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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?

#131

Post by digitaltrees »

root_axis wrote: post #52
digitaltrees wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is evidence that awareness is an emergent property from sensory experience. And consciousness is an emergent property of language that has grammatical meaning for self and other.

LLMs have no self, sensory experience, or experience of any kind. The idea doesn't even really make sense. Even if it did, the closest analogy to biological "experience" for an LLM would be the training process, since training at least vaguely resembles an environment where the model is receiving stimuli and reacting to it (i.e. human lived experience) - inference is just using the freeze-dried weights as a lookup ta…

What is different about the human neural network? People have given LLMs sensors and they respond to stimuli. The sense of self can be expressed as a linguistic artifact that results in an emergent pattern recognition of distinct entities. For example, merely my saying I am sitting under the tree with a friend I have encountered the self as a pointer to me as the speaker. There is evidence from early childhood development that language acquisition correlates to awareness of the self as distinct from other. And there is evidence from anthropology indicating that language structures shape exactly what the self is perceived to be.

Your best argument is that the weights are set because that means it’s not a system that can self reflect and alter the experience. But I don’t see why that is necessary to have an experience. It seems that I can sense a light and feel its warmth regardless of whether my neurons change. One experience being identical to another doesn’t mean neither was an experience.

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

#132

Post by pydry »

boxed wrote: post #123
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…

> We don't even know what the pre-requisites for consciousness are so we have no way of knowing. Imo we don't even have a definition of the word that we agree on.

We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human.

We might not clearly understand the diff between the two states but we can certainly point to it and go "it's that".

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

#133

Post by ninalanyon »

exe34 wrote: post #101
brookst wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I read it once, was immensely impressed, can't bear to read it again. In fact I find most of what I have read from Peter Watts to be brilliant but disconcerting and uncomfortable.

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

#134

Post by freedomben »

pydry wrote: post #132
boxed wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't even know what the pre-requisites for consciousness are so we have no way of knowing. Imo we don't even have a definition of the word that we agree on.

We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human. We might not clearly understand the diff between the two states but we can certainly point to it and go "it's that".

I'm not sure it's that clear. What about a person who is on drugs to the point they clearly don't know what reality is happening around them, but they are able to speak and move and such? I'm not sure I'd call that conscious, but by most definitions it is.

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

#135

Post by digitaltrees »

mrandish wrote: post #117
AlecSchueler wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-g…

How are you sure it doesn’t reason about itself? The grammar of languages encode the concepts of self and others. LLMs operate with those grammar structures and do so in increasingly accurate ways. Why would we say humans that exhibit the same behavior are inherently more likely to be conscious?

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

#137

Post by digitaltrees »

mrandish wrote: post #117
AlecSchueler wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-g…

Toddlers learn over the course of several years of observing training data and for the first few years misspeak about themselves and others. What’s the difference?

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

#138

Post by agnosticmantis »

pydry wrote: post #132
boxed wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't even know what the pre-requisites for consciousness are so we have no way of knowing. Imo we don't even have a definition of the word that we agree on.

We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human. We might not clearly understand the diff between the two states but we can certainly point to it and go "it's that".

Now discuss whether a bonobo, a dog, a cat, a mouse, an ant, a bacterium is conscious.

And you’ll find it’s not as clear cut.

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

#139

Post by yakbarber »

let's say aliens land. we learn to talk to them. they're super smart - smarter than us. would we say they're conscious? why? because they're organic. I think that's the root of the criteria many folk are trying to express.

1. passes turing test

2. is organic

I'm not saying it's correct or even that I agree with it, but that's what it boils down to.

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