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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

#81

Post by mnewme »

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.

Nope, only if the architecture changes. Still probabilistic prediction models

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

#82

Post by mnewme »

indigo945 wrote: post #31
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.

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 use the same terms for computers and brain, but the analogies are misleading. LLMs don’t even have memory, how do you have consciousness without memory? The architecture probibits any signs of consciousness.

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

#83

Post by mnewme »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #77
breuleux wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No they don’t have memories. With an harness you just send historic data into the prompt.

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

#84

Post by dmrivers »

"This is important, if what we want to do is populate the cosmos with good experiences."

There is a concerning utilitarian maximizing attitude at the heart of this post, that what we want to do is tile the universe with computational boxes all simulating happy minds, and that this is the end goal of AI development and consciousness research.

So many moral schools would object to this perspective. I don't think the goal of humanity should be to tile the universe with black computing boxes simulating happy experiences.

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

#85

Post by indigo945 »

mnewme wrote: post #83
kelseyfrog wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No they don’t have memories. With an harness you just send historic data into the prompt.

There's no inherent, technological reason to feed the historic data into the prompt, though. You could train a network with a second input for model-states, and during inference, feed into that input historic model-states that occured for the same LLM when consuming input that is somehow associatively related to whatever input is currently being consumed. Can you definitely show that this would be meaningfully different from how humans "experience" memories?

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

#86

Post by kelseyfrog »

mnewme wrote: post #83
kelseyfrog wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No they don’t have memories. With an harness you just send historic data into the prompt.

Memory is definitionally the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. There's no special carve out for 'except when it's an LLM.'

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

#87

Post by breuleux »

mnewme wrote: post #83
kelseyfrog wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No they don’t have memories. With an harness you just send historic data into the prompt.

Why, exactly, is this distinction relevant? The brain must store episodic memory somewhere too. From a cursory read, it seems to me that our experiences are processed through the hippocampus and amygdala into a high-level annotated encoding of historical data, stored somewhere else (unclear), fetched based on various triggers, replayed and reinterpreted by the neocortex, and, I assume, sent back through the hippocampus once more for updating. Sure, it's all in the brain, but I don't think physically separating the storage makes it fundamentally different.

I mean, I've replayed old memories in my head before. Sound, image and all. That's kind of like sending historic data into a prompt, isn't it? Of course it's not exactly the same thing, but the difference isn't exactly load-bearing, if you'll excuse the claudism. I feel like we're grasping at straws.

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

#89

Post by gpderetta »

indigo945 wrote: post #19
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 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…

Agree. Unscientifically, I don't think current LLM are conscious because I don't think they have enough awareness of their own thoughts (I, again unscientifically don't believe that the context window is enough).

Still, tthey are the stuff of sci-fi: it is the first time in recorded history that we can communicate with language with something that is not human! The consciousness "problem" is just a distraction.

Do androids dream of electric sheep indeed.

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