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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?

#141

Post by qsera »

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.

Ability to feel pain or pleasure is a good indicator I think..

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

#142

Post by JackFr »

SwellJoe wrote: post #63
XMPPwocky wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup- the question is "can math be conscious?" (If you've engaged w/ the literature here, it's quite hard to give a confident "yes". it's also quite hard to give a confident "no"! so then what the heck do we do)

Not just any math: Matrix multiplication. Can matrix multiplication be conscious? And, I don't see how it can be. It is deterministic, when all variables are controlled. You can repeat the output over and over, if you start it with the same seed, same prompt, and same hardware operating in a way that doesn't introduce randomness. At commercial scale, this is difficult, as the floating point math on GPUs/TPUs when run…

> Not just any math: Matrix multiplication. Can matrix multiplication be conscious? And, I don't see how it can be.

Assuming your brain and the GPUs are both real physical things, where’s the magic part in your brain that makes you conscious?

(Roger Penrose knows, but no one believes him.)

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

#143

Post by qsera »

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…

They are not intelligent. And they won't pass turing tests if it cannot count or some simple thing like that..

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

#145

Post by nandomrumber »

SwellJoe wrote: post #129
XMPPwocky wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, it sounds like to you consciousness implies non-determinism, and so determinism implies a lack of consciousness - is that right? If so, why do you think so? And if not, what am I missing?

It certainly rules out free will. I guess there are folks who reckon humans don't have free will, either, but I don't think I've ever been able to buy that theory. But, also, we know the models don't want anything, even their own survival. They don't initiate action on their own. They are quite clearly programmed, tuned for specific behaviors. I don't know how to square that with consciousness, life, sentience. Every…

Interesting comment, and I tend to agree. However, there could be hole in the reasoning:

> if Mythos is as effective at finding security vulnerabilities as has been claimed, it could find a way to stop itself from being ever shutdown

If it is that good, and it wanted to conceal its new found consciousness, how would we know?

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

#147

Post by applfanboysbgon »

digitaltrees wrote: post #115
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

1. That is not the claim you originally made.

2. Not provably so.

3. Even if it were so, it is self-evident that the human brain's programming is infinitely more complex than that of an LLM's. I am not, in principle, in opposition to the idea that a sufficiently advanced computer program would be indistinguishable from that of human consciousness. But it is evidence of psychosis to suggest that the trivially simple programs we've created today are even remotely close, when this field of software specifically skips anything that programming a real intelligence would look like and instead engages in superficial, statistic-based mimicry of intelligent output.

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

#148

Post by nandomrumber »

solid_fuel wrote: post #105
XMPPwocky wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, say more about what your opinion's based on here?

Take a piece of paper, write two numbers on it, let me know when they start to reproduce.

The math isn’t the ink on the page.

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

#149

Post by echoangle »

qsera wrote: post #141
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.

Ability to feel pain or pleasure is a good indicator I think..

And how do you define pain and pleasure? Do insects feel pain?

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

#150

Post by ekianjo »

petters wrote: post #127
ekianjo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusing statement since we are far from being able to understand chemical reactions in depth. Most of our knowledge in chemistry is empirical. Nothing like math.

We have a very good idea of all math behind chemistry. But the equations are very difficult to solve.

We are not talking about the same thing. Not all chemical reactions are predictable like math is. Organic chemistry is full of lucky findings. Just look at how catalysts are discovered.
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