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Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
831–840 of 1001 posts
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#832Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of discussions about consciousness yet no useful definition. All fall into one (or more) categories: - not observable (feelings, agency etc) - not useful (spiritual definitions, definitions that degrade into consciousness = being human/animal)
Agency is entirely observable.
How do you observe the ability to make decisions which action to take? You can observe that one does something, not that they could decide to do something.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#833When 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…
It's perfectly rational for AI researchers to think consciousness could emerge in a software neural network. If what goes on between your ears isn't consciousness emerging from a network of neurons, it must be magic. So anyone claiming it's impossible to make machine consciousness should hedge that bet. There's a chance it could arrive tomorrow. On the other hand we've got no idea whether that chance is so close to z…
On the other-other hand, how will we know when it arrives? We don't have a concise definition of consciousness and the consciousness that would arrive wouldn't know it's conscious as defined in the higher-order system.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#834When 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…
Why do you have no inkling that your spreadsheet or terminal emulator is conscious, yet when that same machine is running an LLM all of a sudden we’re debating its consciousness? Anthropic seems to have chosen their in-house philosopher well - one who’ll be amenable to getting confused in their favour.
Why do you assume other humans or cats and dogs are conscious? I'd suggest it's because they behave as if they are. LLMs show some signs of human like awareness, at least of text contents, whereas spreadsheets don't.
When doctors are testing if humans are conscious they'll do things like hold out their hand and say how many fingers am I holding up. Some LLMs can pass that.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#835Or more accurately, we are not qualified to say if something is conscious or not.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#836There's currently no way to prove that something is or isn't conscious. I would bet that rocks and LLMs aren't conscious. I would bet that humans and dogs are conscious. But I can't prove it. Whenever people try to prove it (in either direction), they end up resorting to sophistry.
This state of affairs could change. If neuroscientists develop a deeper understanding of consciousness, we could talk about it with more precision. Perhaps we could prove that LLMs do or don't possess consciousness. Some neuroscientists claim we already have the requisite knowledge, but I'm skeptical (and there's no consensus).
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#837I’m not on one side or the other, but I feel that it’s incredible that we are in the timeline where we argue that we have synthesized consciousness.
That we are even discussing it is absolutely wild to me.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#838I 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…
I wish people would knock this off. There is zero path to AGI at the moment — and all the Anthropic/pentagon Sam Altman/AI-skynet stuff is scaring people into being fearful (and outright ignorant) to the actual uses of this probabilistic NPL tool. You can't use AI atm without a human with proper knowledge spot checking and directing it. We should market it that way.
The current theme is that agi may not be definable, and an ai which matches humans on all economically relevant tasks is close enough for business purposes.
Billions spent on RL may be good enough to beat human performance.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#839There's currently no way to prove that something is or isn't conscious. I would bet that rocks and LLMs aren't conscious. I would bet that humans and dogs are conscious. But I can't prove it. Whenever people try to prove it (in either direction), they end up resorting to sophistry. This state of affairs could change. If neuroscientists develop a deeper understanding of consciousness, we could talk about it with more…
I actually don't think neuroscience can solve it either. Science could decide whether, e.g. equivalent physical processes are occurring in dogs and humans, and you could argue that solves the question for things with physical brains, but even then it can't measure whether another brain has the same subjective experience as you do. It can't really do that for other humans. It certainly can't answer that question for human askers regarding a different substrate where humans have no ground truth to compare with. The Hard Problem is going to remain Hard.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#840I 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…
If we want to be really pedantic, a computer does not necessarily need to be digital. You could build a consciousness-coprocessor with analog circuitry that brings in what you say could be needed.
But honestly I doubt that there is a real requirement for that, surely you could just increase the resolution you're running the simulation at until the difference decreases sufficiently. Imagine using 256 bit floats for example.