Yup. See also why many care more about dogs and horses than pigs and cows, etc.
Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
81–90 of 379 posts
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#82I wish the AI bros would take a fucking philosophy class. Jesus.
[deleted]
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#83It's hard to read this article and keep track of all the philosophical confusions at once.
Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness. Of course, we might try to argue that consciousness implies moral patienthood or vice versa, but that's an argument, not a definition.
The short paragraph about Descartes has at least three errors. (1) The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia. (2) The subjective nature of qualia does not imply that they aren't real or that they're socially constructed. (3) He conflates the existence of a self with consciousness.
The core premise is not only dubious scientifically (an alien species can't be conscious until humans discover it?), but also deeply problematic. It would imply that it's morally permissible to torture a sentient being as long as no human cares about it.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#84Quoting from the Permutation City by Greg Egan:
"Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?"
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can prove other people are conscious off the assumption that you yourself are conscious. If you use that axiom then given genetics you know that other humans are rough copies of you so if you are conscious so are your copies because consciousness was copied.
> You can prove other people are conscious off the assumption that you yourself are conscious I'm being a bit pedantic here, but no I don't think that "I am conscious therefore you must be too" is true I think you can claim that it is most reasonable to assume other people are conscious but I don't think it reaches the level of proof
I don't think you're being pedantic. The person you're replying to seems like he wants to cut off the solipsistic argument; the only thing we can be sure of is our own consciousness, everything else is debateable.
So while I know I am conscious, I do not know that everything I experience aren't just impulses fed to my brain by some external force. And I can't prove it either way. I have no way to test whether or not I'm a brain in a jar because the very thing I would use to evaluate the evidence is the thing that is potentially being manipulated.
However, slapping a solipsist sees them abandoning their philosophy rather quickly.
But I agree with you. We can't prove it, but "other people are as real and conscious as I" is a reasonable assumption to make
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#86LLMs are trained to produce outputs that humans would find reasonable. That's it. They don't do anything else.
To say they have feelings and that they can think/reason is insane.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> But you could create a church of your teddy bear and, with some grit, you could get people to widely assign consciousness to it That's not really the same as it having actual consciousness, even if people will wind up treating it similarly though Humans have consciousness whether or not anyone believes we do Or at least I do. I don't really know about the rest of you. I prefer to believe that you all have conscious…
> That's not really the same as it having actual consciousness,
It's trivially easy to come up with definitions of consciousness that support your point. But there isn't one of them that it is trivially singular and above all others from a scientific point of view. If you say, "I know consciousness when I see it," you are just making the point that consciousness is attributed by the beholder. Idem if you affirm "I'm conscious". If you say, "only humans are conscious", you are socially attributing consciousness. Now, I don't want to be argumentative, I honestly haven't been able to figure this matter in a decade of armchair internal debate[^1], and it seems I have some company.
[^1]: Having this internal debate makes me believe I'm conscious, but now that I have seen LLMs in action whose "internal debate" is more lucid than mine, I honestly question that "internal debate" is sufficient.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#88LLMs are trained to produce outputs that humans would find reasonable. That's it. They don't do anything else. To say they have feelings and that they can think/reason is insane.
The author is anthropomorphizing a language-tamagotchi.
LLMs can reason, reasoning is logic, and as you said yourself it is derived from what humans belief is reasonable. However, there is more to the structure of language, the way mathematics is also a language that ultimately describes the universe.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#89If 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?
It is worth noting, in the same issue they make an appology for claiming that Nvidia also makes its chips and not just design them. The Economist might be a very reputed journal but their technology and especially AI related takes are absolute garbage. I say this as a regular who still finds value in their business and economics sections. But god do they talk a lot of bs about technology.
This sounds like Gell-Mann amnesia
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans are just baby replicators. The civilizations are what's getting uncanny. It's good the 'just token predictors' crowd is starting to pivot and hedge though lol. 'It's just the harness!' uh huh. give it a couple more months and you'll be in here regurgitatin' Gordon Wood
Baby replication is one thing humans might do. Word fragment generation is the one-and-only thing llms have ever done.
I think you can similarly reduce humans. For example, all humans do is contract muscles. This doesn't fully cover all of biology, such as replicating cells, etc. so not exactly comprehensive, but hopefully that helps get the idea across.
LLMS: Receive text/binary input, process it, and output text/binary input Humans: Receive various inputs, process them, and output muscle contractions