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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

#131

Post by UJ-FLD-ScrTr »

In my opinion, this essentially touches upon the old problem of anthropomorphism, here in connection with radical constructivism, more precisely: social constructivism and the capacity for attachment.

These are fundamentally socio-philosophical questions, but none that actually correspond to reality—because no matter how much one might wish that one's car had consciousness and would be grateful for the next oil change and constant polishing, objectively speaking, it is and remains—despite all epistemological limitations—a machine.

The problem isn't that, but rather that humans are capable of establishing emotional relationships even with inanimate or nonexistent things, and from this kind of relationship arises the desire to attribute more properties to the emotionally attached object than are objectively present.

A rather trivial insight, I think. Constructing a debate about the consciousness of a collection of algorithms from this only confirms it.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#132

Post by dist-epoch »

kaangiray26 wrote: post #84

Quoting 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?"

So I see you solved the Simulation Hypothesis - water is wet, so we can't be in a simulation, because in a simulation nobody gets wet.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#133

Post by jampekka »

basilikum wrote: post #103
eureka7 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you making this confident of a claim? Do you have insight into how consciousness is a thing, allowing you to definitely say it doesn't exist in this case?

You could just as much argue that a stone has consciousness. Some people believe that. Insane describes it quite well.

Why is it insane? We have no idea how or where consciousness arises, or even if it's a coherent concept.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#134

Post by dist-epoch »

alecst wrote: post #31

I’m can’t track what the point of this essay is. Suppose we replaced “AI” with “animal.” How would this essay be different? What am I supposed to take away? My concern with AI consciousness is about to what extent these machines can have an experience comparable to mine, which this essay doesn’t touch on at all.

That's exactly the point the article makes - we care about dogs and cats, so we believe they "suffer". We don't care about pigs, so we say they don't mind being factory farmed.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#135

Post by mannykannot »

ratelimitsteve wrote: post #130
mannykannot wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then, presumably, you will also hold that when you have digitally modeled a brain such that the model responds to its inputs as a brain does, then you have built a brain.

Tendentiously redefining the word "simulation" in an attempt to avoid the awkward cases is not going to save an argument that was dead on arrival.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#136

Post by pc86 »

Noaidi wrote: post #115
fasterik wrote: post #83

It'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 would imply that it's morally permissible to torture a sentient being as long as no human cares about it. Yes, I agree. To me it reads as an apology to sociopathy.

I think this lends intent toward the article that it doesn't necessarily warrant.

The author is just wrong about the philosophy, and the logic (and probably other things too). That doesn't mean he's a sociopath, or that he's defending sociopathic things.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#137

Post by jampekka »

fasterik wrote: post #83

It'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…

The article doesn't claim anything about what is and what is not conscious. It's about what we may think is conscious, and why.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#138

Post by feoren »

mannykannot wrote: post #128
seethishat wrote: post #86

LLMs 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 unders…

The problem with philosophy is that someone can present an argument that is pretty dumb, everyone can point out it's dumb, people can show evidence that it's dumb, reason through how dumb it is, and publish articles about the many different ways in which it's dumb, and still it gets trotted out as if it counts as evidence for some argument. Searle's Room was debunked immediately upon being suggested: the "Systems Reply" is the debunking. His response was: "but if you take all the knowledge out of the system and put it in the person, then the person still doesn't understand Chinese!" Which is obviously false and immediately collapses his entire argument down to nothing. He starts from the premise "this person doesn't understand Chinese; he is just following instructions that are written down for him" and then immediately rejects his own premise and say "actually he does understand all of Chinese and everything he's doing, but he still doesn't, you know, understand it, see?" It's completely embarrassing.

Searle's Rooms is a fully rejected and rebutted argument, and Philosophy will never be (and never has been) a serious discipline until it figures out how to actually let go of failed arguments.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#139

Post by edgyquant »

mannykannot wrote: post #135
ratelimitsteve wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that if it encrypts and decrypts, then you've built an enigma machine, not modeled it.

Then, presumably, you will also hold that when you have digitally modeled a brain such that the model responds to its inputs as a brain does, then you have built a brain. Tendentiously redefining the word "simulation" in an attempt to avoid the awkward cases is not going to save an argument that was dead on arrival.

Are brains responsible for consciousness? Or are brains a tool that our consciousness uses to understand the world?

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#140

Post by fasterik »

jampekka wrote: post #137
fasterik wrote: post #83

It'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…

The article doesn't claim anything about what is and what is not conscious. It's about what we may think is conscious, and why.

It claims that there is no objective fact about whether something is conscious. From the second paragraph:

>Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property. It is a belief about what kinds of entities have beliefs, experiences, feelings, intentions and agency.

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