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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?

#111

Post by tovej »

ofjcihen wrote: post #36

Incredibly confusing that people who are otherwise of sound mind seem to fall for this. Especially confusing when it’s someone who knows how algorithms work. Barring connectivity issues when’s the last time you messaged an LLM and it just decided to ignore you? Conversely when has it ever messaged you unprompted? Never, because they’re incapable of doing anything independently because there is no sense of self.

If you've followed Dawkins' trajectory, I don't think it's clear that he's "otherwise of sound mind" anymore.

He's had some very strange output on biological gender, where he tries to handwave away the existence of intersex people. And he's a biologist.

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

#113

Post by throwuxiytayq »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #49

We don't even know what the pre-requisites for consciousness are so we have no way of knowing. LLMs have emergent behavior that is reminiscent of language forming brains, but they're also missing a lot of properties that are probably necessary? Mainly continuity over time, more integrated memory, and a better sense of space and time? Brains use the rhythm and timing of neuronal firings, and the length of axons effect…

Clive Wearing's memory lasts for less than 30 seconds, so he has no memory of being awake before now. He is permanently in a state of feeling like he has just woken up, observing his surroundings for the first time.

Clive Wearing's mind has no time continuity and basically zero memory integration. Is he not conscious? There's interviews with the guy.

Where on the scale [No mind Clive Wearing Healthy human brain] would you put an LLM with a 10M token context window?

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

#115

Post by digitaltrees »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #45
digitaltrees wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would current AI be an argument for panpsycism? I don’t understand the connection. AI is stochastic, not static and deterministic. As I said, in another post, there is evidence that sensory experience creates the emergent property of awareness in responding to stimulus, self-awareness and consciousness is an emergent property of a language that has a concept of the self and others. Rocks, just like most of nature…

> AI is stochastic, not static and deterministic. LLMs are deterministic. If you provide the same input to the same GPU, it will produce the same output every time. LLM providers arbitrarily insert a randomised seed into the inference stack so that the input is different every time because that is more useful (and/or because it gives the illusion of dynamic intelligence by not reproducing the same responses verbatim)…

The same argument is made about the human neural network

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

#116

Post by digitaltrees »

colechristensen wrote: post #29
digitaltrees wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would current AI be an argument for panpsycism? I don’t understand the connection. AI is stochastic, not static and deterministic. As I said, in another post, there is evidence that sensory experience creates the emergent property of awareness in responding to stimulus, self-awareness and consciousness is an emergent property of a language that has a concept of the self and others. Rocks, just like most of nature…

I think it's the opposite argument IF current AI is conscious, so are trees, rocks, turbulent flows, etc. The argument being that LLMs are so simple that if you want to ascribe consciousness to them you have to do the same to a LOT of other stuff.

But I listed a specific difference: sensation and response. Trees have that. Rocks do not.

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

#117

Post by mrandish »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #98
ofjcihen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you’re missing is a “self” to have the “experience”. LLMs do not have a self. This is like arguing that the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness.

> the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness. Can such an algorithm reason about itself in relation to others?

> Can such an algorithm reason about itself in relation to others?

No, but an LLM doesn't do that either. An LLM is an algorithm to generate text output which can simulate how humans describe reasoning about themselves in relation to others. Humans do that by using words to describe what they internally experienced. LLMs do it by calculating the statistical weight of linguistic symbols based on a composite of human-generated text samples in its training data.

LLMs never experienced what their textual output is describing. It's more similar to a pocket calculator calculating symbols in relation to other symbols, except scaled up massively.

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

#119

Post by digitaltrees »

kortex wrote: post #73
brookst wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These LLMs don’t have senses, they have a token stream. They have no experience of the world outside of the language tokens they operate on. I’m not sure I believe that consciousness emerges from sensory experience, but if it does, LLMs won’t get it.

How do you know the sensation of a red photon hitting a cone cell, transduced to the optic nerve through ion junctions and processed by pyramidal neurons, is any more or less real than the excitation of electrons in a doped silicon junction activating the latent space of the "red" thought vector? Cause we are made of meat?

You’re arguing against the opposite of my position. I am arguing that LLMs have a reasonable basis to be seen as conscious because there is nothing special about biological neural networks.

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

#120

Post by psychoslave »

dpark wrote: post #97
throwyawayyyy wrote: post #19

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…

> But they also prove that intelligence != consciousness. They prove no such thing. We can't even prove consciousness in other humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_other_minds

On that regard, arguing with thermometer is not a thing generally, but people arguing with LLMs is certainly common enough now to not be considered a completely marginal case. Given some people fall in love or move to suicide after interacting with these models, they are certainly different from even the most beloved dialectical rubber duck.
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