181–190 of 450 posts
As long as AI is being introduced by multibillion dollar corporations, it’s all a trick, a scam. They are just looking for increasing their valuation. A waste of time
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That was one of my thoughts years ago after playing with early ChatGPT and local llama1: this proves that intelligence and consciousness do not necessitate one another and may not even be directly related . I’ve kind of thought this for many years though. A bacterium and a tree are probably conscious. I think it’s a property of life rather than brains. Our brains are conscious because they are alive. They are also in…
I think this gets to the conflation we naturally have with consciousness and a sense of self. Does a tree have a sense of self? I imagine probably not, a tree acts more like a clonal colony than a single organism.
An animal that doesn't have some kind of pair bond or social arrangement, and doesn't raise its young, has a lot less need for some of this emotional hardware than we do.
Whereas K-selected species that raise their kids have broadly the same need for it as humans.
That doesn't categorically mean it evolved with the first pair-bonding K-reproducer, or that birds have parallel-evolved emotional hardware like ours, but there's plenty of behavioural evidence there - the last common ancestor of birds and humans was small-brained and primitive, but investing in individual children probably evolved around the time of amniote eggs, just because they were so much more biologically expensive to produce than amphibian or fish eggs.
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…
With that said, just because we don't have a great way of measuring it doesn't mean that we should assume LLMs are intelligent. An LLM is code and a massive collection of training weights. It has no means of observing and reasoning about the world, doesn't store memories the same way that organic brains do (and is in fact quite limited in this aspect). It currently isn't able to solve a problem it hasn't encountered in its training data, or produce novel research on a topic without significant handholding. Furthermore, the frequent errors made by it suggests that it fundamentally does not understand the words that it spits out.
Not really sure what you mean by your anesthesiology comment. Being able to intubate and inject propofol does not make you more of an expert on consciousness than neuroscientists and neurologists.
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…
Since the times GPT-2 was reimplemented inside Minecraft - its quite obvious LLMs are just math. Nothing else, by nature. Modern LLMs have the same math as in GPT-2 - just bigger and with extra stuff around - and math is the only area of human knowledge with perfect flawless reductionism, straight to the roots. It was build that way since the beginning, so philosophy have no say in this :) And because of that flawles…
This is such a weird comment. > Since the times GPT-2 was reimplemented inside Minecraft - its quite obvious LLMs are just math. This was obvious since LLMs were first invented. They published papers with all the details, you don't need to see something implemented in Minecraft to realize that it's just math. You could simply read the paper or the code and know for certain. [0] > math is the only area of human knowle…
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> 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?
So to match with that your hypothetical scenario should involved robots that already have consciousness within them and the question would be if their evolution had managed to tap into that built in consciousness and ability to feel and cause them to behave in one way or another.
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…
We don't really have a good way to measure whether something has consciousness. Heck, we have pretty limited ways of testing how "intelligent" non-human animals are (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals ). With that said, just because we don't have a great way of measuring it doesn't mean that we should assume LLMs are intelligent. An LLM is code and a massive collection of training weights. I…
But then they came up with the whole "Reasoning model" paradigm and that contains obvious feedback loops. So now just throw my hands in the air because I think no one really knows or can tell for sure. We are all clueless here.
I can really recommend this book by Douglas Hofstadter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
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…
“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Simple programs can give rise to very complex behaviour. Conway’s game of live is Turing Complete and has four rules.
Conway’s Game of Live can simulate a Turing machine, can therefore implant a GTP.
Does that mean Conway’s Game of Life is conscious? I don’t think so.
Does it rule out Conway’s Game of life from implementing a system that has consciousness as an emergent ability?
I’m not convinced I know the answer.