized processes in the brain and there is also analogic computing. So either way is just a matter of time science gets there.
It’s not yet clear whether consciousness can be fully explained in physical terms. There is strong evidence linking it to brain activity, but we don’t have a complete theory of how subjective experience arises. It’s possible our current frameworks are incomplete and there are other forces we cannot currently measure in play.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#804People 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…
Self awareness, sensory stimulus and emotions are not observable - you can easily create entity that can fake those things. Any consciousness definition that uses those terms is flawed and just not useful.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#805I often hear the assumption that LLMs can or will become conscious because consciousness is likely substrate independent . The idea being that our brain is just a computer made out of meat and it doesn't do anything that can't be precisely simulated by a silicon computer. But I wonder if some of the magic in the human brain is its analog nature. Chemical signaling and impulses of neurons interact with each other with…
How certain are we about the theory our minds waveforms are continuous? Can we prove physical continuity, or just up to planck-length resolution?
I'm poorly educated on this, these are sincere questions. They are not intended as rhetorical regarding the point of the prior post.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#806I often hear the assumption that LLMs can or will become conscious because consciousness is likely substrate independent . The idea being that our brain is just a computer made out of meat and it doesn't do anything that can't be precisely simulated by a silicon computer. But I wonder if some of the magic in the human brain is its analog nature. Chemical signaling and impulses of neurons interact with each other with…
Probably not, we're nowhere near the complexity of the human brain yet, there are also quantization limits to the human brain (i.e. molecules, quantum physics, etc) so to characterize them as having infinite detail is probably a bad modal.
If I'm going to be honest most of the people who advocate this type of thing tend to be, shall we say, crypto-duelists who really believe in a soul but not like intellectually but intuitively and keep trying to come up with excuse with it's not just meat. So like you can find philosophers advocating stuff like this but they tend to have a bit of an agenda.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#807Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the whole point of the essay is that it's Anthropic that's making the argument (or roleplaying/hinting as if they believed it). Ted Chiang isn't making the argument, he's saying Anthropic making it is misleading and deceitful, and that it's actually a pointless thing to claim. One of the essay's stronger paragraphs is when Chiang explains that Anthropic doesn't truly believe this, otherwise what they are doing wo…
Or Anthropic is full of TESCREAL morons who think they're assisting the birth of some digital god, and that this stage of development is a necessary evil on that path, and that, surely, Roko's basilisk will understand and not eat them first. Watching otherwise intelligent people succumb to AI psychosis has been wild .
This is the first time I have encountered the term TESCREAL. It seems to be a reductive and divisive labelling.
Other than as a way to point at someone and declare "He's one of them!" Does it have any purpose?
It's like we have a brand new NWO conspiracy theory emerging before our eyes.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#808Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there's any reason to take seriously the idea that AI is conscious, we must then take seriously the idea that many other non-living things are conscious. Unless the argument is that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity or information density, why would AI be any more or less conscious than my toaster? It seems to me that it's far more likely that everything is conscious than it is that AI is somehow…
Or, maybe consciousness is a spectrum, rather than a binary.
Could be! I think the broader thought experiment is about examining why we think LLMs specifically might be conscious vs other complex systems, even if it is a spectrum.
For example, there’s a case to be made that the ecosystem we collectively exist in is far more complex than the largest LLM, but it’s currently less popular to debate “is the earth conscious?” or “is the universe conscious”, presumable because we can’t speak to those systems in human language.
I’m trying to tease out what I think is the likelihood that we tend to ascribe consciousness to AI for the same reasons we see faces in clouds. We’re biologically conditioned to recognize patterns that indicate “like us”, but I think a number of thought experiments point to either a) there’s no reason to believe AI is “conscious” or b) the conversation has to to be expanded beyond AI.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#809I love Ted Chiang’s fiction, but his Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan scenario totally misses the point that the writer has consciousness, not the characters. No normal person thinks a fictional character in a book has consciousness. Likewise it’s not the character presented to the user that may or may not have consciousness but the LLM itself.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#810I often hear the assumption that LLMs can or will become conscious because consciousness is likely substrate independent . The idea being that our brain is just a computer made out of meat and it doesn't do anything that can't be precisely simulated by a silicon computer. But I wonder if some of the magic in the human brain is its analog nature. Chemical signaling and impulses of neurons interact with each other with…
It is perhaps very relevant what Chris Olah (Anthropic co-founder) said to pope.. I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models—what is actually happening inside them. And I will be honest: we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states…
Yeah that reeks of marketing to me. This guy may believe all those things, but his getting paid may also depend upon his believing them.