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

The New AI Consciousness Paper

astralcodexten.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 313 posts

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#161

Post by itsalwaysgood »

empath75 wrote: post #152
itsalwaysgood wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider an infant to be conscious? Or electrons?

i think it's still an open question how "conscious" that infants and newborns are. It really depends on how you define it and it is probably a continuum of some kind.

True. There's always going to be uncertainty about this kind of topic.

I think the jist of the article is that we will use whatever definition of consciousness is useful to us, for any given use case

Much the same way treat pigs vs dogs, based on how hungry or cute we feel.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#162

Post by itsalwaysgood »

vasco wrote: post #150
itsalwaysgood wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider an infant to be conscious? Or electrons?

An infant has phenomenological consciousness. Electrons make no sense as a question unless I'm missing something.

It makes sense when you try and disprove the question.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#163

Post by achierius »

horacemorace wrote: post #148
advisedwang wrote: post #109

This article really takes umbridge with those that conflate phenomenological and access consciousness. However that is essentially dualism. It's a valid philosophical position to believe that there is no distinct phenomenological consciousness besides access consciousness. Abandoning dualism feels intuitively wrong, but our intuition about our own minds is frequently wrong. Look at the studies that show we often beli…

> Abandoning dualism feels intuitively… Intuition is highly personal. Many people believe that abandoning monism feels intuitively wrong and that dualism is an excuse for high minded religiosity.

I think you misunderstood GP, they don't seem to be a fan of dualism either and are in fact defending it as a valid position. The point about intuitive feeling was just a polite concession.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#164

Post by sega_sai »

I am just not sure that the whole concept of consciousness is useful. If something like that is that difficult to define/measure, maybe we should rely on that characteristic. I.e. reading the Box 1 in the paper for consciousness definition is not exactly inspiring.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#165

Post by soganess »

vasco wrote: post #150
itsalwaysgood wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider an infant to be conscious? Or electrons?

An infant has phenomenological consciousness. Electrons make no sense as a question unless I'm missing something.

As a question???

Do the physical quanta we call electrons experience the phenomenon we poorly define but generally call consciousness?

If you believe consciousness is a result of material processes: Is the thermodynamic behavior of an electron, as a process, sufficient to bestow consciousness in part or in whole?

If you believe it is immaterial: What is the minimum “thing” that consciousness binds to, and is that threshold above or below the electron? This admittedly asks for some account of the “above/below” ordering, but assume the person answering is responsible for providing that explanation.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#166

Post by bjourne »

sega_sai wrote: post #164

I am just not sure that the whole concept of consciousness is useful. If something like that is that difficult to define/measure, maybe we should rely on that characteristic. I.e. reading the Box 1 in the paper for consciousness definition is not exactly inspiring.

An AI that is consciousness is plausibly also sentient and hurting sentient entities is morally wrong.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#167

Post by dleary »

armchairhacker wrote: post #143
dleary wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is AI conscious? I believe "yes" [...] and in a way that somehow means I don't think anyone who believes "no" is wrong. What does it even mean to "believe the answer is yes", but "in a way that somehow means" the direct contradiction of that is not wrong? Do "believe", "yes", and "no" have definitions? ... This rhetorical device sucks and gets used WAY too often. "Does Foo have the Bar quality?" "Yes, but first und…

> What does it even mean to "believe the answer is yes", but "in a way that somehow means" the direct contradiction of that is not wrong? Opinion Another example: when I hear the famous "Yanny or Laurel" recording ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel ) I hear "Laurel". I can understand how someone hears "Yanny". Our perceptions conflict, but neither of us are objectively wrong, because (from Wikipedia) "an…

> Opinion

The single word "opinion" is not an answer to the question I asked.

> Another example: ... "Yanny or Laurel"

This is not remotely the same thing.

> I can understand how someone hears "Yanny">

So can everybody else. Everyone I have heard speak on this topic has the same exact experience. Everyone "hears" one of the words 'naturally', but can easily understand how someone else could hear the other word, because the audio clip is so ambiguous.

An ambiguous audio recording, which basically everyone agrees can be interpreted multiple ways, which wikipedia explicitly documents as being ambiguous, is very different from meanings of the words "yes", "no", and "believe".

These words have concrete meanings.

You wouldn't say that "you believe the recording says Laurel". You say "I hear Laurel, but I can understand how someone else hears Yanny".

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#168

Post by nprateem »

alphazard wrote: post #137
andai wrote: post #115

So we currently associate consciousness with the right to life and dignity right? i.e. some recent activism for cephalopods is centered around their intelligence, with the implication that this indicates a capacity for suffering. (With the consciousness aspect implied even more quietly.) But if it turns out that LLMs are conscious, what would that actually mean? What kind of rights would that confer? That the model m…

> So we currently associate consciousness with the right to life and dignity right? No, or at least we shouldn't. Don't do things that make the world worse for you. Losing human control of political systems because the median voter believes machines have rights is not something I'm looking forward to, but at this rate, it seems as likely as anything else. Certain machines may very well force us to give them rights th…

[flagged]

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#169

Post by estearum »

eszed wrote: post #82
estearum wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And these expectations are violated regularly? The question of how to evaluate whether something is conscious is totally different from the question of whether it actually is conscious.

> these expectations are violated regularly? I don't know what you're thinking of, but mine are. Practice of any kind (sports, coding, puzzles) works like that. Most of all: interactions with any other conscious entity. I carry at least intuitive expectations of how my wife / kid / co-workers / dog (if you count that) will respond to my behavior, but... Uh. Often wrong, and have to update my model of them or of mysel…

Yes, I am saying in both cases the expectations are violated regularly. It’s not obvious at all that an LLM’s “perception” of its “world” is any more coherent than ours of our world.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#170

Post by nprateem »

andai wrote: post #115

So we currently associate consciousness with the right to life and dignity right? i.e. some recent activism for cephalopods is centered around their intelligence, with the implication that this indicates a capacity for suffering. (With the consciousness aspect implied even more quietly.) But if it turns out that LLMs are conscious, what would that actually mean? What kind of rights would that confer? That the model m…

I've said it before: smoke DMT, take mushrooms, whatever. You'll know a computer program is not conscious because we aren't just prediction machines.
Post reply on HN