101–110 of 140 posts
Now of course as an atheist I do not believe in soul and humans are just following evolutionary programming but we will never see chatGPT do standup comedy.
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Seems like you think AI psychosis has taken over Substack? For anyone wondering what the answer is: You can argue whatever you want (and people will argue both sides), but it's almost all bullshit that dances around the big question. Either AI is smart enough to replace us, in which case it's pretty smart. Or it's not, and it's just good at faking it but can't solve real problem very often. It might be smart by searc…
>Seems like you think AI psychosis has taken over Substack? I wasn't touching the question of psychosis one way or the other, though it's an interesting question in its own right. (I have seen one account dedicated to defending a personal deep friendship with Claude and a few others analogizing our ignorance of LLM welfare to historical disregard for African Americans, which I think is a bit much. Most cases I think…
I feel like I got my fingers burnt last year trying to solve a technical problem, and the AI was just good enough to seem convincing, but not good enough to fool me when I stopped to think. These days, I expect the AI ability to defend my bad ideas will be beyond my ability to refute.
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Taking this word as a "key" just leads to a philosophical zombie dead end which is not tied to anything observable.
"Nobody supposes that the computational model of rainstorms in London will leave us all wet. But they make the mistake of supposing that the computational model of consciousness is somehow conscious. It is the same mistake in both cases."
The interaction with those LLMs would be excruciatingly slow, probably spanning over multiple human lifetimes, but yes, why not?
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Whether LLMs could be conscious or not is basically a weekly conversation for me, but I've never had a conversation about whether a chess model is conscious. I suspect that there is a large group of "mainstream" people for whom LLMs raise questions about consciousness that other kinds of models do not. It might be the case that hardcore model philosophy types think that chess models could be conscious, but I think mu…
On what grounds would someone establish than an LLM could be conscious but a sufficiently large/complex transformer model aimed at chess would not be conscious?
If we define consciousness this way, then a plain transformer is not conscious because it's not able to explain its outputs properly or make corrections to the pipeline (i.e. "cannot modify its own system prompt", if simplified). But an ensemble of LLMs "orchestrator/analyzer + reasoning subagents" can probably viewed as something approximating 'consciousness".
I think a chess engine can be proclaimed conscious if it has the properties listed above. However, my very simple and mechanistic definition of consciousness is debatable, especially since by many it's conflated with "soul".
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> I'm not sure who this kind of thing is aimed at My guess would be it is aimed at those who are falling for the marketing from the AI companies that these LLM's are far more than they are. That they are 'intelligent' that they have 'emerging human like properties because of that intelligence.'
We're really moving the goal posts on "Intelligence" now that passing the Turing test, writing a poem, writing code, creating a painting, driving a car, and solving multiple Erdos problems all no longer qualify. I' genuinely wondering if people are even bothering to come up with new goal posts now? Is there any miracle of computing that would possibly satisfy your definition? When we get a fully AI-run company that's…
- make another bullshit benchmark and name it "humanity's last humanlike intelligence benchmark" and overfit to it;
- make rich talkinghead twit about it p r o f o u n d l y, ask for more money and remind people of china;
- remove last remaining percentage of truth from all communication about ai (this is the real bug breaking the system);
Solved this problem for you on under 20W of processing power!
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Personally: not only is "blind/disabled 12 year olds" categorically intelligent compared to llm, perhaps even a Labroides dimidiatus is, check (retain skepticism): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_aNH4hXz8I. Capabilities of these organisms are beyond llm. I don't care that your machine jumps much higher than a person - because it's pointless no matter how marvellous of an engineering it is, ESPECIALLY when you say that it therefore has surpassed people entirely; and then use that to extract the last crumb of resource from everyone... It is a compounding issue. Same way I don't care that it can approximately and unpredictably recall or not recall the web before 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDS-iSueBQ4.
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If ai lovers started telling the truth about capabilities, goalposts of these capabilities would not move - because they would be accurately defined and measured. Instead, they use the fuzziness of language to their advantage - a big part of the betrayal of language that is happening...
And you know I am right, since - your favorite larger than life AI "told" me so ;)))
EDIT: GRAMMER
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People have hypothesised that consciousness is tied to language.
And so animals wouldn’t be conscious because they don’t use language? If so, I vote that the stupidest hypothesis of the year. Or would one count any communication between animals as language? In that case almost any interaction would count.
As soon as try and draw a firm line between "X counts and Y doesn't", you find that you really can't. There are no obvious boundaries between a deeply complex and fully functioning FL human brain, and a pile of atoms bouncing around arbitrarily.
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And so animals wouldn’t be conscious because they don’t use language? If so, I vote that the stupidest hypothesis of the year. Or would one count any communication between animals as language? In that case almost any interaction would count.
That's where things get interesting. As soon as you start asking what counts as communication... what about signals passing between cells? What about heat passing between atoms? As soon as try and draw a firm line between "X counts and Y doesn't", you find that you really can't. There are no obvious boundaries between a deeply complex and fully functioning FL human brain, and a pile of atoms bouncing around arbitrari…
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On what grounds would someone establish than an LLM could be conscious but a sufficiently large/complex transformer model aimed at chess would not be conscious?
What is consciousness? For, me it's being aware of one's internal processes. Evolutionarily, I view it as dynamic intelligence: static intelligence has a fixed in-out pipeline, while dynamic intelligence allows one to reflect on the reasoning pipeline itself and make dynamic corrections to it => better adaptability. If we define consciousness this way, then a plain transformer is not conscious because it's not able t…
That reasoning may not manifest as English that we can read, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.
As information bounces through the many layers of the model, I find it plausible that you could get reflection in there somewhere.
I also find it reasonable that consciousness may not even require reflection / introspection.
That's the main problem with consciousness. We really have no idea how it works, therefore it's really difficult to conclusively state that something lacks consciousness
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On what grounds would someone establish than an LLM could be conscious but a sufficiently large/complex transformer model aimed at chess would not be conscious?
It might not even need a transformer. A specific pattern of self-referencing data could be seen (or not) as low-level consciousness in the future, when we know what consciousness exactly is. It might be that stockfish is already something future scientists would define as "conscious". Altough it is diffucult for me to Imagine that specific example.
Common sense says "surely not"... But where is the exact point at which "surely not" becomes "well maybe..."?
I haven't been able to find a satisfying answer to that question, which forces me to assume (at least until a satisfying answer is found) that consciousness is a gradient and in fact does exist in little bits all over the place.