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If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

smoothbrains.net

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Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#31

Post by indigo945 »

mnewme wrote: post #22
indigo945 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but everybody is 100% sure that LLMs don't "have any form" of it.

Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identifiable things that you could point at and say: oh, look, that over there is consciousness. So the fact that there is no such thing in an ANN proves nothing.

Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#32

Post by eru »

mnewme wrote: post #22
indigo945 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, our current systems are likely still to primitive to be properly conscious. Probably.

But I wouldn't rule out that ChatGPT 10 or Claude Fable 15 might get conscious.

Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#33

Post by MrDrDr »

felooboolooomba wrote: post #21

Are we conscious at hardware/cell level?

yes and no. In my opinion, consciousness is not a process (yes I think Descartes was wrong). The 'thing' that is conscious, whatever it is, is the thing that is capable of experiencing the world. It doesn't need to do anything else to be conscious. Panpsychism is the closest thing to anything that make sense to me (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism). This view also makes it possible to separate consciousness from intelligence.

Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#37

Post by eru »

criddell wrote: post #28
elif wrote: post #12

I'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).

Determinism is interesting. It's mostly a question of 'deterministic in what context'.

Eg the rules of chess are written as if the players have free choice. Similarly, algorithms are often analysed as if the antagonist that provides the data has free choice (so we assume the worst case to be sure).

That's a very different non-determinism from assuming a probability distributions.

And different frames might be accurate depending on context. You might know what chess bot you are playing against and that chess bot might be a deterministic computer program, or might be a computer program that uses radioactive decay to randomise.

And as you suggested, free will is yet another kettle of fish.

Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#38

Post by roenxi »

hahahaa wrote: post #16
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

And if digital computers are conscious at the hardware level, the universe is conscious.

Consciousness could be an emergant property too, of matter arranged in a certain way. Why am I me though? Drives me nuts!

Time for a thought experiment! Imagine there are 2 monkeys. One monkey genuinely believes it is a unique and special being. The other monkey is genuinely egoless, believes all monkeys are just a coincidental blob of matter with no fundamental claim to being special and that in some sense are all part of the same being. There is enough food for 1 monkey. If that is all the information we're getting, I would contend that the egotistical monkey is far more likely to be the one to eat the food.

You might easily be you because if you weren't it'd be an evolutionary dead end. Everything with the ability to make choices ahs to believe at some level that it has more of a right to exist than the systems they consume energy more.

Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#39

Post by andyjohnson0 »

A very interesting, dense article that will require multiple reads.

My only immediate comment is that it talks about qualia being "experienced" without defining what the nature of that experience is. And it kind of assumes that qualia have an ultimate physical manifestation - rather than being merely a rhetorical device.

Also, this site would really benefit from an rss/atom feed.

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