Are we conscious at hardware/cell level?
If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
21–30 of 119 posts
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#22I'm so bored with the "are machines conscious" debate. The only thing it has proven is how desperately humans will continue to move the goalposts to the point of ontological collapse in order to preserve their internal sense of primacy. You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where…
I fully agree with this. I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed. This used to be a thing of science fiction, that people dreamed, fantasized about. Now they are everywhere, people rely on them for the most mundane of tasks, and the only debates happening about them are - is their water use efficient enough? Is this CEO likable enough? There seems to be no sense of wonder. Do androids drea…
Most sci-fi is about genuinely sentient AI, and we are far from that. There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation. If you know anything about machine learning, you know that the idea that LLMs have any form of consciousness is ridiculous. Humans just like to anthropomorphise, that is all.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed a classic (upvoted!), but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists. Nor do we know whether it's possible to simulate "just" neurons and get meaningful results on some higher level. People have been trying at that for decades, so far without success. (nice overvie…
> but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists Is it even possible that a complete simulation of the rules of this universe (let alone the content of it) could exist in this universe? I am no expert but I did manage to read most of GEB [0] so I feel fully qualified to s…
It is entirely possible (if perhaps unlikely) that the correct theory of everything is a relatively straightforward expansion of the current standard model.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#24Thinking LLMs are conscious is as ridiculous as thinking a thermostat wants the room to be warm
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#25Reminds me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/505/ Replace universe simulation with a LLM an it’s hard to consider a bunch of rocks shuffling on a beach as conscious. Or alternatively, our own minds are simply (squishy, organic) rocks on a beach, which is quite humbling if you think about it long enough.
Indeed a classic (upvoted!), but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists. Nor do we know whether it's possible to simulate "just" neurons and get meaningful results on some higher level. People have been trying at that for decades, so far without success. (nice overvie…
> [...] but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, [...]
LLMs are nice here: we don't need a theory of everything to simulate them. You can indeed use pebbles on the beach.
Scott Aaronson said that in theory a finite look-up table can win eg a ten minute Turing test (any finite length is fine). Of course, to borrow his argument further, the naive table would be galactic in size. So the real magic is in being able to compress the responses of that table into something human sized / LLM-server sized.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#26Reminds me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/505/ Replace universe simulation with a LLM an it’s hard to consider a bunch of rocks shuffling on a beach as conscious. Or alternatively, our own minds are simply (squishy, organic) rocks on a beach, which is quite humbling if you think about it long enough.
Indeed a classic (upvoted!), but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists. Nor do we know whether it's possible to simulate "just" neurons and get meaningful results on some higher level. People have been trying at that for decades, so far without success. (nice overvie…
I would argue that for the situation of the comic to occur, it's only necessary to have a theory of everything that's sufficiently good to simulate a universe that's close enough to ours that it's hard to notice the difference.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed a classic (upvoted!), but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists. Nor do we know whether it's possible to simulate "just" neurons and get meaningful results on some higher level. People have been trying at that for decades, so far without success. (nice overvie…
> but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists Is it even possible that a complete simulation of the rules of this universe (let alone the content of it) could exist in this universe? I am no expert but I did manage to read most of GEB [0] so I feel fully qualified to s…
> Is it even possible that a complete simulation of the rules of this universe (let alone the content of it) could exist in this universe?
Yes, it is possible! See how a Quine is constructed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)
As an analogy: you can have a zip archive that expands to itself. Or even more so: to itself (the simulation of itself in itself) plus something arbitrary (standing in for the rest of the universe).
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#28I'm so bored with the "are machines conscious" debate. The only thing it has proven is how desperately humans will continue to move the goalposts to the point of ontological collapse in order to preserve their internal sense of primacy. You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where…
I like the debate because I've learned a lot of stuff about consciousness, thinking, free will, determinism, agency, intelligence, emergence, problems with reductionism, qualia, etc... Lots of these concepts may be related but it might just be a correlation.
For example, free will and determinism may be orthogonal concepts (compatibilism).
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#29I'm so bored with the "are machines conscious" debate. The only thing it has proven is how desperately humans will continue to move the goalposts to the point of ontological collapse in order to preserve their internal sense of primacy. You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where…
I fully agree with this. I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed. This used to be a thing of science fiction, that people dreamed, fantasized about. Now they are everywhere, people rely on them for the most mundane of tasks, and the only debates happening about them are - is their water use efficient enough? Is this CEO likable enough? There seems to be no sense of wonder. Do androids drea…
I never thought I'd have so much sympathy for Kate “Forgive me, Mr Data; I am not accustomed to work with non-living devices that… Forgive me again. Your service record says that you are alive.” Pulaski, but here we are.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our bodies could just be rocks on a beach, but whatever it is about us that is capable of observing the output of our own internal thinking (preventing us from just being p-zombies) is not contained within the beach.
The "whatever" part, in strict terms, would be information. Jury is still out whether that is a fundamental component of the universe or not: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundame...
Well, thermodynamics is considered pretty fundamental, and the second law of thermodynamics is pretty much all about information. (But your link already touches that.)
People also interpret the 'unitarity' of quantum mechanics to mean that information is preserved.