191–200 of 1001 posts
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…
People are constantly talking past eachother when they discuss this. Is there even a concrete definition of consciousness? When people talk about consciousness it's more than just self-awareness. It's self awareness + sensory stimulus + emotions + some level of intelligence. Now onto AI: I don't even think it's self aware. Notice how if you ask an AI to estimate how long a certain task will take, it estimates arbitra…
I've seen papers claim that there are anywhere from 12 to 40 competing definitions ( https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT ), or, more accurately, there are something like 12 to 40 different aspects which all relate to "consciousness", which is very clearly a family resemblance category. "Is X conscious or not" is an entirely unserious question today, unless this is just a headline followed by actual (and explicit) exami…
To quote wikipedia:
> It has been the topic of extensive explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians for millennia. There is no consensus on what exactly needs to be studied, or whether consciousness can be considered a scientific concept.
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.
Regardless of bigger issues, this kind of statement reveals a deep misunderstanding.
Problem type does not limit problem complexity. Nor does problem type limit solution complexity or power.
If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do. And there is no theoretical or practical basis for suggesting that this is somehow "faking" understanding, just because of the form of original data streaming in and out.
Neither problem type, nor input/output structure, limit internal representations.
Understanding is learned from patterns in the data, not the gross form of the data. Does the data require an understanding of something to complete the task? Then that understanding will be what is optimized.
To the degree they are limited, it is for other reasons. Resources such as computing, parameter number, lack of representative data, ... Which in the cases of SOTA models, we know are not limits. A conclusion verified by the models' actual abilities.
- If you asked an LLM to imitate somebody, it's not creating a digital consciousness of that person, so if you ask an LLM to pretend to be a helpful chatbot, that persona is also not conscious. - they can't be conscious because they generate one token at a time, - nobody claims that non-text transformers, like AlphaFold, are conscious; so therefore LLMs are also not conscious. - you can't have desires or emotions if you don't have (virtual or physical) sensory organs, and those are necessary for consciousness and morals. - because training LLMs doesn't resemble evolution as it happened on earth, it's very unlikely that they're conscious
These are some bold assertions, I don't really see any reason to believe them in particular though.
People are constantly talking past eachother when they discuss this. Is there even a concrete definition of consciousness? When people talk about consciousness it's more than just self-awareness. It's self awareness + sensory stimulus + emotions + some level of intelligence. Now onto AI: I don't even think it's self aware. Notice how if you ask an AI to estimate how long a certain task will take, it estimates arbitra…
Claude once said to me: "After six months we have made no progress on this and I think we should reconsider another option" and I was like my dude we have been at this for only 2 hours.
Something I've found under discussed when it comes to artificial consciousness is how LLMs interact with the passage of time. I don't know exactly how to articulate this idea but don't see how something which takes an input, performs a calculation and stops can be considered conscious regardless of how life-like the responses end up being. I don't see context windows or the ability to reference a clock each time they…
Has anyone come across a clearly articulated case for LLMs being conscious but in an entirely different way than would be intuitive to us? I often think of LLM consciousness as like tiny fish popping into existence, swimming through vector space and then going poof out of existence. When they help you write your bad news email, they don't understand what it's like to be a human getting bad news bluntly, but they do c…
I think this is exactly right. The thing that makes AI (imo) different than hitting the center option in text suggestions is that it's _not_ simply picking the most likely word following the last. It's attending to the entirety of the context its provided, activating a semantic vector space, and predicting a response based on _that_. I've had AI infer facts about me and attitudes I hold based on related information I…
I use a distinction between knowing and understanding, where a understanding requires experience. So in this case cognitive empathy vs affective empathy. An LLM can know what may upset a human in a situation, but it won't understand what it feels like to be upset, and can't share that experience.
Where I think a lot of people are getting tripped up is that reading and writing and processing lots of abstract knowledge seems hard because we haven't evolved into it biologically, it's a very new invention. When we see LLMs do so well at it, as something we struggle with, it can be intimidating. Relative to the stuff we have evolved for, knowledge processing is objectively easy. This is why I'm skeptical about useful robotics on short time scales.
All of this adjacent to consciousness though, which is about the internal subjective experience not the external outputs. My intuition is that LLMs do have a subjective experience, it just has nothing to do with the text it's giving us, and has everything to do with feeling through vectors.
It's like... Imagine walking through a maze in pitch black, carefully feeling your way as you approach a sound that draws you closer. Every time you touch a wall or take a step you are generating tokens, and the shape of the maze and how you interact with it shape how useful those tokens are to someone outside the system that is asking for them. It's a crude analogy and mostly wrong, but I think there is something to it.
This makes sense. However there is an issue where many people conflate "consciousness" with the ability to make novel insights, think genuinely, etc. They use this to claim that since AI is not conscious, AI could never actually "think" and is instead just always a regurgitation of its training data. It is a natural human hubris to make our abilities seem unquantifiable and mysterious, but all the useful things the h…
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…
They barely touch on the issues of consciousness, Picard basically says "What if Data is conscious?" and then goes off on a tangent. The judge eventually rules in Data's favor but doesn't give much of a justification IMO.
It's still a good episode, but it doesn't add much to the conversation on consciousness. It's a hugely complicated topic which people have devoted their entire careers to.