Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 1001 posts

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#121

Post by devindotcom »

sigmar wrote: post #66

>So what context would cause me to seriously consider the possibility that engineers had created a computer program that is conscious and an intentional user of language? Let me outline one potential sequence of steps. The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs; there are many reasons for this, but for the purposes of this discussion the most relevant o…

the very next paragraph addresses this concern imo. it's just an example of one way it might be convincing to him, since of course we are naturally anthropocentric.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#122

Post by runarberg »

throwaway713 wrote: post #78
shafoshaf wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I have with good faith debate is that it often falls into a fallacy of "fair-time" meaning we think we have to give the other side equal time. This because obvious with things like the Holocaust. Or when you have a legal person (e.g. RFK Jr.) asking to debate a scientist (e.g. Dr. Peter Hotez.)

> The problem I have with good faith debate is that it often falls into a fallacy of "fair-time" meaning we think we have to give the other side equal time The Catholic church could have said exactly the same thing at one point. "Why should we even devote time to an argument as absurd as the earth not being the center of the universe?" There are darker examples along the lines of those you give, with beliefs quite op…

Galileo’s (or rather the Copernican) model was still wrong though. It had obvious flaws and the church was not wrong in keeping their older model of the universe while a better model (Kepler‘s model) was still in the works.

What Galileo was asking the church to do was extremely unreasonable. He was basically asking them to throw a way a model which had worked fine for hundreds of years just because he observed the phases of Venus and moons of Jupiter. I mean would you? Especially for a model which was worse at predicting the motions of the planets.

Had Galileo’s model been better then Ptolemies’ I could see a case for his arguments, but it wasn’t, and there was no reason for the church to take his arguments at equal value with those in favor of keeping the Ptolemaic model.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#123

Post by cataphract »

throwaway713 wrote: post #22

Suppose one selects an arbitrary hot-button issue [X] with two opposing sides and one side has anything less than overwhelming support. And then that person writes an article titled "Side 1 of issue [X] is true". Not "maybe" or "possibly". Just a straight-up declaration by fiat. Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying? And before you say "persuasive" because you're thinking…

You must hate reading legal briefs.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#124

Post by eberkund »

sigmar wrote: post #66

>So what context would cause me to seriously consider the possibility that engineers had created a computer program that is conscious and an intentional user of language? Let me outline one potential sequence of steps. The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs; there are many reasons for this, but for the purposes of this discussion the most relevant o…

I'm more interested in what a virtual body would entail. To me the root of this idea is around persistent state which is something that currently LLMs do not have. Imagine if somehow your brain lacked long-term memory forming capabilities and instead each day when you woke up you had to read a notebook with (markdown formatted) instructions that you wrote the day before? I wouldn't be surprised if such a person lacked in many of the dimensions we consider important for consciousness, even in less sophisticated forms of life like dogs or mice.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#125

Post by danbmil99 »

I find it strange that no one talks about consciousness and intelligence from the perspective of evolution.

We have big brains for exactly one reason only: bigger brains bestowed reproductive success upon our species.

Evolution doesn't give a shit about the meaning of 'consciousness'. It just pushed us farther and farther along a trajectory that led to modern humans (and other animals).

This take suggests, then, that consciousness might be an epiphenomenon -- an aspect of the system that comes about outside of the pressure to reproduce and thrive. It arises unbidden, and we don't have any a-priori information as to its purpose or effect on reproductive success.

Put another way: we have a correlation (the smartest things seem to be conscious) but not causation. Consciousness may arise naturally in any system above some intelligence threshold. Perhaps it arises early in the evolutionary cycle, and does in fact have an impact on species success. We really have no way of knowing what is the chicken vs the egg (Smart things become conscious, or consciousness promotes intelligence). Or maybe some smart things are conscious and others are not.

Looking at this from an AI perspective, in some sense it doesn't matter which scenario is true, if all you care about is results. The AI equivalent of "Shut up and compute" (riffing on Feynman's "Shut up and calculate").

Where this gets tricky is when we haul in the baggage of ethics and morality into the picture. Is it OK if our AI system is treated poorly by human standards? If it is conscious, does that imply an ability to suffer, and/or to feel pleasure? If the answer is yes, does that not make the case for considering their moral status?

In the end, we need to decide if the evidence points to AI as being a form of "philosophical zombies", to which we need not attribute moral status, or they are like us -- presuming we are not zombies ourselves!

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#126

Post by speak_plainly »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #28
speak_plainly wrote: post #19

“Counsciousness” is the ultimate moving goalpost, and historically, it’s been one of humanity’s most effective intellectual weapons. An indefinable black box we intentionally gatekeep to draw an arbitrary line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. I don’t know if AI is conscious or not, and I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious. historically, by claiming a monopoly on it, we’ve successfully manufactured the phi…

Can you give some historical examples of people moving the goalposts around consciousness? I agree, perhaps, for aspects of "intelligence" but I can't think of any examples of it with regard to consciousness proper.

There’s over 400 years of philosophical debate about consciousness starting with Locke, shifting with Kant, and continuing onward with real world implications throughout. By some more modern definitions an iPhone has consciousness while others explicitly exclude certain humans, and these definitions served as part of the justification of slavery and sexism, colonialism and more. I started writing an essay on this on my phone in response and I gave up there are so many examples.

To name a few you may want to investigate:

John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Giulio Tononi, René Descartes, Daniel Dennett, Julian Jaynes, Michael Graziano, T.H. Huxley, Otto Weininger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Searle, Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Max Velmans, Victor Lamme, Stanislas Dehaene, Antonio Damasio, Anil Seth, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, Colin McGinn, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Frank Jackson, Jerry Fodor, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Brentano, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#127

Post by lwarfield »

sdenton4 wrote: post #109
sigmar wrote: post #66

>So what context would cause me to seriously consider the possibility that engineers had created a computer program that is conscious and an intentional user of language? Let me outline one potential sequence of steps. The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs; there are many reasons for this, but for the purposes of this discussion the most relevant o…

Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions. Is a car a body? Does an AI situated in a car therefore get to have desires and emotions? Is a taupe box with a webcam attached a body? (For that matter: Is a quadropelegic body a body? Do quadropelegics have desires and emotions? Obviously, yes and yes.) Why i…

>Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions.

Damn, what a line!

Another thing that bothered me with his baseline for consciousness was that it did not involve the ability to change one's self. A big part of being conscious in my mind is how one's experiences shape them, and how someone can shape themselves. LLMs completely lack this, their weights are static. An LLM isn't going to be molded by a bad breakup, or a relative passing away. An LLM isn't going to set up a routine to get stronger with training, nor smarter by reading up on a field.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#128

Post by radial_symmetry »

McGlockenshire wrote: post #92
radial_symmetry wrote: post #55

We do not know if Claude is conscious, and we will almost certainly never know. Any strong claim either way is over confident.

Fancypants autocomplete cannot be conscious. It's just echoing previous human experiences, which make it sound like a person. It is not a person. It is an algorithm. There is no mechanism by which it can obtain consciousness. People believing otherwise are fools. People debating this are idiots. I realize these words are harsh, but it's the truth.

[dead]

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#129

Post by radial_symmetry »

search_facility wrote: post #105
radial_symmetry wrote: post #55

We do not know if Claude is conscious, and we will almost certainly never know. Any strong claim either way is over confident.

It's the opposite, engineers do know. Claiming otherwise is way too generous and over confident. I mean between this two "knowings" the Claude inner workings are much more clear for engineers, including many side effects, alternatives, custom shortcuts in processing etc. It's a magic only for people looking at it as black box

How would engineers know? We don't even know what makes humans conscious

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#130

Post by anon291 »

jbotz wrote: post #2

I don't think LLMs are conscious. But of course to say that definitively you have to define consciousness, and then you quickly dig yourself into a deep hole, which is why I can't say anything but "meh" to someone who is so keen to go on the record to say "absolutely not". Coincidentally I just read "Children of Memory", which was published in 2022 and I wonder if the advent of LLMs had any influence on Adrian Tchaik…

You can also take the opposite view as you and claim that only some humans experience consciousness, or even more strongly, only you, since you have no evidence. You are correct that, in my perception, some other people have fallen into the 'birds are conscious, whales are conscious, etc' bandwagon, but that's just them. I have no evidence of anything being conscious but myself.
Post reply on HN