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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

#281

Post by bitwize »

Rendello wrote: post #260
dpark wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t hold up to even a little bit of critical right. This boils down to “models aren’t real because they don’t affect the real world”. By the same rule, thought itself isn’t real. It’s an abstract notion that has no concrete effects in the real world. Putting thought into action in the real world requires a linkage between the thinker and the physical. In humans, that’s the body. But you can put an AI into ro…

A more accurate quote sidesteps the whole question: > The question of whether Machines Can Think […] is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim. – Edsger W. Dijkstra https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#1980s

I've worked on AUVs, and in discussions with my colleagues we would often describe the machine as "swimming" out to some setpoint location, for instance.

Since hearing that, discussions of a machine "thinking" or "believing" something didn't really bother me, even though Dijkstra was adamantly opposed to such language—because everyone in the conversation usually understood that the meaning was metaphorical, like the swimming submarine.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#282

Post by txrx0000 »

pasquinelli wrote: post #236
bluefirebrand wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to make that argument, I promise I'll read it, give it honest consideration and offer a thoughtful reply. Otherwise don't be stupid. Come on.

if you're interested it's called panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a fundemental trait of the universe. it's an idea a little like solipsism, in that people have a reflex against it, but it's pretty hard to make a case against it any stronger than "come on man don't be stupid."

If by "consciousness" you mean the thing that goes away during general anesthesia, then panpsychism is very unlike solipsism and can be easily refuted by the fact that anesthesia works.

If it isn't that, then we're talking about some non-practical definition, in which case, does that even matter?

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#283

Post by calf »

scoofy wrote: post #249
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much to add except that The Economist pontificating about morality is like a vampire complaining blood tastes funny.

I don't think this kind of comment is helpful at all. We should treat these arguments on their merits, rather than with some ad hominum prejudice. If your (I presume anti-liberal) views are compelling, you wouldn't need to trot them out in as a flippant quip. I would hope I didn't have to regurgitate that kind of basic intro to logic copy in a forum named after a combinatory logic.

I hate ad hominems leveled (especially against me), but the information about the Economist and this author is relevant. It suggests bad faith (to readers who have noticed a pattern by those sources). Which is not necessarily an ad hominem. Specifically it turns out I already read a problematic piece by this author last year, so the heads up saves me time, attention, and energy.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#284

Post by felipeerias »

bitwize wrote: post #276
kulahan wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't we assume humans are special? We are, by so many metrics. We've become essentially a force of nature, rather than a simple occupying species. I find it much weirder that we're so dedicated to pretending we're normal. Just a normal animal, on a normal planet, in a normal solar system, in a normal galaxy, in a normal universe. I get we have to do that for science to be good, but I don't get why it carries…

Recently I learned about Human Acceleration Regions (HARs), parts of our DNA that remained almost unchanged in our mammalian ancestors, and then diverged very rapidly in humans between 500-200kya. And it made me wonder, is this why the ancient Hebrews said humans alone are created in the "image and likeness of God"? At any rate, it establishes that we are a very different kind of animal, even from our closest relativ…

Anthropologists make a similar point from a different perspective: at some point roughly within that time span, human biology and culture began to co-evolve, so cultural practices would bring about physiological changes, which would in turn unlock new practices, and so on.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#285

Post by calf »

grimpy wrote: post #204

Blaise 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.

I read some long piece by him last year, just as terrible. It's a pattern. These are what we call court philosophers, the court is in Google HQ.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#286

Post by calf »

D-Machine wrote: post #19
rmunn wrote: post #5

Wow. 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…

You can conclude the author is a completely unserious thinker because he doesn't even take a second to talk about the definitions, or even show he has ever read any actual proper philosophical writing on consciousness at all. Like, literally all you have to do is read the Wikipedia entry to see that definitions are essential for meaningful discussion on consciousness. So anyone that starts going on about AI and consc…

I care about the fennel I grew in my backyard. Then one day I made fennel salad.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#287

Post by b112 »

kulahan wrote: post #213
Animats wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why wouldn't we assume humans are special? We are, by so many metrics. We've become essentially a force of nature, rather than a simple occupying species. I find it much weirder that we're so dedicated to pretending we're normal. Just a normal animal, on a normal planet, in a normal solar system, in a normal galaxy, in a normal universe. I get we have to do that for science to be good, but I don't get why it carries…

Many, many places have tried giving money to have kids. Many.

Thst never works. It's not about money.

It's about biology, likely microplastics acting as hormone inhibitors. Sex drive and reproductive drive are not the same.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#288

Post by felipeerias »

eureka7 wrote: post #96
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.

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?

In living beings, consciousness is embodied and can not be reproduced by discrete steps. You can not sit down with pen and paper, and reproduce by hand exactly what is going on inside someone’s brain.

But you could replicate exactly the calculations happening as a LLM computes the next token. Would that be conscious? Where would that consciousness reside?

My view is that LLMs are designed and trained to autocomplete narratives, and that as part of that process they develop an emergent narrative about themselves. Whatever personality traits they exhibit is part of that narrative. Perhaps this is not that different from how humans learn to move in social contexts, but it is not consciousness as it happens in living beings.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#289

Post by wtallis »

mcmcmc wrote: post #209
seethishat wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think that argument holds water, because the scope of what can be reasonably approximated by matrix multiplication is extremely broad (especially when the matrix multiplication is also paired with a source of randomness).

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#290

Post by chermi »

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…

Those are also different things. I think it should unambiguously clear that humans are special to humans. If not that's basically a mental health problem lol
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