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Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

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Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#351
post #299
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" wh…

>not to program such things into LLMs

While we can direct LLM training to do some particular things better never forget that unexpected emergent behaviors can pop up because of that.

For example stronger prompting and training to make an LLM say it's not conscious can increase deceptive/sociopathic behavior.

Or by filtering behavior X the LLM just moves to the nearest closest path W or Y which are very similar to the blocked behavior.

That and instrumental convergence. Some global solutions that humans have excluded for moral reasons will be easily discovered and found to be efficient by LLMs which will put reward systems and human guidance in conflict.

Lastly more and more AIs will be trained by AIs over time and diverge from human value monitoring. Which leads to some fun and interesting times.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#352
post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your response doesn't make a lot of sense, are you able to actually state your point? Doing a search and replace as you suggest, doesn't actually create anything that makes sense.

I first read your comment as "giving money to kids." That's probably how commenter interpreted it and it makes sense in that context.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#353
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And I can't prove it either way. Not true. This is "provable" aspects of you and your personality can be changed by physical changes to the brain. There are thousands of instances of this including experiments that verify this. While you can't "prove" this simply by observing this phenomenon among other people that level of "proof" is impossible. You technically can't prove anything and what we see with physical cha…

I'm a little unclear as to what the disagreement is. I still think in your scenario, we would not be able to prove that that is what actually happened as opposed to someone manipulating the inputs to the brain to make it think that's what happened. Or to change it completely. Like that's the entire solipsistic problem. The brain is just sort of self-contained. Everything is essentially input. We are incapable of real…

See it’s too pedantic now.

My statement is not that a type of proof is impossible. All proof is impossible. This is a fact of science. Proof is only possible in mathematics which is a made up game of axioms and theorems. Proof in reality is impossible.

But humans go about believing in many things without proof. We believe in physics without proof because it’s relatively consistent though unproven. And I am saying that things like brain damage, brain surgery and electrodes and the physical changes those things do to the personality is ALSO relatively consistent.

Consistent enough that we can know that the souls doesn’t exist that the personality the ego is a manifestation of the physical brain. Proof is not needed because we can’t prove anything anyway and the criterion is met in this aspect because it is the baseline of how we believe all things without proof.

For example:

We know that conscious experience and personality are manifestations of the physical brain rather than a non-physical soul because targeted changes to brain tissue directly alter a person's core identity, memories, and behaviors. The most famous historical example of this is Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railroad worker who survived an iron rod blasting through his frontal lobe; while his body healed, his polite, reliable personality vanished, replacing him with an impulsive and erratic stranger. Similarly, modern medical cases of patients suffering from severe Alzheimer's disease or traumatic brain injuries show how the physical erosion of brain matter systematically erases lifelong memories, moral reasoning, and the emotional bonds that define a person's character. Furthermore, patients who undergo "split-brain" surgery to treat epilepsy—where the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres is severed—effectively develop two separate streams of consciousness inside one head, with one half of the brain holding beliefs or desires that the other half is completely unaware of. If a unified, spiritual soul were the true source of our character, choices, and consciousness, physical damage, tissue erosion, or surgical separation would leave those abstract traits unharmed. Instead, because changing the physical structure and chemistry of the brain completely rewrites or splits who a person is, modern neuroscience concludes that the mind is entirely a product of the physical brain.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can prove other people are conscious off the assumption that you yourself are conscious. If you use that axiom then given genetics you know that other humans are rough copies of you so if you are conscious so are your copies because consciousness was copied.

> You can prove other people are conscious off the assumption that you yourself are conscious I'm being a bit pedantic here, but no I don't think that "I am conscious therefore you must be too" is true I think you can claim that it is most reasonable to assume other people are conscious but I don't think it reaches the level of proof

can you provide an example of a claim in the subject being discussed, or any subject outside of mathematics, that manages to reach the level of proof?

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#355
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And I can't prove it either way. Not true. This is "provable" aspects of you and your personality can be changed by physical changes to the brain. There are thousands of instances of this including experiments that verify this. While you can't "prove" this simply by observing this phenomenon among other people that level of "proof" is impossible. You technically can't prove anything and what we see with physical cha…

I'm a little unclear as to what the disagreement is. I still think in your scenario, we would not be able to prove that that is what actually happened as opposed to someone manipulating the inputs to the brain to make it think that's what happened. Or to change it completely. Like that's the entire solipsistic problem. The brain is just sort of self-contained. Everything is essentially input. We are incapable of real…

> And I agree that sort of proof is impossible to acquire. Like, there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone else is conscious. Like, there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone else is conscious. But that's why we instead treat it as an axiom instead. We basically say "We're not going to prove it, we're just going to accept it as true". And that's fine.

> Mostly because it not being true is an existential horror no one wants to truly confront.

we can't prove, in this mathematics sense, that other people are conscious just as we can't prove that the sun will rise again tomorrow, or that my food will nourish me instead of killing me, or that everything is still there when you're not looking. for questions of this type we normally content ourselves with empirical evidence instead. and the empirical evidence for the consciousness of other humans (and, taking it further, other animals) for me would be the facts (1) that i am conscious, and that (2) i am a human like other humans: same anatomy, same behaviors, same story. indeed, empirically, it'd be absurd to think that i'd be so profoundly different from other humans in this particular aspect.

i guess what i'm saying is for me the real existential horror is the problem of induction.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#356
post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think the brain encodes language via a giant list of rules.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile that's exactly what we see now, do we not? Whether AI is conscious will be determined by the social acceptance of that idea, because how can you prove or disprove it without using a ton of questionable assumptions? How can you prove that I'm conscious, for that matter? Call me ignorant, but I see the entire consciousness debate as pretty irrelevant to what the thing is. I agree that the article is all over…

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…

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Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#358
post #31

I’m can’t track what the point of this essay is. Suppose we replaced “AI” with “animal.” How would this essay be different? What am I supposed to take away? My concern with AI consciousness is about to what extent these machines can have an experience comparable to mine, which this essay doesn’t touch on at all.

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Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t take massive intelligence to sit on all the capital and charge rents. The owning class isn’t going to just give up control because the AI could run things better than them.

That’s a naive take. Generating above market returns on capital is probably the most competitive arena ever. Why do you think CEOs make so much money? They typically are not the ones that own the capital. They are the people the capital owners pay extremely well to maximize their returns. If it didn’t matter who they picked they would just pick someone and pay them a few 100k and keep the rest.

No sir your take is the naive one. You’ve affirmed my position by pretending to deny it.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How so?
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