11–20 of 42 posts
The cultural fixation on "Consciousness" has become deeply frustrating to me. We are naturally "animistic" and personifying. The twist in structure allowing mirror neurons being able to re-use the hardware for thinking to model the behavior of external things is useful and has been critical to our success. Unlearning the behavior of of that animism is HARD. Maintaining awareness that the forces of nature, animals, or…
I know I’m conscious. I only extend the assumption to you that you’re conscious because I’m hoping you will extend the same to me. But I have no way of knowing that you are. And you (if you really are conscious) have no way of knowing that I am.
or, maybe, you are just a figment of mine.
if you think about it.
I know I’m conscious. I only extend the assumption to you that you’re conscious because I’m hoping you will extend the same to me. But I have no way of knowing that you are. And you (if you really are conscious) have no way of knowing that I am.
Philosophically: You can being building criteria for consciousness; the things you look at in yourself that tell you are, and then begin looking for that (or symptoms of that) in other people.
Anecdotally: you can totes spot "unconscious" people. You can even watch people gain consciousness, if you watch 'em in the right circumstances. You can even watch yourself regain consciousness (for me it's usually a sensation of "what was I even doing for the past day/week/month).
All of this gets at least as weird and fuzzy as trying to define "consciousness" in the first place.
I actually think major components supporting consciousness are already present in LLMs, and some of the 'requirements' like "perceiving time fluidly" are anthropomorphism: perception of time is streams of discrete signals; an LLM also processes streams of discrete signals -- just not as high resolution or analog as the ones our brains process. There are certainly big missing pieces too though -- like the article talk…
I think that it may be possible to view consciousness as the combination of three things:
(1) A generalizable predictive function, capable of broad abstraction. (2) A sense of being in space. (3) A sense of being in time. (#2 and #3 can be combined into a "spatiotemporal sense.")
Animals have #2 and #3 in spades, but lack #1. LLMs possess #1 to a degree that can defeat any human, but lack #2 and #3. Without a sense of being in space and time, it's not clear that they are capable of possessing consciousness as we understand it.
I know I’m conscious. I only extend the assumption to you that you’re conscious because I’m hoping you will extend the same to me. But I have no way of knowing that you are. And you (if you really are conscious) have no way of knowing that I am.
really, if you think about it, you have no way of knowing if I'm not just a figment of your imagination. or, maybe, you are just a figment of mine. if you think about it.
I know I’m conscious. I only extend the assumption to you that you’re conscious because I’m hoping you will extend the same to me. But I have no way of knowing that you are. And you (if you really are conscious) have no way of knowing that I am.
How? Or is this more of a case of "To the extent of my ability to reason about my own state of being, I'm conscious. But I can't reason about external entities."
This leads to the interesting question, can you simulate consciousness in a virtual in-silico world setting? Can you create an entity that inhabits this virtual world, taking in simulated sensory data, from which it orients itself, learns to speak a language, develops symbolic representations of reality in its own mind which it uses to navigate and understand its world - would that be human-level consciousness? And if so, is this an ethical undertaking?
If the underlying tech for AI in 50 years is still LLMs it will never have a conscience, it will just keep mimicking one from reddit convos, but yes it will be much more advanced than todays.
>You are not just seeing consciousness in me; your brain is generating the feeling of another’s consciousness as the best explanation for the patterns you’re interacting with. It's ironic to see the most mundane and likely best answer to the problem from the model itself, while the author is getting increasingly lost in philosophical conundrums. Consciousness has no scientific definition. The only way something, anyt…
> So where do we go from here if we're not convinced yet? The answer is: nowhere. Humans used to deny that animals could have consciousness because they don't have souls or aren't chosen by god according to some sacred books or something along those lines.
You bring up religion. People say that AI is conscious based on mystic vibes they unquestioningly take in (or accept gratefully) because the AI can write like a philosopher. That’s exactly like people thinking that the woods and the creeks are Alive. They see the phenonema around these natural objects and make extra-evidential inferences about how the conscious Nature is working with or against them.
> They even used to deny that other humans have consciousness to promote slavery and slaughtering. Today many would still deny consciousness in computers even when faced with overwhelming evidence, because they might fear for their jobs and thereby their wealth and social standing. Artificial intelligence is a direct threat to the foundations of personality in a capitalist society.
Yeah, preach. Before they enslaved people. Now people are afraid of losing their jobs—their only means of survival—so that the tech billionaires can reap all the productivity benefits for themselves. Preach.
And: their sense of personality? No. Just their means of being able to survive and live a good life. That’s how it relates to “capitalist society”. Because their identity (of letting a capitalist extract their value I guess?) is secondary to that more base need.
And who cares if the entity that takes their job (presumably) is conscious or not? What does it even matter? It doesn’t.
As for the overwhelming evidence, well. I guess it is overwhelming to the kind of person who hears voices in a valley where the terrain happens to have a shape which makes the wind make intonations.
I know I’m conscious. I only extend the assumption to you that you’re conscious because I’m hoping you will extend the same to me. But I have no way of knowing that you are. And you (if you really are conscious) have no way of knowing that I am.
> I know I’m conscious How? Or is this more of a case of "To the extent of my ability to reason about my own state of being, I'm conscious. But I can't reason about external entities."