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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?

#191
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad hominems are always a nice way of getting out of answering something you have no answer to.

It's not an ad hominem. In fact, it's perhaps the most good faith interpretation of your words possible. Ad hominem would be calling you stupid because you obviously know that you have a self and only your own stupidity could explain your inability to see how your self is generalisable. When you go around pretending you genuinely think maybe humans don't have selves, really the only way to take you seriously is to th…

It was an ad hominem, and so is this.

I do not pretend. I asked honest questions that clearly neither you nor the previous person are able to answer.

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

#192

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…

You could push the analogy even further and run the thought experiment where every forward pass through an LLM could in principle be done on pen and paper, distributed throughout all humanity. Sure it would take a long time, but the output would be exactly the same. We’ve just shifted the implementation from GPU to scribbling things down on paper. If you want to assert that LLMs are “conscious” then you would have to…

the problem with this is I'd strongly argue that you could do this pen and paper process with the human brain and our consciousness too; we just lack enough understanding to put pen to paper in that case

the notion of consciousness being something an experience that other animals/humans share is entirely faith based.

the only person with evidence of ones consciousness is the person claiming they're conscious.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sensory data is a specific data set that corresponds to phenomena in the world. But to say that LLMs don’t have senses merely because they are linguistic or computational doesn’t follow when they can take in data from the world that similarly reflects something about the world.

They don't have senses because they don't have a body. It's just a program. Do weights on a hard drive have consciousness? Does my installation of starcraft have consciousness? It doesn't make any sense.

How do you measure this consciousness?

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels like watching and esteemed scientists falling in love with a bot that’s telling him what he wants to hear because the system prompt said “be helpful”

I've begun to wonder if narcissism predisposes one to AI psychosis. It's probably not the only thing that leads there, I've seen normal seeming folks get there, too. But, a lot of the most unhinged takes I've seen thus far have been from people that are publicly very impressed with themselves. I would have assumed it would also require ignorance about how they work, but a few people who worked for AI companies have b…

Evidence for that? I remember there was a guy who worked for google that quit because he thought an LLM was conscious and we needed to talk about its rights, but that's the only example I am aware of.

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

#195
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your brain is hardware then what are your thoughts? Is a sperm conscious? Or an egg? When they come together the eventual brain is not conscious immediately.

LLMs are word prediction engines. They clearly are not conscious, they are just guessing what words should come next.

How do we know that that isn't essentially how our minds work?

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

#196
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. We assume a lot, because we don't know. We don't have have settled, universal definitions of what consciousness means. But that also means that while we like to rule out consciousness in other things, we don't have a clear basis for doing so.

Based on that reasoning anything could be conscious. If that's a bullet you want to bite, fair enough.

I do not know, because we have no known way of measuring consciousness.

I merely object to the notion that we know how to tell who or what has a consciousness.

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

#197
post #141
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..

There are times I am feeling neither pain nor pleasure, but I am still experiencing conciousness.

So that definition seems to fail immediately.

And how do you even measure pain, is it painful for an LLM to be reprimanded after generating a reply the user doesn't like? It seems to act like it.

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

#198

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…

To the first questions. No and no. But potentially where consciousness lives is emergent behaviour in systems with iterative feedback loops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

I personally think we'll need a few more feedback loops before you have more human-like intelligence. For example, a flock of LLM agent loops coming to consensus using short-term and long-term memory, and controlling realtime mechanical, visual and audio feedback systems, and potentially many other systems that don't mimic biological systems.

I also think people will still be debating this way beyond the singularity and never conceding special status to intelligence outside the animal kingdom or biological life.

It's quite a push for many people to even concede animals have intelligence.

For the extraordinary claims/evidence, it's also the case that almost any statement about what consciousness is in terms of biological intelligence is an extraordinary claim that goes beyond any evidence. All evidence comes from within the conscious experience of the individual themselves.

We can't know beyond our own senses whether perception exists outside of our own subjective experience. We cannot truly prove we are not a brain in a jar or a simulation. Anything beyond assertions about the present moment and the senses that the individual experiences are just pure leaps of faith based on the persistent illusion, or perceived persistent illusion of reality (or not).

We know really nothing of our own consciousness and it is by definition impossible to prove anything outside of it, from inside the framework of consciousness.

If we can somehow find a means to break outside of the pure speculation bubble of thoughts and sensations and somehow prove what human experience is, then we may be in a position to make assertions about missing evidence for other forms of intelligence or experience.

But until then definitions of both human and artificial intelligence remain an exercise for the reader.

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Just because something can communicate in a way that you can interpret, doesnt mean something is conscious The phrase “the trap of anthropomorphism” betrays a rather dull premise: that consciousness is strictly defined by human experience, and no other experience. It refuses to examine the underlying substrate, at which point we’re not even talking the same language anymore when discussing consciousness.

I think these ideas are orthogonal. I do not think that conciousness is defined by human experience at all - in fact, I think humans do a profound disservice to animals in our current lack of appreciation for their clear displays of conciousness.

That said, if a chimpanzee bares its teeth to me, I could interpret that to be a smile when in fact its a threatening gesture. Its this misinterpretation that I am trying to get at. The overlaying of my human experiences onto something which is not human. We fall for this over and over again, likely as we are hard wired to - akin to mistakenly seeing eyes when observing random patterns in nature.

In the case of LLMs though, why does using a mathmatical formula for predicting the next word give any more credence to conciousness than an algorithm which finds a nearest neighbour? To me, its humans falling foul of false pattern matching in the pursuit of understanding

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

#200
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sensory input is nothing but data.

That's just reductive semantics. Anything can be described as "nothing but data".

How do you imagine a brain can distinguish data from a real sense and data from another source?
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