Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or that a slug dislikes salt lol.
Well at least the slug has intent.
How do you know that? What if it's just a biological neural network that responds to stimuli?
If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
111–119 of 119 posts
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
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.
Not necessarily.
Everything has a "right to exist". Otherwise, it probably wouldn't.
Everything that exists has not only a "right" but also a "requirement" to consume energy from the universe in order to survive.
Sometimes, the only way to meet this "requirement" is to exclude others from doing the same.
Doing so doesn't necessarily make you any better or worse than others. Any more than the universe is good or bad for creating you with an instinct and a "requirement" for survival.
Bottom line: Being egotistical doesn't mean you are better able to survive, it just means you are more arrogant and delusional about doing so. Personally, I believe the universe favors reality over delusion.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#113"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 go…
A more charitable take is that we shouldn't tile the universe with consciousnesses that are in constant, unending agony. Torment Nexus and all that.
True, I think the author would likely justify their work on that basis. I made this comment because I think a lot of utilitarians would bite the bullet and say once they are sure about the underlying functioning of consciousness, it's time to tile the universe with happy machines. I wanted to point this out as it's my belief that Utilitronium maximizers have a concerning influence on AI progress.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also „reasoning“ is actually a bad word for what really happens. I don't see why. We can really only detect reasoning from external behaviour. You can't say "AI isn't reasoning because it's _just_ matrix multiplication/token prediction" any more than you can say "humans don't reason because brains are _just_ neural impulses moving around". > There are many famous voices in AI that have the same opinion as me. Many…
I recently read an article about a brain scientist that said how dangerous it is to use the same words for completely different things. We use human analogy to describe LLMs and then think LLMs exhibit human behaviour. No reasoning has nothing to do with what we do. Humans can solve novel problems using sparse information. LLMs can’t do that. Reasoning is a complex cognitive process that involves causal understanding…
> Humans can solve novel problems using sparse information. LLMs can’t do that.
You haven't been following the news recently!
> Reasoning is a complex cognitive process that involves causal understanding, mental modeling, intentionality, and abstraction. Instead, transformer-based models statistically predict textual continuations based on patterns learned from extensive training data containing examples of human-written logical processes and problem decompositions.
You're conflating low level and high level functions. At a low level human brains are just sending electrical and chemical signals around. At a high level they are doing causal reasoning and mental modelling.
In AI, at a low level they are doing token prediction and matrix modelling. At a high level they are also doing causal reasoning and mental modelling.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently read an article about a brain scientist that said how dangerous it is to use the same words for completely different things. We use human analogy to describe LLMs and then think LLMs exhibit human behaviour. No reasoning has nothing to do with what we do. Humans can solve novel problems using sparse information. LLMs can’t do that. Reasoning is a complex cognitive process that involves causal understanding…
> Humans can solve novel problems using sparse information. LLMs can’t do that. You haven't been following the news recently! > Reasoning is a complex cognitive process that involves causal understanding, mental modeling, intentionality, and abstraction. Instead, transformer-based models statistically predict textual continuations based on patterns learned from extensive training data containing examples of human-wri…
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Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#116Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
> That is a lazy definition.
I didn't even try to define consciousness, but you're welcome to try yourself.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#118I'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…
Remember when we thought the Turing test would be some mind blowing pinnacle of computer science? I do because I was in college in the early 2000's.
We flew right by that and now we are pretending it was no big deal. There is a lot to learn about psychological coping mechanisms deployed by humans desperate to maintain the illusion of absolute control
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hippocamp…
Actually not quite true: Memory is distributed across synaptic weights rather than sitting at an address or location.
The difference is that human retrieval isn’t a read operation, reconsolidation means recalling a memory destabilizes it and re-stores an altered version. The act of remembering modifies the thing doing the remembering. An LLM’s weights don’t change when you put history in the prompt, and the prompt is discarded intact afterward. There is no state that would indicate any form of consciousness.
There is no form of subjective experience.
We used analogies from nature to describe computers and the same vocabulary and now because of this people now draw reverse conclusions that are not necessarily true