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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

#331

Post by gizajob »

txrx0000 wrote: post #303
consumer451 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

These are good intuitions. I'll add some more: Orangutans can drive a golf cart, there are videos of that from the pre-AI era. General anesthetics that work on humans also tend to work on them. There is just a smooth gradient of brain evolution. We don't know exactly what in the brain gets disrupted during general anesthesia (or a baseball bat to the head, for that matter) that causes consciousness to go away, but in…

How is taking a baseball bat to the head analogous to taking a baseball bat to a computer mainframe?

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#332

Post by archonis »

kulahan wrote: post #291
consumer451 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 grea…

>> And there's lots of evidence that we've hit a million unlikely goalposts.

What makes them unlikely?

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#333

Post by ahartmetz »

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…

The simplest and perhaps most honest argument for humans being special is that we are humans, so other humans are special to us.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#334

Post by hackinthebochs »

slopinthebag wrote: post #322
hackinthebochs wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really the only live option once the issues are properly understood. Causal closure: a physical event is explanatorily exhausted by prior physical events. Causal exclusion: if physical properties fully cause/explain everything we say and do about consciousness, i.e. our behavior purported to be about consciousness, then consciousness cannot be distinct from the physical behavior and also be a cause of that behav…

It's a massive leap to go from consciousness must be causally integrated with physical brain activity to consciousness is exhausted by an abstract functional description of that activity . At best you could establish that consciousness cannot be an additional, independent cause outside the physical causal order.

Causal integration + causal closure is a wrap for non-abstract theories. The so-called biological theories of consciousness are just wishful thinking.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#335

Post by hackinthebochs »

Jtarii wrote: post #325
hackinthebochs wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just alters the thought experiment. What the thought experiment offers is a book of opaque rules, just instructions on how to transform symbols into more symbols without any concern for their meaning. What you're offering is a translation dictionary, what does it mean when one encounters X symbol. You're giving him a book on learning Chinese.

Language is infinitely generative though so I don't understand how you can write down a finite list of rules in a book in the first place. The thought experiment is fundamentally nonsensical.

It only takes a finite number of rules to generate a mapping between unbounded strings of finite symbols. The brain doesn't contain an infinite amount of information after all.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#336

Post by cwmoore »

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.

s/“That never works.”/“mine,mine,mine,mine,mine”/g

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#337

Post by exe34 »

mcmcmc wrote: post #207
exe34 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It can produce better thought out arguments than a lot of people though.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#338

Post by GPerson »

nonfamous wrote: post #326
felipeerias wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> In living beings, consciousness is embodied and can not be reproduced by discrete steps. Why not, at least in principle? Wouldn’t an exact map of a brain’s neural structure and its electromagnetic and chemical state, combined with inputs mirroring the senses, be able to be automated to produce a digital analog of human thought. The model is impractical and couldn’t be reproduced today, yes. But what, exactly, is m…

Our models of reality are incomplete. See this very nice Stephen Hawking lecture where he says as such

https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/lectures/godel-and-the-e...

People have thought they were nearly complete at least for 500 years, probably longer.

When you choose a specific model to represent the brain you are asserting you’ve accounted for everything that generates consciousness (=the lights are on, experiences qualia). This means you’ve solved the hard problem. The hard problem is debated constantly though.

In my view there is absolutely no reason to think a description of reality can be equal to reality. There are probably (in my view that is) aspects of reality, like first person internal experience, that fundamentally can not be described with third party linguistic / symbolic / representational devices.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#339

Post by [deleted] »

exe34 wrote: post #97
kaangiray26 wrote: post #84

Quoting 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.

[deleted]
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