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Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

economist.com

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Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#11

Post by benatkin »

This reminds me of a provocative YouTube video title I read the other day, one that makes me want to fight factory farming injustices. The title is "Animals to me are "Philosophical Zombies" - Destiny" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtpLbmr4ijY I agree with Destiny a lot of the time but not here, though he seems to come around somewhat as the video goes on.

If a sheep or a pig isn't thought of as conscious because it doesn't have a name, like someone's pet dog or cat, indicating that we care about them, then that feels problematic to me. So this isn't a way to neatly solve the problem of AI consciousness.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#12

Post by Charon77 »

blatherard wrote: post #9

If I understand the central argument, which is confusingly stated, the claim is that "consciousness" is a socially-determined, subjective, descriptor for certain things that one cares about. How does this make any sense? If I care about my teddy bear enough it'll gain consciousness?

If I stab at your teddy bear will you feel that it is hurt?

Yes it will gain consciousness. You can't prove it but other people can't prove that it's not conscious either

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#13

Post by D-Machine »

Oh look, another completely retarded article that doesn't even bother to note or deal with the definition problem. If you don't define what you mean by the term, your argument isn't even wrong, it is just a waste of everyone's time, since there are multiple highly conflicting aspects of and/or definitions of consciousness.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#ConCon

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#14

Post by skybrian »

There's the core of a reasonable argument if you forget about using the word "consciousness."

Consider playing a game where some players are human and others are implemented by AIs. You might want to model your opponents' minds in a similar way? Someone playing chess or Go will need to consider what moves their opponent could make. If it's poker then you need to consider if they're bluffing. If you can make alliances, you'll need to consider how far other players can be trusted.

You can put scare quotes around words like "intention" when discussing AI players if you like, but it might not matter when you're figuring out how to interact with them.

When a game is complicated enough, an AI player is going to need memory (likely implemented by the harness) and it will have to model the other players too in order to coordinate or compete with them.

This doesn't happen when I use a coding agent in a normal way to write code, but I haven't played around with persistent agent stuff like OpenClaw or Gas Town. They seem to be making their agents act in an unnecessarily complicated social environment, which seems to lead to weird situations?

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#15

Post by blatherard »

Charon77 wrote: post #12
blatherard wrote: post #9

If I understand the central argument, which is confusingly stated, the claim is that "consciousness" is a socially-determined, subjective, descriptor for certain things that one cares about. How does this make any sense? If I care about my teddy bear enough it'll gain consciousness?

If I stab at your teddy bear will you feel that it is hurt? Yes it will gain consciousness. You can't prove it but other people can't prove that it's not conscious either

No of course not, because its a teddy bear!

At best this is redefining "consciousness" to mean something only tangentially related.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#16

Post by benatkin »

beloch wrote: post #7
rmunn wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterpoint article, which can be read at https://archive.ph/IeSZg , is also worth reading. (IMHO, the original article is completely wrongheaded and the counterpoint is far closer to correct, but I'll post my reasons for that opinion separately).

"Yet if we build systems that can suffer, and miss their sentience, we risk creating suffering on an industrial scale." -------------- Will we recognize AGI when it's finally made? Will we go from something that is not conscious to something that clearly is in one clean step, or will we murder millions of artificial lives while iteratively developing from the former to the latter? Will the tests we develop even work,…

I'd recognize the emotional robot if it was like Marvin the paranoid android.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#17

Post by dsign »

blatherard wrote: post #9

If I understand the central argument, which is confusingly stated, the claim is that "consciousness" is a socially-determined, subjective, descriptor for certain things that one cares about. How does this make any sense? If I care about my teddy bear enough it'll gain consciousness?

Your teddy bear, alas, is not cared for in a socially determined way. But you could create a church of your teddy bear and, with some grit, you could get people to widely assign consciousness to it. We have done that sort of thing for thousands of years, and not with fluffy teddy bears; it has been more often with rocks, though not exclusively. It's fun to think about how much of humanity's history and culture is the product of consciousness socially attributed to bad weather [^1].

I'm pretty sure somebody will create an improved synthetic simulacrum of self awareness in the coming years, suffering and all, just so that we can enjoy better synthetic software architects and product owners with "skin in the game". If that consciousness simulacrum were put in a teddy bear that shares your whole life and gives you decent advice and conversation, for how long do you think you could, in your private mind, deny it consciousness? Worse, what would your human friends think if you were to maim your teddy bear?

[^1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#18

Post by rmunn »

beloch wrote: post #7
rmunn wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterpoint article, which can be read at https://archive.ph/IeSZg , is also worth reading. (IMHO, the original article is completely wrongheaded and the counterpoint is far closer to correct, but I'll post my reasons for that opinion separately).

"Yet if we build systems that can suffer, and miss their sentience, we risk creating suffering on an industrial scale." -------------- Will we recognize AGI when it's finally made? Will we go from something that is not conscious to something that clearly is in one clean step, or will we murder millions of artificial lives while iteratively developing from the former to the latter? Will the tests we develop even work,…

I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the "I can't prove they aren't" part. Having taken a few philosophy classes in college, I quickly realized that you can't actually prove that solipsism is wrong. I can't actually prove that everything I see, every person I talk to, isn't just a figment of my imagination. And yet, I categorically reject solipsism anyway, as any sane person should. The world is real, other people are real conscious beings, and so on. To believe otherwise is to literally be insane. And yet, any argument you could come up with for rejecting solipsism, a solipsist would reject: "Oh, that's just a figment of my imagination going off on a tangent again."

Just because you can't prove an assertion doesn't mean it's wrong.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#19

Post by D-Machine »

rmunn wrote: post #5

Wow. I have rarely read anything that made me lose more respect for the author in a single article. And this guy is a VP at Google ? And he leads an AI research team ? His third paragraph, which is the core of his argument, is stupid . He says, "As intelligent, social entities, we decide ... which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Yes, that's correct. "We do not care for others…

You can conclude the author is a completely unserious thinker because he doesn't even take a second to talk about the definitions, or even show he has ever read any actual proper philosophical writing on consciousness at all. Like, literally all you have to do is read the Wikipedia entry to see that definitions are essential for meaningful discussion on consciousness.

So anyone that starts going on about AI and consciousness without at least a sentence or two clarifying some basic definitions is basically either intellectually incompetent or attempting to use the emotional salience (and brain-numbing effect, it would seem) of the word to push some agenda. But they certainly don't care at all about understanding consciousness.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#20

Post by orbital-decay »

D-Machine wrote: post #13

Oh look, another completely retarded article that doesn't even bother to note or deal with the definition problem. If you don't define what you mean by the term, your argument isn't even wrong, it is just a waste of everyone's time, since there are multiple highly conflicting aspects of and/or definitions of consciousness. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#ConCon

It defines consciousness as an

>observer-dependent model, subject to social consensus.

Which is actually more pragmatic than most conflicting philosophical definitions involving qualia and other handwavy concepts.

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