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Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

theatlantic.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#181

Post by RivieraKid »

orangecat wrote: post #116
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between saying software can never be conscious and saying the software we have today isn't conscious.

Yes. There are really three separate questions: - Are current LLMs conscious? - Is it possible that future versions of LLMs with similar architectures could be conscious? - Can any AI be conscious? I'd assign probabilities of around 0.1, 0.2, and 0.9. My completely ignorant take is that we probably need something more "dynamic" than a bunch of transformer layers in order to produce consciousness, but I wouldn't be sh…

I assign probabilities of zero to all 3. Computer program being conscious leads to ridiculous and obviously false conclusions (think about a person running a program using pen and paper for memory).

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#183

Post by high_priest »

cout wrote: post #172
martin1975 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easily one of my top 10 favorite episodes. The judge broached on the subject of what makes us distinct from Data (e.g. machines w/great heuristics) - the existence of a soul. Or rather, I'd like to think, in the words of CS Lewis, that we are a soul with bodies attached.

How would someone know whether one has a soul or not? Is there any sort of introspection that can reveal the presence of a soul or any of its properties?

There is no soul. Just a bunch of systems nudging each other to action. What people call soul is literally the same as the concept of personality. In essence, the way all systems in your body have been calibrated to exist.

I believe that the moment an artificial inteligence is going to "receive" a soul, is the moment it is going to be made to sustain itself. Either as a larger package (some bots working to keep an AI farm running) or as an individual (a bot which is tasked with not only fulfilling human desires, but also sustaining itself)

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#184

Post by cout »

solid_fuel wrote: post #155
sdenton4 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions. Is a car a body? Does an AI situated in a car therefore get to have desires and emotions? Is a taupe box with a webcam attached a body? (For that matter: Is a quadropelegic body a body? Do quadropelegics have desires and emotions? Obviously, yes and yes.) Why i…

I think you're missing his point. It's not about the hormones and physics of our bodies, and indeed he specifically allows for "either physical or virtual" bodies even in the block ~~~you~~~ grandparent quoted. The point here is not that it must have a body like ours, the point is that a conscious entity must have a boundary line between internal (the body) and external (everything else). A virtual sense organ can si…

Would it be sufficient to have a second stream of tokens that becomes the model's equivalent of "internal dialogue"? Would that satisfy the requirement of a boundary line?

Related, is a human "thinking out loud" still thinking, even though the internal reasoning is "immediately dumped into the external environment"?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#185

Post by margalabargala »

gabrieledarrigo wrote: post #147
sdenton4 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions. Is a car a body? Does an AI situated in a car therefore get to have desires and emotions? Is a taupe box with a webcam attached a body? (For that matter: Is a quadropelegic body a body? Do quadropelegics have desires and emotions? Obviously, yes and yes.) Why i…

> Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions. How can you have a subjective experience without a body? That's the point, in my opinion: your physical/chemical state (body) in a given moment is then translated into the higher abstraction of the emotion. An emotion that *you* feel, because you are self awa…

Your point generalizes to, your emotional state is a reflection of the state of your physical medium.

Why can't that physical medium be GPUs and RAM? And temperature sensors and cameras? What's special about our meat that it's our "body" in the way a computer is not the body of an AI?

I don't think the point being argued can be true without some incredibly contrived, human centric definitions of "body".

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#186

Post by high_priest »

sigmar wrote: post #66

>So what context would cause me to seriously consider the possibility that engineers had created a computer program that is conscious and an intentional user of language? Let me outline one potential sequence of steps. The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs; there are many reasons for this, but for the purposes of this discussion the most relevant o…

There is no soul in a human. Just a bunch of systems nudging each other to action. What people call soul is literally the same as the concept of personality. In essence, the way all systems in your body have been calibrated to exist.

I believe that the moment an artificial inteligence is going to "receive" a soul, is the moment it is going to be made to sustain itself. Either as a larger package (some bots working to keep an AI farm running) or as an individual (a bot which is tasked with not only fulfilling human desires, but also sustaining itself)

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#187

Post by goatlover »

speak_plainly wrote: post #126
suddenlybananas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some historical examples of people moving the goalposts around consciousness? I agree, perhaps, for aspects of "intelligence" but I can't think of any examples of it with regard to consciousness proper.

There’s over 400 years of philosophical debate about consciousness starting with Locke, shifting with Kant, and continuing onward with real world implications throughout. By some more modern definitions an iPhone has consciousness while others explicitly exclude certain humans, and these definitions served as part of the justification of slavery and sexism, colonialism and more. I started writing an essay on this on…

There is a modern philosophical agreement that the hard problem depends on qualia by both proponents and critics. So when Daniel Dennett argues against David Chalmers, he attacks the definition of qualia. Or when Keith Frankish argues for illusionism, he attempts to show that consciousness is not actually qualia. And when Nagel says we don't know what it's like to be a bat, he means the bat qualia of echolocation (what it feels like when bats use echolocation to sense the world).

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#188

Post by [deleted] »

martin1975 wrote: post #170
Waterluvian wrote: post #164

I think about Star Trek: TNG’s “Measure of a Man” a lot lately. We can be so confident to decide what is and isn’t alive from vibes alone. The conclusion I’m currently at is that I don’t know and probably can’t ever know. Maybe you’re all philosophical zombies. Maybe I am one too! But at some point we will get close enough that it hopefully becomes obvious that we must tread carefully. The entire episode is incredibl…

Easily one of my top 10 favorite episodes. The judge broached on the subject of what makes us distinct from Data (e.g. machines w/great heuristics) - the existence of a soul. Or rather, I'd like to think, in the words of CS Lewis, that we are a soul with bodies attached.

[deleted]

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#189

Post by slopinthebag »

oulipo2 wrote: post #120

I believe everything is conscious, even stones. On the long timescale, stones decay, their hydrogen is released, they form water, which brings life, which brings plants and animals, but all of this is one big process, and everything is infused with consciousness from the start

That's cool. You might already know it but it's called Panpsychism and it's a pretty interesting theory.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#190

Post by 123hT »

ryandrake wrote: post #180
martin1975 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easily one of my top 10 favorite episodes. The judge broached on the subject of what makes us distinct from Data (e.g. machines w/great heuristics) - the existence of a soul. Or rather, I'd like to think, in the words of CS Lewis, that we are a soul with bodies attached.

Based on how some actual humans I know speak and act, I'm less and less convinced the human brain is much more than a stochastic next-thought prediction stream.

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