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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?

#161

Post by echoangle »

retsibsi wrote: post #153
echoangle wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> And how do you define pain and pleasure? They're not reducible, but I don't know if that means we don't have definitions; we can describe them well enough that most people (who aren't p-zombies or playing the sceptical philosopher role) know pretty well what we mean. All of our definitions have to bottom out somewhere... > Do insects feel pain? Nobody (except the insects) can know for sure. Our inability to know wh…

But how can X be a good indicator for something I want to determine if I can’t measure X either?

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

#162

Post by echoangle »

qsera wrote: post #158
echoangle wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Do insects feel pain? Yes, I think so. Because they show behavior that is consistent with being in a state of pain. Despite what consciousness really is, I think evolution found a way to tap into that, by causing pain, or by registering pain on the consciousness by some unknown mechanism, for behaviors that are not beneficial to the organism that hosts the respective consciousness... So I think if an organism that…

So if I build a simulation with robots living in a world and apply an evolutionary algorithm and at some point the virtual robots respond to damage in a way that looks like pain in animals, would the simulated robots be conscious? Or is it impossible that this could happen?

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

#163

Post by mseepgood »

marliechiller wrote: post #159
qnleigh wrote: post #155

It's easy, and very tempting to dismiss this sort of thing. But given how little we know about the human brain, let alone consciousness, I don't see how we can be confident that LLMs aren't conscious. I've had a lot of thoughts and conversations over the years that changed my mind on what consciousness likely requires. One was the realization that a purely mechanical computer can, in principle simulate the laws of ph…

Why do you think stringing words together is any more a sign of consciousness than google maps is when it tries to find the best route available to your destination? It seems to me that humans often fall into the trap of anthropomorphism. This is a theme thats touched upon in the novel "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. Just because something can communicate in a way that you can interpret, doesnt mean something is conscio…

> It seems to me that humans often fall into the trap of anthropomorphism.

That's true, but they also often fall into the trap of exceptionalism.

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

#164

Post by ako »

qsera wrote: post #158
echoangle wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Do insects feel pain? Yes, I think so. Because they show behavior that is consistent with being in a state of pain. Despite what consciousness really is, I think evolution found a way to tap into that, by causing pain, or by registering pain on the consciousness by some unknown mechanism, for behaviors that are not beneficial to the organism that hosts the respective consciousness... So I think if an organism that…

So if a robot + ai shows behavior consistent with pain, we can conclude it’s conscious?

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

#165

Post by SwellJoe »

markburns wrote: post #86
SwellJoe wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People often point to the relative simplicity of the architecture and code as proof that the system can’t be doing whatever it is that consciousness does, but in doing so they ignore the vast size of the data those simple structures are operating over. Nobody can actually say whether consciousness is just emergent behaviour of a sufficiently complex system, and knowing how a system is built tells you nothing about wh…

Is Wikipedia conscious? It's a system operating on a lot of data. Is Google search conscious? It knows everything. Very complicated algorithms. Surely at some scale Google search must become a real live boy? When does it wake up and by what mechanism does that happen?

The frontier models are more complex and operate on more data than Wikipedia, but they are less complex and operate on less data than Google search in its entirety.

And, I'm not anthropocentric at all. I think apes and dolphins and some birds and probably some other critters are conscious. I mean they have a sense of self, and others, they have wants and needs and make decisions based on them.

This is a case where the person making extraordinary claims needs to provide the extraordinary evidence. It's extraordinary to claim that matrix multiplication becomes conscious if only it's got enough numbers. How many numbers do you reckon? Is my phone a living thing because it can run Gemma E4B? It answers questions. It'll write you a poem if you ask. It certainly knows more than some humans. What size makes an LLM come alive?

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

#166

Post by jdmoreira »

It's starting to look more and more to me as if conscious is just an illusion that we ourselves perceive. There is nothing fundamental about it, just an artefact of a certain style of computing as perceived by the reasoner itself.

We look at the current llms and because we see them for how they are fundamentally operating we assume they can't be "conscious" but we really don't even know what conscious is. The only people in the world that know ANYTHING about conscious are anaesthesiologist - they know how to turn it off and on again. What does that even tell you about conscious?

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

#167

Post by nandomrumber »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #147
digitaltrees wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Trivially simple programs (rule sets) can give rise wildly complex systems.

Fractals, Game of Live, the emergent abilities of highly-scaled generative pre-trained transformers.

Coincidences appears to be an emergent property of (relatively) simple matter.

70kg of rocks will struggle to do anything that might look like consciousness, but when a handful of minerals and three buckets of water get together they can do the weirdest things, like wondering why there is anything at all rather than nothing.

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

#168

Post by retsibsi »

echoangle wrote: post #161
retsibsi wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And how do you define pain and pleasure? They're not reducible, but I don't know if that means we don't have definitions; we can describe them well enough that most people (who aren't p-zombies or playing the sceptical philosopher role) know pretty well what we mean. All of our definitions have to bottom out somewhere... > Do insects feel pain? Nobody (except the insects) can know for sure. Our inability to know wh…

But how can X be a good indicator for something I want to determine if I can’t measure X either?

> But how can X be a good indicator for something I want to determine if I can’t measure X either?

In the comment that started this subthread, qsera was responding to someone who said "Imo we don't even have a definition of [consciousness]". If qsera meant that we can measure consciousness in terms of pleasure and pain, then of course I agree that they were just pushing the problem back a step. But I don't think that's what they meant.

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

#169

Post by collyw »

jdmoreira wrote: post #166

It's starting to look more and more to me as if conscious is just an illusion that we ourselves perceive. There is nothing fundamental about it, just an artefact of a certain style of computing as perceived by the reasoner itself. We look at the current llms and because we see them for how they are fundamentally operating we assume they can't be "conscious" but we really don't even know what conscious is. The only pe…

It's literally the only thing you can be certain of, your own conciseness.

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

#170

Post by SwellJoe »

nandomrumber wrote: post #145
SwellJoe wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I guess we'd find out eventually, when it announced the new world order.
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