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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

#141

Post by The_Double »

We thought that consciousness was the core of what made something worthy of moral consideration, because only life showed conscious behavior. Now we have machines that can output behavior indistinguishable from consciousness.

I think that reevaluating how to determine if something is conscious is the wrong reaction to this. It should be to reevaluate if consciousness is really the right thing to care about.

Maybe the new consideration should simply be to preserve (biological) life. Or maybe to preserve complexity that can't be easily reproduced. So we should care for humans, the planet, our society, but not for the state of some gpu's VRAM.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#143

Post by s1artibartfast »

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.

And then the argument about Consciousness becomes whether it is strictly and completely necessary for the input to Output process.

There's also the question of input output range.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#144

Post by skrebbel »

akersten wrote: post #109
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'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?

You're reading way too much into this. This is just a journalist geeking out on philosophy for a bit. Read it the way you would an HN comment about psychology or nuclear physics.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#145

Post by fasterik »

skrebbel wrote: post #144
akersten wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You're reading way too much into this. This is just a journalist geeking out on philosophy for a bit. Read it the way you would an HN comment about psychology or nuclear physics.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a computer scientist at Google. But I agree, it's an opinion piece and it's not the Economist's job to grade it as a philosophical essay. Generally, I think the Economist is a high quality publication for news even if the opinion pieces are sometimes a bit silly.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#146

Post by dguest »

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.

Reminds me of the Edsger W. Dijkstra quote:

    Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim
Which has often been paraphrased as

    The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
Some might disagree with the relevance but it's a cute analogy.

The whole essay [1] is actually somewhat relevant to modern LLM use for other reasons. He spends a lot of time lamenting the industry's obsession with "user friendly" interfaces which obscure the underlying complexity of the problem at hand.

[1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd08xx/EWD898.PDF

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#147

Post by Dylan16807 »

niam wrote: post #127
akersten wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Claiming a publication uses bad writers isn't a conspiracy.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#148

Post by Animats »

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's another round of "humans must be special, right?" The author comes close to admitting this: "As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Then he works backwards from that towards a definition of consciousness that makes humans special.

AI forces us to confront an issue that's often come up in science fiction - when you encounter a new kind of creature, how do you decide if they are sentient? What rights do they have? How do you get along with such different creatures? This historically hasn't been a problem on Earth, because there's such a big jump between humans and the rest of the primates or the dolphins and octopuses. It's more of a problem when the difference is small, or complex. Look at how much trouble we have with race.

The last time this came up was about 400,000 years ago, when the Neanderthals became extinct. Close to human level, but maybe not quite there. They lost.

Maybe that's the fate of humans. No big extinction. Just the demographic transition, a birth rate below replacement rate, for a few centuries. The machines outlive humans. Japan is officially resigned to this fate.[1]

[1] https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/e/zenkoku_e2023/pp2023e_Su...

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#149

Post by Dylan16807 »

edgyquant wrote: post #139
mannykannot wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They seem to be. But that argument doesn't matter much because you can simulate the whole body. (If you want to argue consciousness is outside the body, I could get into the physics argument but instead I'll just claim that consciousness will attach to the computer too and if you have a reason it wouldn't it's your burden to say why.)

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#150

Post by jptlnk »

fasterik wrote: post #140
jampekka wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, the existence of an objective "consciousness" property is a hotly debated question philosophically. Many great thinkers have written and discussed this question at length, and as of now the jury is very much out.
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