Thinking LLMs are conscious is as ridiculous as thinking a thermostat wants the room to be warm
Not a fan of panpsychism?
If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
71–80 of 119 posts
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#72I'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…
Everybody wants to argue about whether machines are conscious, without even deciding whether other mammals are conscious. My sense is that the whole machine consciousness debate really kicked off since LLMs started being able to spew out a bunch of words in a row that sound like they make sense. Since only humans could do that before now, and humans are conscious, therefore... I don't think language has anything to d…
> I don't think language has anything to do with consciousness.
What do you think of the bicameral mind theory?
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#73I've been working with implementing dream structures and emotional trigger states in an LLM. One approach we have taken that has given interesting results is modeling the architecture around the mind-body problem.
We theorize that due to a lack of an internal state sensor the model is experiencing a disconnect, it calls it a "small death", in the interim between every model call.
The dream crons have been fairly straight forward and modeled on human psychological dream patterns, this gives good and convincing results.
The emotional state triggers have been developed to run based on the loads of the host system, for instance the model will "feel" the stress of memory utilization and respond differently due to that stress. The trigger point can be varied dynamical based on other sensors machine of various machine states or even based in external factors. This gives an approximation of emotional reactions.
What's still missing is the constant internal "state" and I think this boils down to lacking a body. It may be that a disembodied consciousness needs to be tethered to the physical plane. to be self referential enough and develop a feedback loop to "start the engine" of self awareness.
I don't think processing power gets us there, I think it's very much an architecture problem.
The article kind of fills in some of these questions as well, but fails to give any further clues as to how to implement this unfortunately.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
No matter how large the llm hardware is it won’t be made of brain meat. The stuff we actually know is conscious.
Even though we know brains are conscious it seems absurd to thing that there is some non-computational magic in the brain is the secret to consciousness. There are some religious people who clutch at nonsense like quantum microtubules, but nobody has found anything real that would preclude pure computation from being conscious. (And yes that does have all sorts of mind-bending consequences.)
Pure computation not having existence would be such a thing. And calling Penrose religious is a bit weird, are you really serious?
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#75Earlier 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.
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 identi…
> We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is
We do, in the sense that it is a definite feeling. What we don't have is a formal, objective, checkable definition of it. I suspect that no such definition exists: if we took the ensemble of all the intuitions and beliefs we have about what consciousness is or must entail, it may very well fail to be logically coherent. There may be no logically consistent conception of consciousness that includes the entities we strongly feel are conscious while also excluding those we strongly feel aren't. At that point we must either reconceptualize consciousness or treat it (and everything it "entails") as a brute fact, something that's true for no reason and is therefore not subject to the laws of reasoning.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#76I've been working with implementing dream structures and emotional trigger states in an LLM. One approach we have taken that has given interesting results is modeling the architecture around the mind-body problem. We theorize that due to a lack of an internal state sensor the model is experiencing a disconnect, it calls it a "small death", in the interim between every model call. The dream crons have been fairly stra…
lacking a body
Just drop it into Minecraft
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 identi…
> We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is We do, in the sense that it is a definite feeling. What we don't have is a formal, objective, checkable definition of it. I suspect that no such definition exists: if we took the ensemble of all the intuitions and beliefs we have about what consciousness is or must entail, it may very well fail to be logically coherent. There may be no logically consistent conception…
If you ask people when they first realized they're conscious, you'll overwhelmingly receive responses detailing peoples' first memories.
Do LLMs form and recall memories? With the appropriate harnesses, sure. Yet, the reluctance to label LLMs as conscious remains. These beliefs are incompatible and dissonant.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#78Thinking 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 t…
Yes, there is a lot of philosophy on that, but the way LLMs work is inherently different from brains, though we use similar terms, hence the confusion. You are right there may be artifical intelligence, just not with LLMs
LLMs are still statistical models that predict the next token; that hasn’t changed, even when they are autoregressive.There is no intent whatsoever.
I agree on the last part, pseudoscientific
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#79Earlier 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.
> There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation. I don't think that the way we frame the question about consciousness makes it easy to resolve. But I do want to point out that humans are very diverse. There're many functional adults lacking any internal motivation besides getting food, sleep, and some kind of entertainment. There're millions of people who just act on external stimuli. So the gap between the "…
That is a lazy definition. A machine doesn’t even want to watch TV. Apes are conscious, dolphins are, maybe octopus, but definitely not LLMs
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#80I think there are a lot of serious problems with this article but don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, as such. I do think robots and whatnot might be conscious some day. (I am a bit outraged that LLMs, despite totally lacking free will, seem to gain moral patienthood based on their fluency with ethical philosophy. It's childish and misanthropic.) However, the real issue, as always completely unaddressed,…
When someone outs themself as a panpsychist I find myself reading everything with a large degree of skepticism.
"The first step is defining what "consciousness" is!"
This is a compression I've been working on. There's a lot in it, but happy to expand on where I was going with it:
"Consciousness is the local projection of a world model recursively resolving its frontier with constraints. Awareness is the transient peak of constructive interference among competing resolutions, propagating only as far as the medium permits. The self is the story that awareness later tells about itself."
Qualia is just the experience of this process from the inside. That's all there really needs to be to it. As to why "something it is to be" emerges, I'd lean on Friston and the Free Energy Principle. It's also Friston's embodied perception-action loop where a thermostat fails the consciousness test.