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Could AIs Become Conscious?

economist.com

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Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#71

Post by goatlover »

xscott wrote: post #70
drfloyd51 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you prove you are not merely mimicking consciousness? At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing.

I've thought about turning this upside down. To any person who is sure they know what has and doesn't have consciousness: If I say I don't have it, can you prove me wrong? As far as I'm concerned, it's a word without a useful enough definition to bother worrying about it.

It's subjective experience. The colors you see, the sounds you hear, tastes, smell, pain, emotion, dreams, inner dialog. The philosophical word would be qualia.

I don't understand people who pretend to be p-zombies in these arguments.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#72

Post by goatlover »

pixl97 wrote: post #51
missingrib wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering it's the only thing I'm directly aware of I think I can safely reject that it's a made up concept.

Ok, then lay out what it is in words that adequately covers what consciousness is across the spectrum of conscious behaviors. Also while doing so, prove that your consciousness is the same as mine. It's really easy to say, it's fuck all hard to actually prove.

Qualia or subjective experience. All the sensations of your experience, whether in perception, dreams, imagination, etc.

There's many things we can't prove with certainty, like the existence of an external world. A solipsist can doubt that anything exists outside their own mind because nobody can prove to them otherwise. But were does requiring certainty get us? Science doesn't require certainty, because empirical investigation is never certain.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#73

Post by frogperson »

i don't think LLMs are the entire answer, but they might be part of the solution. To me, LLMs feel a lot like system 2. I don't see a lot of people trying to build system 1. i don't think you can have consciousness without a body to keep alive and reward.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#74

Post by frogperson »

metalman wrote: post #61

no AI can not become consious.AI is an inert guessing engine of fantastic proportions and craft, but still a dead thing.some humans and other animals ocasionaly do, become conscious, and by consious I mean aware of what I am doing AND aware of what you are doing, and which parts are autonomic behaviors and which parts are considered, actions, or measured reactions, or not. I will tell you what I know if I feal like i…

i think you bar is too high. i would argue dogs, cows, and pigs are conscious. it doesn't seem unreasonable to build an artificial system capable of reproducing and out competing a cow at doing cow things.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#75

Post by dwd »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #34
seanw444 wrote: post #28

I know this probably sounds ridiculous to this demographic, but I'm not quick to dismiss the possibility that we are antennas (best comparison I can make) for a substance/field we aren't yet aware of. Or something along those lines. Maybe consciousness isn't in the mind per se. The mere fact that general/special relativity and quantum mechanics are both correct in their respective domains, yet mutually contradictory,…

Consciousness is a made up concept. We made up this word and try to tie an arbitrary amount of features to it. Now you’re questioning the features like does consciousness only involve complexity without realizing you’re just attacking a language problem. You’re trying to map out a definition of an arbitrary word that’s made up by humans: consciousness. There’s nothing profound with this endeavor. I can make up any wo…

Consciousness is a bucket of things. Putting subjective experience to the side, the main components could be:

- An internal model that is actively revised (the Markov blanket/s) - A continuing active resolution of inputs (either sensory or the ability to simulate "dream" - basically aliveness) - A persistent state of completed resolutions that are recursively reentered and affect the future resolutions.

Everything we might say have these abilities are organic, but a digital system could possibly be defined as being conscious if it met all those.

LLMs have an internal state, they respond to external input, they have a form of memory.

What is missing is agency; a directionality of resolution, and the subjective experience (what the conscious process "feels' like from inside.

I would suggest that those developed purely via evolution as the drive to procreate and stay alive against entropic decay.

When you stop typing, the LLM is not there wondering when or what you will type next. It responds if you ask it something, it doesn't wait around wanting to continue the conversation. There's also no loss if you stop or delete it completely.

The next phase could be adding something equivalent to dreaming (except a LLM doesn't sleep), where the LLM continues "thinking" about the conversation, and generates something additional to say without explicit prompting.

And maybe a digital system needs to know/sense/feel its potential mortality, and cares about that?

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#76

Post by wotamess »

qgin wrote: post #18

We pretty famously can't prove that humans are conscious. I'd hold off from making strong statements that AI can't become conscious.

This misunderstands the "hard problem" of consciousness which for brevity's sake I will just pose as the question "why does the universe exist at all?"

Sure, we don't know that answer. Probably cannot without an impossible machine that can observe all states of all particles and matter throughout all of time space.

Occam's Razor allows for a simple, good enough definition to satisfy day to day concerns on Earth; consciousness is a feedback loop of sensory information and mechanical body response.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#77

Post by GPerson »

pixl97 wrote: post #62
GPerson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it bothers me in the sense you have in mind. What bothers me is the desire to actually understand it and always see all the smart people stuck on a non-starter. And it’s the first idea most smart people have about what consciousness must be. I also thought this when I was a teenager and after reflecting on it for many years decided it does not work. I believe animals have consciousness and probably plants may…

Now you've put yourself into a trap. "Consciousness is emergent" but also "Consciousness is not emergent". Only one of these statements can be true. Life is that sand pile. We were a pile of chemicals that got hit by lightning or whatever billions of years ago, and from those uncountable chemical and electrical reactions nature evolved a programming machine that reliably produces conscious entities from non-conscious…

I didn’t say consciousness is emergent? Given some fundamental mechanism and substrate which is the essence of consciousness sure there will be emergence on top, but I’m not sure how you’re getting me saying consciousness is emergent when I clearly expressed the opposite.

You can reject the hard problem, but that just amounts to giving up with pride.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#78

Post by GPerson »

pixl97 wrote: post #59
GPerson wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you don’t know I’m talking about (various kinds of reductive materialism), it sounds like you’re doing exactly what I’m saying is the main rhetorical move in reductive approaches to consciousness.

>reductive approaches to consciousness There 100% must be reductive approaches to consciousness because consciousness lives on a gradient. If your definition of consciousness exists on as a point like an electron, something that only exists as a whole, then you've already flunked out of the study of consciousness. It is wildly complex. Has a great number of pieces. Manifests itself in different ways in different anim…

Right if my view was some ridiculous position you just invent to try to embarrass me then it would be ridiculous. Brilliant logic.

I don’t think you know what reduction means here and you don’t actually engage with what I write here and on other posts so I don’t care to explain.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#79

Post by euroderf »

frogperson wrote: post #73

i don't think LLMs are the entire answer, but they might be part of the solution. To me, LLMs feel a lot like system 2. I don't see a lot of people trying to build system 1. i don't think you can have consciousness without a body to keep alive and reward.

I for one believe consciousness will not happen without qualia,

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#80

Post by xscott »

goatlover wrote: post #71
xscott wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about turning this upside down. To any person who is sure they know what has and doesn't have consciousness: If I say I don't have it, can you prove me wrong? As far as I'm concerned, it's a word without a useful enough definition to bother worrying about it.

It's subjective experience. The colors you see, the sounds you hear, tastes, smell, pain, emotion, dreams, inner dialog. The philosophical word would be qualia. I don't understand people who pretend to be p-zombies in these arguments.

Your definition is not useful enough. There are people missing any or all of those, and any or all of those can be approximated by a machine.
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