Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being able to describe how humans likely feel is not evidence of the model feeling empathy.
And what would be evidence?
I’m not sure, what would evidence of qualia even look like?
Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
201–210 of 380 posts
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Of course it's hard to define. That doesn't mean every definition is valid. And often this comes up in the context of the Hard Problem, where a definition is clearly inadequate (dodging the problem and talking about something else) if it does not even try to point at qualia/subjective experience/what-it-is-like-to-be.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#203LLMs 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…
I think this quote is often misunderstood. It isn't really about machines, but about English definition of swimming (and thinking): a living creature moving in water. That makes debating whether submarines can swim rather pointless. You can replace it by "can airplanes fly?" and the meaning changes because we colloquially say that yes, airplanes fly. In Russian, for example, submarines definitely swim (I believe Dijkstra himself mentioned it at some point). I personally believe that defining thinking as something only humans are capable of is rather narrow.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#204Blaise is trying so hard to be a engineer-philosopher but none of his work here is useful. I'm very confused as to why he gets so much attention here, it's very clear he's in dialogue with no one.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Rep…
Huh? How does the person having all the instruction books memorized and whatnot imply that the person understands Chinese? Memorizing instructions to the point that one can mentally follow them doesn’t imply understanding why they work. If the person doesn’t understand the correspondence between the Chinese written words and things in the external world, then surely they don’t understand Chinese in the sense we gener…
The point is that Searle's entire exercise is to show that there can be execution without understanding, and he does this by creating an agent whose only purpose is blind execution of rules. Since this agent doesn't have the understanding, there must be no understanding.
Critics immediately point out: yes, there clearly is still understanding, it's just in the system itself -- the program. The fact that the person does not have the understanding doesn't mean the understanding is gone.
His response to this is: but what if the system was the person's brain!?
Okay, so either it doesn't address the criticism at all (there is still a system of rules that contains the understanding; who cares whether that system is internal or external to the person's brain?) or it completely destroys the original premise of the argument, which is that the understanding is not in the person! You can't put the understanding back in the human agent and still claim the human doesn't understand what they're doing! His entire argument relies on the fact that the human agent obviously doesn't understand Chinese, and then says, actually, their brain contains everything it needs to know to have completely fluent conversations in Chinese. So the person does understand Chinese!
> How does the person having all the instruction books memorized and whatnot imply that the person understands Chinese?
How does a person's brain containing all the facts, information, and skills that it needs to have a fluent conversation in Chinese imply that the person understands Chinese? How does it not!?
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why and from what? Because you feel my statement was incoherent or because you believe the general conceit is flawed? Edit: I am not in anyway trying to be obtuse or reductive, I simply want to understand your statement. Apologies if it comes across that way.
> Loss of meaning, purpose, place etc... The one thing we used as a ranking metric is now a commodity, so....? I don't even know how to finish that. So why care, why work...shit just why? This sounds a bit like depression, I think they’re genuinely concerned for your wellbeing
Thats totally fair, and TBH - I am also very concerned for my wellbeing as well; I and many others are not doing so well because, in my case I no longer see this "vapid" state of existence as ephermial.
I have been reading more and more; I guess looking ot knowledge as some eort of ends vs a means to an end for once. Camus, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Dostoevsky's underground man etc...
Camus: The universe was always going to stay silent when you demand meaning from it; the answer isn't a better metric, it's to push the rock anyway ("imagine Sisyphus happy").
Dostoevsky [underground man]: Refusing to be a piano key in someone's optimized Crystal Palace
Stokely Carmichael: "Racism is not a question of attitude, it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism."
My conclusion: AI didn't take our meaning, It made me realize I have always been looking in the wrong place and thus reacting ignoratly when I felt "denied" this thing I feel entitled to.
Love.
Edit: Love; paradoxically, ive felt both entitled to and unworthy of so I'm not sure WTF to do with that.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#207Quoting 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?"
I think the difference is that thought itself might not be a real "thing", but just another computation. You can motivate this line of thought with the ship of Theseus approach: replace one neuron with a computer that takes the original inputs and produces the original outputs. There's no evidence yet that organic chemistry is necessary for thought.
There’s also no evidence that current AI can think or have thoughts.
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether AI is conscious or not is independent of the social acceptance of the idea, unless you believe in thoroughly discredited and quite radical forms of social constructionism. In fact, if you stop talking about consciousness, and go through all the various aspects of consciousness, the whole debate gets very interesting. There are various ways in which AI is very clearly conscious or exhibits / involves phenomena…
> Whether AI is conscious or not is independent of the social acceptance of the idea, unless you believe in thoroughly discredited and quite radical forms of social constructionism. Yet all science is social, until you convince other people to take your ideas seriously, you are just another crank/loony. How is social constructionism thoroughly discredited? Wikipedia shows some people poking with nits that don't look…
Radical or hard or global social constructionism [1] (or perhaps more accurately radical/hard/global relativism about truth [2]) are discredited because both are manifestly incoherent and prevent any serious thought from being possible, since they amount to a total denial of the existence of any kind of observer- or society-independent reality, i.e. they devolve to a solipsism of some form. Solipsism is not a coherent (or workable, at least) worldview, so can safely dismissed.
It is hard to provide a citation for these points because these points are so philosophically obvious that few waste time spelling them out, but searching for "hard/global constructionism" or "hard/global relativism" (on e.g. Google Scholar), or asking an AI about problems with these views I hope will make it clear why they are dumb, if it isn't already obvious to you.
Soft forms are of course totally fine. But to say "conscious is only and exactly whatever we say it to be" is hard constructionism / relativism, so completely unserious. Very obviously there are aspects of consciousness that do not merely depend on what we believe or say about it, even if some social constructionist aspects are also involved.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-construction-natur...
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/#RelAboTruAleR...
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this "common sense"? The question of what consciousness is, what it emerges from, etc. literally have no proved answer at the moment. Take this statement: "consciousness emerges from sufficient complexity in any system". Neither you or I can prove it right or wrong, but we can both make an assumption that if it was right, then there would be a way for an LLM to be conscious. I'm not arguing that they are, I'm…
Yes, I see your point. You could argue that humans, too, are trained to produce expected outputs (family, societal and peer pressure, etc.).
By social norms, not running matrix multiplication in their head ad nauseam
Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Rep…
The person who memorized the book doesn’t understand Chinese. In fact they don’t even understand that Chinese isn’t a language. Searle’s response stands.
So you could put this person in a room with a bunch of native Chinese speakers, and he could hold conversations fluently with all of them. Yet you claim he doesn't understand Chinese? How can you possibly defend that? This is very close to "zombie theory" -- everyone else is an automaton except you. Nobody else has real thoughts. That obviously fluent Chinese speaker doesn't really understand Chinese.