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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?

#101
post #39

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 n…

Obligatory Blightsight recommendation for intelligence != consciousness.

that book messes with my head every time I read it, it's like I go through life in a detached way for several weeks. I need to read it again!

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

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just any math: Matrix multiplication. Can matrix multiplication be conscious? And, I don't see how it can be. It is deterministic, when all variables are controlled. You can repeat the output over and over, if you start it with the same seed, same prompt, and same hardware operating in a way that doesn't introduce randomness. At commercial scale, this is difficult, as the floating point math on GPUs/TPUs when run…

Human brains are also deterministic, though somewhat more difficult to reset to a starting state. So this seems to prove that humans aren't conscious either.

This seems like an extraordinary claim to make about an above-room-temperature chemical system that, even in the most Newtonian oversimplification, amounts to an astronomical number of oddly-shaped and unevenly-charged billiard balls flying around at jet aircraft speeds.

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

#103

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.

No, math is a tool that we can use to describe something more fundamental. Don't mistake the map for the territory!

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

#104
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Ad hominems are always a nice way of getting out of answering something you have no answer to.

It's not an ad hominem. In fact, it's perhaps the most good faith interpretation of your words possible. Ad hominem would be calling you stupid because you obviously know that you have a self and only your own stupidity could explain your inability to see how your self is generalisable. When you go around pretending you genuinely think maybe humans don't have selves, really the only way to take you seriously is to think that maybe you're a p-zombie.

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

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imho no, math itself have no conciousness. Quite confidently its a helpful tool that does not act by himself.

Hm, say more about what your opinion's based on here?

Take a piece of paper, write two numbers on it, let me know when they start to reproduce.

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

#107
Honestly, who care if they are conscious? If it's about how we should treat other conscious beings, our attention should first go to how we treat other animals, or even other humans. Actually even how fellow humans will treat themselves can be a concern if they are not the proper means to deal with their own life.

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

#109

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.

We're going to see increasing numbers of older famous (non computer savvy) figures that we have respected follow his views on this. It's like seeing your favourite celebrity sell out an shill crypto coins, all a bit sad.

Thinking positively, it could just be newsworthy because he is famous and he so misses the mark. Other older famous people might agree with us but that's not news.

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

#110
post #39

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 n…

Obligatory Blightsight recommendation for intelligence != consciousness.

Blindsight
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