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When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

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Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#11

Post by canjobear »

search_facility wrote: post #6

Since the times GPT-2 was reimplemented inside Minecraft - its quite obvious LLMs are just math. Nothing else, by nature. Modern LLMs have the same math as in GPT-2 - just bigger and with extra stuff around - and math is the only area of human knowledge with perfect flawless reductionism, straight to the roots. It was build that way since the beginning, so philosophy have no say in this :) And because of that flawles…

You could simulate your own brain in Minecraft. What do you conclude from this?

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#12

Post by SuperV1234 »

search_facility wrote: post #6

Since the times GPT-2 was reimplemented inside Minecraft - its quite obvious LLMs are just math. Nothing else, by nature. Modern LLMs have the same math as in GPT-2 - just bigger and with extra stuff around - and math is the only area of human knowledge with perfect flawless reductionism, straight to the roots. It was build that way since the beginning, so philosophy have no say in this :) And because of that flawles…

We are not fundamentally different. Chemical reactions are just math.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#14

Post by rellfy »

RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #7

It is terribly sad when someone undeniably brilliant in a particular field fails to recognize their own incompetence in other areas - in this case mistaking advanced technology for magic.

Are you implying consciousness is magic? Well, I wouldn't disagree with that really.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#15

Post by root_axis »

There are a lot of people vulnerable to AI psychosis.

As far as the ostensibly controversial topic of AI being conscious, it can be dismissed out of hand. There is no reason that it should be conscious, it was not designed to be, nor does it need to be in order to explain how it functions with respect to its design. It's also unclear how consciousness would even apply to something like an LLM which is a process, not an entity - it has no temporal identity or location in space - inference is a process that could be done by hand given enough time. There is simply no reason to assert LLMs might be conscious without explaining why many other types of complex programs are not.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#16

Post by rellfy »

SuperV1234 wrote: post #12
search_facility wrote: post #6

Since the times GPT-2 was reimplemented inside Minecraft - its quite obvious LLMs are just math. Nothing else, by nature. Modern LLMs have the same math as in GPT-2 - just bigger and with extra stuff around - and math is the only area of human knowledge with perfect flawless reductionism, straight to the roots. It was build that way since the beginning, so philosophy have no say in this :) And because of that flawles…

We are not fundamentally different. Chemical reactions are just math.

Well, (in our current understanding) yes, but there may be underlying aspects of physics and the universe that we do not understand that could be the reason consciousness kicks in. It could turn out that LLMs do work similarly to how humans think, but as an abstracted system it does not have the low level requirements for consciousness.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#17

Post by ezfe »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #9
RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #7

It is terribly sad when someone undeniably brilliant in a particular field fails to recognize their own incompetence in other areas - in this case mistaking advanced technology for magic.

Where does he say it's magic?

LLMs are just math run on your CPU. Autocomplete. Sometimes very useful autocomplete, but still just autocomplete.

To imply it could be conscious requires something else, here the comment uses the phrase magic to fill that gap - since we must agree that a CPU is not conscious on it's own (else everything our computer does would be conscious).

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#18

Post by api »

root_axis wrote: post #15

There are a lot of people vulnerable to AI psychosis. As far as the ostensibly controversial topic of AI being conscious, it can be dismissed out of hand. There is no reason that it should be conscious, it was not designed to be, nor does it need to be in order to explain how it functions with respect to its design. It's also unclear how consciousness would even apply to something like an LLM which is a process, not…

If AI as presently designed and operated is conscious, this ends up being an argument for panpsychism.

As you say it’s static, fixed, deterministic, and so on, and if you know how it works it’s more like a lossy compression model of knowledge than a mind. Ultimately it’s a lot of math.

So if it’s conscious, a rock is conscious. A rock can process information in the form of energy flowing through it. It’s a fixed model. It’s non-reflective. Etc.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#19

Post by throwyawayyyy »

Current LLMs prove that the Turing Test was insufficient all along. But they also prove that intelligence != consciousness. One can, after all, be conscious without a thought in one's head. We certainly have ongoing work in identifying the neural correlates of consciousness in animals, none of which is going to be remotely applicable to machines. We're genuinely blind to the question of whether a sufficiently large neural net can exhibit flashes of subjective experience.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#20

Post by baggy_trough »

rellfy wrote: post #16
SuperV1234 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not fundamentally different. Chemical reactions are just math.

Well, (in our current understanding) yes, but there may be underlying aspects of physics and the universe that we do not understand that could be the reason consciousness kicks in. It could turn out that LLMs do work similarly to how humans think, but as an abstracted system it does not have the low level requirements for consciousness.

> it does not have the low level requirements for consciousness.

What is the evidence for this?

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