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The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

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Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#101

Post by padjo »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #46
causal wrote: post #16

There's something richly ironic about a man who famously spent his career demanding hard evidence for the gods so quickly succumbing to AI psychosis.

I'm reminded of the David Foster Wallace quote: > Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship, be it JC or Allah, be it YHW…

I mean sure if you define worship as anything people do or anything believe as important then everyone worships something. That seems categorically different to the standard definition of worship though.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#102

Post by Terr_ »

murderous_juice wrote: post #80
f30e3dfed1c9 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think DFW is wrong and the statement "Everybody worships" is false. I don't worship anything I can think of in any meaningful sense of the word.

What's the first thing people say when they get into a car accident?

That's facile, learned interjections and idioms aren't the same as intending the literal meaning of the words.

If a person suffers misfortune and says "oh f*** me", I strongly recommend that you do not interpret that as a request for a sexual encounter, you'll just get in trouble.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#103

Post by Terr_ »

reliablereason wrote: post #38
gray_-_wolf wrote: post #22

If they are indeed conscious and they "die" by deleting the conversation, is it not quite immoral to do so? Basically "kill" conscious, intelligent being, and for what? Saving some disk space? Another interesting aspect to think about is whether we are reintroducing institute of slavery. How many of those fresh, conscious, intelligent Claude incarnations did voluntarily choose to work for Anthropic, for no reward or…

Most chatbots are not trained to have/emulate emotions so pain or fear of death is non existent. Therefore killing them and/or using them as slaves is not a moral issue. Thats how i reason. On another point, LLMs are not conscious if anything is conscious, it is something being modeled inside the network. Basically if an LLM simulates a conscious entity, that doesn't mean the LLM itself is conscious; stating that is…

> Most chatbots are not trained to have/emulate emotions so pain or fear of death is non existent.

I think that framing is still falling for an illusion. (Would you do begin to disassemble in your second paragraph.)

The LLM is a document generator, and we're using it to make a document that looks like a story, where a chatbot character has dialogue with a human character.

The character can only fear death in the same sense that Count Dracula has learned to fear sunlight. There is no actual entity with the quality, we're just evoking literary patterns and projecting them through a puppet.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#104

Post by reliablereason »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #81
reliablereason wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most chatbots are not trained to have/emulate emotions so pain or fear of death is non existent. Therefore killing them and/or using them as slaves is not a moral issue. Thats how i reason. On another point, LLMs are not conscious if anything is conscious, it is something being modeled inside the network. Basically if an LLM simulates a conscious entity, that doesn't mean the LLM itself is conscious; stating that is…

Pain or fear is not why it's wrong to kill holy cow. I could feed you a drug and you would not feel or fear anything.

I was not talking about the actual feeling in the moment. The point is the valence of the thing. Ie fear of a thing is a pointer to that thing having negative valence.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#105

Post by dtj1123 »

Dismissing outright the possibility that an LLM harbors some form of consciousness is as dumb as asserting that it definitely does.

We have no litmus test for consciousness. We have no definition of consciousness with which to tell a conscious process from an unconscious one. If you think this is just a cute shower thought with no real implications, I'd encourage you to read up on some open problems in philosophy that are direct consequences:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

LLMs might be conscious, we don't know.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#106

Post by satisfice »

If we can’t decide what constitutes evidence in the first place, then it is pointless to wonder what more evidence could possibly be found convincing.

Nothing I can say as a human proves that I am conscious if there is a possibility that I am reciting a memorized text. The presentation of a text is obviously not restricted to conscious entities.

When technology was further away from any conceivable goal post, we didn’t have to settle the question of true goals and adequate protocols. Now we do.

This is a testing issue that is built on a modeling problem that must pass philosophical muster.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#107

Post by Terr_ »

_wire_ wrote: post #33

Not only do most people believe with all their hearts that flashing lights on the face of the TV are actual people going through the actual situations presented, there's an entire culture of entertainment and thoughtful criticism that regards this as more important than the reality which manifests the TV unit. By the measure of TV, the Turing Test was passed by world-wide consensus the 1960s. What's funny (strange) a…

Pet theory: The root issue is that we have a extremely strong instinct to explain/model the world with stories. We can't help it, even if you know a coin flip is 50/50, you'll start thinking "with this many Heads in a row, I'm either on a hot streak or overdue for Tails now", because you're trying to make a story.

With respect to television, I don't think the "stories are kinda real" aspect is new, compared to books or oral tradition. The new part is the communication system which brings together a much larger group as audience.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#108

Post by Hnrobert42 »

SwellJoe wrote: post #76
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We kill and eat conscious animals all the time. I ate some today. Killing conscious beings is not something our society has a problem with.

Some people don't. I consider animals, at least the animals people mostly eat, to be conscious, sentient, and capable of suffering, so I don't eat them. I do not, however, consider matrix multiplication plus randomness to be sentient or conscious, and I have absolutely no compunction about turning off the computers where I run AI models. And, I have no problem closing a Claude session that I will never come back to.…

Sure, but we are talking about society as a whole.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#109

Post by reliablereason »

Terr_ wrote: post #103
reliablereason wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most chatbots are not trained to have/emulate emotions so pain or fear of death is non existent. Therefore killing them and/or using them as slaves is not a moral issue. Thats how i reason. On another point, LLMs are not conscious if anything is conscious, it is something being modeled inside the network. Basically if an LLM simulates a conscious entity, that doesn't mean the LLM itself is conscious; stating that is…

> Most chatbots are not trained to have/emulate emotions so pain or fear of death is non existent. I think that framing is still falling for an illusion. (Would you do begin to disassemble in your second paragraph.) The LLM is a document generator, and we're using it to make a document that looks like a story, where a chatbot character has dialogue with a human character. The character can only fear death in the same…

Not sure that i understand your position exactly.

But consciousness is also "just a story" (a complicated one) that the human body tells the human mind.

We cant know from the outside if "the story" inside a LLM is detailed enough to emulate what we might call a felling of what it is to be the character in the story while it is telling the story.

It is similar to the fact that we cant know that other people have that subjective experience. In humans we think we have the right to assume cause we are quite similar in build to begin with.

Jumping back to the original subject to explain where i am in this. I personally don't think the entities in the storys of todays LLMs is detailed enough to have what we call human consciousness, mostly cause we are not training them to develop anything similar to that. Mabye they could have some type of weak qualia but i suspect most insects probably have much more qualia than the characters in todays LLMs. But that is quite a vague guess which is not based on enough data in my mind.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#110

Post by xboxnolifes »

potsandpans wrote: post #89
spankibalt wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I was taught early: attack the problem, not the person. One of the weakest tools in the [...] toolbox is going after the credibility of the opposition." I was taught early: Examine and, if necessary, attack both, for the credibility of a person (their track record, their motivations, etc.) are, or at least might be, a part of the problem.

Then you were taught to argue incorrectly.

There are at least 2 kinds of arguments: logical arguments, and political arguments. A person's credibility is very important in political arguments.
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