No but they can mimic some aspects of consciousness.
Can you prove you are not merely mimicking consciousness? At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing.
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Could AIs Become Conscious?
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Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?
#12No but they can mimic some aspects of consciousness.
Can you prove you are not merely mimicking consciousness? At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing.
> At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing.
You can have a long conversation with AI about pain and suffering, but you have felt it and AI hasnt. The difference is that, for us humans, words are grounded by something other than other-words, words are grounded by experience. Meaning for us is operational in the real world in the form of perception, feeling and emotions, and movement, and words symbolize said meaning. Meaning for LLMs is something in the concept-space that is detached from any worlds. I suspect there should be a test which can tease apart the ungroundedness of the LLMs just from having a conversation with it.
Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you prove you are not merely mimicking consciousness? At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing.
Consciousness isn't behavioral, which is why we can't prove anyone other than ourselves is conscious. Mimicking isn't going to work. But if you want a more scientific reason, LLMs don't have bodies, thus no sensations. What woult it mean for an LLM to feel hungry or cold?
We will be it's body, it will sense through us.
Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you prove you are not merely mimicking consciousness? At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing.
Consciousness isn't behavioral, which is why we can't prove anyone other than ourselves is conscious. Mimicking isn't going to work. But if you want a more scientific reason, LLMs don't have bodies, thus no sensations. What woult it mean for an LLM to feel hungry or cold?
The body is the mind's interface with the world. Why couldn't a digital mind "feel sensations", subjective as they are, on its own interface with it? If it's assumed to not be a subject, then how could it be a mind at all?
Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can say that but it doesn’t make it true. The reductive approach to consciousness involves forgetting it is reductive and then boldly asserting its own correctness.
For that to be reductive there had to be something to reduce. What would that be, without resorting to tautology?
I agree, but this is getting lost in the weeds.
The simpler issue is that "mimic" doesn't apply to LLMs in the domain of biology. That would be like saying a digital recording of a bird's flight mimics the bird.
Whether or not the plumage on the bird is red (in both life and the video) is an entirely different question.
Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you prove you are not merely mimicking consciousness? At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing.
> At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing. You can have a long conversation with AI about pain and suffering, but you have felt it and AI hasnt. The difference is that, for us humans, words are grounded by something other than other-words, words are grounded by experience. Meaning for us is operational in the real world in the form of perception, feeling and emotions, and movement, and words symbolize said…
> Meaning for LLMs is something in the concept-space that is detached from any worlds. I suspect there should be a test which can tease apart the ungroundedness of the LLMs just from having a conversation with it.
But that isn't the question being asked. Nobody said "Could LLM's become conscious"... the ask was "Could AI's become conscious?"
And before one protests "but everybody knows that today when we say 'AI' we mean 'LLM'", check this quote from TFA:
The pace and reach of research—which includes not just more sophisticated LLMs but innovations such as brain cells mounted on chips—suggest that this new world is closer than most people realise.
So no, they aren't only talking about LLM's. The question is about AI in the general sense. And for my part, I have yet to see any compelling argument for why AI's cannot, in principle, become conscious. Heck, as far as that goes, if you allow thinking rooted in ideas like panpsychism[1], there's not necessarily even a good argument that today's AI's (LLM based or otherwise) aren't already conscious to some degree.
And to go one step further... "The marquee sign says 'Artificial'" to paraphrase a great man. So if we're talking about 'Artificial' Intelligence, why not allow 'Artificial' Consciousness as well? Maybe we're engaging in biological chauvinism if we insist that "to be conscious" means "being conscious the same way humans are".
Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?
#17Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?
#18We pretty famously can't prove that humans are conscious. I'd hold off from making strong statements that AI can't become conscious.
Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can say that but it doesn’t make it true. The reductive approach to consciousness involves forgetting it is reductive and then boldly asserting its own correctness.
For that to be reductive there had to be something to reduce. What would that be, without resorting to tautology?
Unless you don’t know I’m talking about (various kinds of reductive materialism), it sounds like you’re doing exactly what I’m saying is the main rhetorical move in reductive approaches to consciousness.
Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consciousness isn't behavioral, which is why we can't prove anyone other than ourselves is conscious. Mimicking isn't going to work. But if you want a more scientific reason, LLMs don't have bodies, thus no sensations. What woult it mean for an LLM to feel hungry or cold?
So if we embodied them, they would become conscious? I feel like the answer would still be no. There would be another gap. We'd ask the question again, "If they had Y, would they be conscious?" and still the answer would be no. We could keep going on forever, which makes me think, it's not really about these gaps at all. It's an ontological distinction swapping in reasons in order to justify itself. Why not just say,…
Why not just say, "Human consciousness is ontologically axiomatic," and leave it at that?
OK, but why does "human consciousness" even need to enter into it? What I mean is, what's our basis for demanding that the consciousness of an Artificial Intelligence be the same kind of consciousness as that of a human?