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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

#171

Post by mannykannot »

GPerson wrote: post #160
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.

“digitally modeled a brain such that the model responds to its inputs as a brain does” If in responding to its inputs it experiences consciousness (=lights are on, experiences senses, perceives qualia), then you’ve built a brain. If your model simulates all the processing of a but does not have these then you have what’s fairly called a simulation of a brain. You can assert there is no such thing but good luck gettin…

> You can assert there is no such thing...

No such thing as what? As far as I can tell, I have asserted no such thing as there being no such thing, whatever it is.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#172

Post by niam »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #147
niam wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an op ed. Hardly a conspiracy.

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

And I "use" dead bodies for sustenance, without qualifying whether that relationship implies eating or necromancy. If the imprecision is because of a misunderstanding about what an op ed or guest essay is for: it's maybe not a publication's fault if someone misses the memo.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#173

Post by jscd »

montroser wrote: post #91
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.

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.

They can provide text which contains thoughts, reasoning, and empathy, but is that evidence of them having thoughts, reasoning, or empathy?

To paraphrase the Chinese room argument: Put me in a room with infinite time, paper, pencils, filing cabinets, and give me an English language list of instructions for doing all the neural-net calculations required to run an LLM. Slide your prompt under the door, and, after doing all the calculations, I will slide the next word out, and so I will repeat until the response is done.

In this thought experiment, I'm just following the instructions. So, in this case, what is doing the "thinking" or "reasoning" or "empathy" here?

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#174

Post by ratelimitsteve »

cognitif wrote: post #105

> we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them. Crucially, that includes ourselves. Why? Ok nevermind, fine. It could be true that someone believes someone else is conscious because they care about them. Next sentence: > Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property. Wait, no, that doesn’t follow at all. A belief that someone is conscious is not the same as someo…

This. There are plenty of people who believe to the bottoms of their hearts that inanimate things have a consciousness. If consciousness is the belief of consciousness, then those things are conscious. But for each person who believes they are, at least one person does not believe that they are. So those things also lack belief, and are therefore not conscious. Unless the author wants to propose some idea of consciousness by plurality, where if more people think a thing thinks than don't. But that would mean that a thing's consciousness can come and go without anything about the actual thing changing at all.

Realistically this article is just trying to make it seem that believing something is the same as it being true and that's patently absurd, but it makes people feel good to think it.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#175

Post by fasterik »

jptlnk wrote: post #150
fasterik wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but staking a claim in that debate is taking a position on what is and isn't conscious.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#176

Post by mannykannot »

edgyquant wrote: post #152
Dylan16807 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I don’t know where consciousness is but I think if we accept that you can simulate a brain exactly that doesn’t prove consciousness of a model as consciousness is a metaphysical concept really

Consciousness appears to be a biological phenomenon, but so too are metabolism, reproduction and evolution. Are these also metaphysical concepts?

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#177

Post by fasterik »

lnenad wrote: post #163
fasterik wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But there isn't? What does it factually mean to be conscious? How can we claim other living beings aren't are conscious?

We don't know yet because we don't have a fundamental theory of consciousness. My money is on that it's an objective property of the structure of computation happening in the brain.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#178

Post by drdeca »

pasquinelli wrote: post #66
bluefirebrand wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

maybe a teddy bear does have consciousness too, in the same way you do.

Well, maybe, but I find this pretty unlikely?

It seems more likely to me that e.g. the individual fibers of the teddy bear are conscious than that there is a consciousness associated with the teddy bear as a whole. And I don’t find it particularly likely that the fibers do.

Like, by what mechanism is the teddy bear “one thing” in a way relevant for consciousness to be associated with that thing.

When people have stuff happen to their brain, this has an effect on their conscious experience in a way that isn’t true of e.g. their hair being cut, or their nails being clipped. In this way, the consciousness of a person seems associated more with their brain than to parts of their hair or nails. But, the way that a persons hair and nails is related to the rest of a person’s body (including their brain) seems more similar to how one bit of fluff is related to the rest of a teddy bear, than the way a part of someone’s brain is related to the rest of their body (including the rest of their brain).

Like, [bit of fluff]:[rest of bear]::[bit of hair or nail]:[rest of body (including brain)] is a better analogy than [bit of fluff]:[rest of bear]::[bit of brain]:[rest of body (including rest of brain)] is, and so, in the same way that removing a bit of someone’s hair or nail in a way that they don’t notice does not seem to alter that person’s conscious experience, while removing or altering a bit of their brain very much can alter their conscious experience, I would expect that removing a bit of a teddy bear would have no impact on any conscious experience it might have, and this goes for, every part of it? Like, any way that you cut it in a (n/(2n+1)), ((n+1)/(2n+1)) split, I would expect that to be more like the “removing some hair” to whatever conscious experience it might have, and so, I expect that it probably has no overall conscious experience?

I find the idea that a single thread has an overall conscious experience to be a little more likely than a teddy bear having one. Like, if you cut a thread, that’s always a pretty fundamental change.. idk. Again, I don’t think that’s like either.

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