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

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

#41

Post by rationalist »

deadbabe wrote: post #7
WhiteDawn wrote: post #3

Reminds 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.

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.

I think you're being downvoted because you're announcing it as an absolute truth, of which we do not have evidence.

However I am open to your belief (and not on religious or theistic grounds which I assume many people might think you're talking about) because people have (non-religious) experiences that lend to such possibilities.

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

#42

Post by indigo945 »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #39

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.

    > And it kind of assumes that qualia have an ultimate 
    > physical manifestation - rather than being merely a
    > rhetorical device.
Denial of Qualia has long been an outlier position in the philosophy of mind, so this is not altogether surprising. (This is saying nothing, of course, about whether it is true or not.)

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

#43

Post by IshKebab »

mnewme wrote: post #24

Thinking LLMs are conscious is as ridiculous as thinking a thermostat wants the room to be warm

Why though? There are only two reasonable reasons I can think of:

1. Scale. There's clearly a scale of consciousness (a jellyfish isn't very conscious but an ape is). Current LLMs are so small (on the scale of brains) that they must be not very conscious at all.

2. Structure. There might be some fundamental structure of computation that is required for consciousness that LLMs don't have yet. For example the ability to form memories (they don't really have that), or some structure of weights that gives consciousness.

My guess is it's definitely 1. and probably also 2.

But I don't think that means thinking LLMs are conscious is completely ridiculous, just a bit premature. I would not be surprised if they are conscious in 50 years.

The real question is how would we ever know that they are. The only reason we know animals are conscious is by direct experience, and we'll never have that for AI.

Anyway this blog post looks like typically worthless philosophy.

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

#44

Post by hannasanarion »

MrDrDr wrote: post #33
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 consciousnes…

Sounds like you might also be tending towards Illusionism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism#Illusi...) the idea that "Consciousness" isn't a real "thing", or even a real property of a thing, just the name we give to one pattern that emerges from adaptive reasoning systems.

I think that Illusionism and related philosophies will tend to be seen as "correct" once AI systems become more and more commonplace, and people will be forced to dismiss the whole concept of "consciousness" along with mind/body dualism in general as a massive category error that philosophers have been making since antiquity.

When you get down to it, philosophy of consciousness mostly exists because philosophers have assumed that because "mind", "soul", "consciousness" etc are nouns in our language, and that since nouns are "persons places and things" and mind is a noun, mind must be a thing, which is of course not how language works and not sound logic.

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

#45

Post by ChrisGreenHeur »

The existence of qualia does not mean the existence of moral facts.

An llm is in principle implementable with a large lookup table where the prompt is the hash. And it can be implemented in an emulator running an emulator running an emulator of the operating system the llm app runs in. How far are you willing to stretch this substrate idea?

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

#46

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

eru wrote: post #27
dofm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's also information in the compiler and the zip binary, without that I'm pretty sure it's not possible.

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

#47

Post by bitwize »

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.

Mass Effect distinguishes between AI, which is sentient enough to be a person; and VI (Virtual Intelligence) which is more like a conversational user interface. What we have built in real life may qualify as a VI by the Mass Effect standard, but it's a crappy one.

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

#48

Post by ChrisGreenHeur »

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…

How about I call it not conscious at all, not even a little bit?

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

#49

Post by prmph »

eru wrote: post #32
mnewme wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are committing a type error.

Consciousness does not necessarily arise from computation, just as simulating snowfall on the computer does not make it cold

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

#50

Post by f6v »

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 agree that the goalpost is moving all the time. But the whole debate is a red herring. We don't have a good definition for consciousness. I can't really quantify the difference between a bee and a dog.
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