Until someone can give a cogent definition of what consciousness is, there is no debate. This is a nonsense debate and you should go read Pragmatism the book because you're arguing about nothing.
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Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
121–130 of 378 posts
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#122LLMs 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.
Sorry, but they can think and reason. They can have empathy too. Meaning, you can describe a circumstance with many parties involved, with different motivations and conflicting goals -- and it will tell you how these humans would likely feel about each other and the situation at hand.
By that logic, a book has empathy.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#123Wow. 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…
I would argue that most people are kind to animals not because we believe in general that _they_ feel pain -- we can't know that and lots of people who are kind to animals don't believe that animals are conscious -- but because watching animals suffer makes _us_ feel pain, sympathetically.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but they can think and reason. They can have empathy too. Meaning, you can describe a circumstance with many parties involved, with different motivations and conflicting goals -- and it will tell you how these humans would likely feel about each other and the situation at hand.
By that logic, a book has empathy.
Not the book, but the author, yes.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#125I wish the AI bros would take a fucking philosophy class. Jesus.
Sadly, many philosophers, including some who are highly respected, make similar mistakes / play similar games. (Consciousness is inaccessible from the outside, which is epistemologically inconvenient... so how about we pretend it doesn't actually exist, or redefine it and hope everyone forgets about the thing we were trying to talk about in the first place? Aha, now all the so-called mysteries have been dissolved!)
> or redefine it
What's the correct definition of consciousness?
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but they can think and reason. They can have empathy too. Meaning, you can describe a circumstance with many parties involved, with different motivations and conflicting goals -- and it will tell you how these humans would likely feel about each other and the situation at hand.
Being able to describe how humans likely feel is not evidence of the model feeling empathy.
And what would be evidence?
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#127It'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…
It's just drivel from the Economist, it's not surprising that it makes all these errors. Their real goal is to shape the narrative and get people through their turnstyle. They really don't care about finer minutae like correctness and philosophy. They just chain words together until it sounds approximately agreeable. Come to think of it, do we know if The Economist is conscious?
It's an op ed. Hardly a conspiracy.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#128LLMs 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.
When John Searle first published his so-called "Chinese Room" argument (https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/7150/1/1...) he included his responses to several counter-arguments that he had been presented with in prior discussions: the systems reply, the robot reply and so forth. Interestingly (as it turns out) no-one seems to have argued that this was a task that could be completed without any understanding, but now that AI technology has reached the point of being able to implement the Chinese Room, it has become the fallback position of those who insist that true AI is impossible!
This is not an argument for true AI being possible, let alone already achieved; it is a warning about depending on arguments from incredulity, which are particularly susceptible to future developments.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#129Well, this certainly makes arguing against AI's consciousness much easier. I'm happy assuming that conclusion and then logicking my way back to the premise, though it's obv philosophically unsound.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#130Quoting 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?"
Yet when you model an Enigma machine, it does encrypt and decrypt messages.
I'd argue that if it encrypts and decrypts, then you've built an enigma machine, not modeled it.