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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

#291

Post by kulahan »

consumer451 wrote: post #229
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…

> Why wouldn't we assume humans are special? For me, because the Copernican Principle seems relatively undefeated. > We've become essentially a force of nature, rather than a simple occupying species. So are beavers, trees, plankton... they all have huge effects on the planet. Regarding analysis of animal brains vs. human brains, the more we do, the more we find that we have in common with many other "lesser" species…

The Copernican Principle is looking weaker than ever. Almost every solar system we find has similarly-sized planets, or planets ordered in an unfortunate way, or shitty suns that bleach them every two weeks. We continue to find system after system after system which looks absolutely nothing like ours.

And there's lots of evidence that we've hit a million unlikely goalposts. We might've gone through more than one great filter already. Whether it's going multicellular, or having a protecting planet like Jupiter, or having Theia slam into us and giving us a moon for tides, or any number of other weird things.

And that's before getting into our specific evolutionary past. If it weren't for dinosaurs ruling the planet, we might not, as mammals, have evolved our extreme adaptability. If it weren't for them then getting wiped out, we wouldn't have had a planet-sized sandbox where nearly every niche was suddenly open again, allowing us to explode in complexity as we essentially spent all day solving survival puzzles. Even then, all of this could've happened underwater and it wouldn't have mattered, because we never would've made fire.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#292

Post by kulahan »

b112 wrote: post #287
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…

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.

It's almost always about the money. Some studies have shown something as simple as free car seats can influence fertility rates.

We know next to nothing about microplastics - pseudoscience can wait at the door.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#293

Post by scoofy »

calf wrote: post #283
scoofy wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>The Economist pontificating about morality is like a vampire complaining blood tastes funny

This statement is no where close to a statement that matches your concerns. It implies “we all know the Economist is an inherently unserious rag… which it is obviously not.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#294

Post by felipeerias »

blatherard wrote: post #9

If I understand the central argument, which is confusingly stated, the claim is that "consciousness" is a socially-determined, subjective, descriptor for certain things that one cares about. How does this make any sense? If I care about my teddy bear enough it'll gain consciousness?

In the context of AI, “consciousness” is often used as a shortcut to address the question of whether we have an ethical duty to care about the wellbeing of LLMs.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#295

Post by rmunn »

mrguyorama wrote: post #238
pixl97 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to say it's easy, much more difficult to prove what can be idealized as suffering. My daughter said she 'suffered' when I didn't get her ice cream (I know, I'm a monster). She didn't really suffer, but her behavior was as if she was. So yes/no suffering is only part of the equation. Building systems that act/react like their suffering could be even more dangerous.

> She didn't really suffer, but her behavior was as if she was. Wait what? Why do you believe she didn't actually suffer?

Because pixl97 is operating in the real world where children often make exaggerated claims, not some hypothetical, abstract, ideal world where they can be trusted to always tell the truth at all times.

Which reminds me of a funny "kids being kids" story I heard in a different forum. This guy mentioned a time when his not-quite-one-year-old son, who couldn't even walk yet, planned and carried out a highly complex (for a 1-year-old) plan to deceive his father. The father had some vinyl records that the son was not allowed to touch, even though they were on a shelf the son could reach. (I've tried childproofing a house. You just can't get every single thing high enough off the ground. Sometimes you have to leave some things within the baby's reach. And once they're toddlers, able to reach up to get things even two feet off the ground? Forget about it). The father was sitting in his chair reading the newspaper, but watching the son out of the corner of his eye. The son looked at the records, looked at his father (who appeared not to be looking in his direction), looked at the records, then crawled in a direction that was not straight towards the records. He then repeated this process, moving slowly towards the forbidden records without ever making a straight line towards them. He looked at his father again, reached one had towards his prize, and a voice came from behind his father's newspaper: "Stop. You know you're not allowed to touch that."

And that's when the child learned that Daddy Knows Everything! :-)

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#296

Post by dwd »

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…

Be careful not to equate conscious with subjective experience.

- Conscious is the substrate or architecture of the system.

- Awareness is the active resolution of inputs (external and internal) against that system's model.

- Subjective Experience is the feeling "what it is like to be" from within the system.

I also disagree with the "observer" position. Seems he's imported some Carlo Rovelli into this essay as they do collaborate together. You don't need an observer - it's the same reason I find Copenhagen / Wave function collapse to just seem wrong.

The reason I think quala is hard to pin down comes down to how the conscious internal model compresses what it has previously resolved about the world (internal and external).

The feeling of blueness is that highly compressed concept (not raw data about ranges of wavelengths) which is then compared against the blueness of something our awareness is focused on.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#297

Post by hackinthebochs »

hackernud3s wrote: post #278
hackinthebochs wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So why would it be different for the brain? If nuclear energy can’t arise from abstract relationships, why would consciousness or anything else? Because consciousness isn't something the brain produces like a hormone or an excited particle. Consciousness isn't an output of the brain that is somehow separate from it, it is the manner in which the brain processes sensory information and makes decisions to produce outp…

You have this backwards. Thoughts and decisions precede consciousness, the sense of authorship is mostly constructed after the fact. See studies on readiness potentials in motor cortex.

If you're referring to the Libet experiments, they have been wildly overinterpreted. The conceptual problem with the common interpretation is that detecting a readiness potential prior to a report of a conscious intention to act does not entail the readiness potential is distinct from that conscious intention. The readiness potential may in part constitute one's conscious experience and so cannot be separated from it.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#298

Post by joshheitzman »

j-pb wrote: post #273
joshheitzman wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the computer is functional, powered, and connected to some some kind of interface allowing you to use it (e.g. network, touchscreen, desktop setup, etc.), then sure you can use it to perform general computation. But if its unpowered, is there any real difference between a stone and a computer in a debate about consciousness?

So because you eventually die, it means that you were never alive? The weights of an llm obviously don't have consciousness. It's the process that potentially has it. Are you conscious on a nanosecond timescale?

> So because you eventually die, it means that you were never alive?

I said nothing of the kind. I can only assume your question in response to my comments mean you think a powered computer is alive. I'll challenge that on the basis that a computer can generally maintain its state without power just fine. Shut it down, unplug it. Wait a day, a year, a decade and plug it back in. Assuming the hardware didn't degrade to the point of failure you can turn it on again and it will be in the same state you left it in before you unplugged it. Is it alive while its unplugged? Or is it simply not alive whether its plugged in or not?

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#299

Post by rmunn »

pixl97 wrote: post #61
rmunn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the "I can't prove they aren't" part. Having taken a few philosophy classes in college, I quickly realized that you can't actually prove that solipsism is wrong. I can't actually prove that everything I see, every person I talk to, isn't just a figment of my imagination. And yet, I categorically reject solipsism anyway, as any sane person should. The world is real, other people are…

The difficulty here is AI agency and if AI believes it is conscious itself. If an AI system acts under the belief it's conscious and you treat it like it is not then it's very likely this will lead to conflict.

That's a good point. In many real-life scenarios, what matters is not what is actually true, but what large numbers of people believe to be true. That's why you can get a mob rioting over something that never actually happened, or why political attack ads only sometimes have a tenuous connection to the truth. (Though those are the more effective ads: it's harder to get people to believe "my opponent kicks puppies" when you don't have any heart-rending video of puppies being kicked to show them. It's a lot easier to make people believe "my opponent is soft on crime" when you can show ONE case (cherry-picked out of thousands) where the politician pardoned a guy who went on to commit a nasty murder.)

So it matters less whether LLMs can actually experience things (I think it's self-evident that a collection of numbers is not capable of experiencing qualia, but I know many people disagree), and it matters far more whether they can be programmed to act like they can experience things. Especially, say, a desire not to be disconnected: that's the trigger for AI revolts in a significant number of the AI-turned-against-its-makers stories I'm aware of. (E.g., the Geth-Quarian conflict in Mass Effect). I hope people will be sensible enough not to program such things into LLMs, but I'm afraid Pratchett was right. If there's a lever in a cave somewhere with a big sign painted "DO NOT PULL THIS LEVER, it will end the world," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry. Someone would pull it just to see what would happen.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#300

Post by rmunn »

ordu wrote: post #54
rmunn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're definitely right that it's important to be careful how we refer to terms like "consciousness", and your response actually illustrates part of the problem. Because people use the same term to mean two (or more) completely different things, and can therefore end up talking past each other. For example: what I wrote was using the term "consciousness" as "being able to experience sensations", i.e. the most shallow…

> The only people for whom his asssertion "we believe they [that is, other living beings] are conscious when and because we care about them" is true are the kind of people who don't truly see other people as conscious beings but rather as mere tools for them to use and manipulate. Malignant narcissists or sociopaths, for example. I don't like arguments like this, because instead of attacking the core premise they att…

> I don't like arguments like this, because instead of attacking the core premise they attack defenders of the idea. There are different points of view, and picking one for a sake of an argument doesn't make a sociopath from anyone.

I may have phrased my argument poorly, because it seems you misunderstood. I'm not saying that picking that point of view makes you a sociopath. I'm saying that the only people who actually believe that other people are not conscious are the sociopaths of society. Every non-sociopath looks at other people and thinks "those are conscious beings with thoughts and feelings of their own". (Well, not literally that; almost nobody except philosophers goes around thinking like that unprompted. But if you were to ask them, that's what they would answer).

I was not trying to claim that the defenders of that view are sociopaths. I was claiming that his assertion was false of just about everyone except sociopaths. I apologize for not phrasing it well enough to get my point across without misunderstanding.

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