Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

unherd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 450 posts

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

#21

Post by digitaltrees »

root_axis wrote: post #15

There are a lot of people vulnerable to AI psychosis. As far as the ostensibly controversial topic of AI being conscious, it can be dismissed out of hand. There is no reason that it should be conscious, it was not designed to be, nor does it need to be in order to explain how it functions with respect to its design. It's also unclear how consciousness would even apply to something like an LLM which is a process, not…

There is evidence that awareness is an emergent property from sensory experience. And consciousness is an emergent property of language that has grammatical meaning for self and other.

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

#22

Post by AdeptusAquinas »

RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #7

It is terribly sad when someone undeniably brilliant in a particular field fails to recognize their own incompetence in other areas - in this case mistaking advanced technology for magic.

That's always been Dawkins's shtick though. As an atheist I've generally found him a bit embarrassing

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

#23

Post by baggy_trough »

ezfe wrote: post #17
IncreasePosts wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does he say it's magic?

LLMs are just math run on your CPU. Autocomplete. Sometimes very useful autocomplete, but still just autocomplete. To imply it could be conscious requires something else, here the comment uses the phrase magic to fill that gap - since we must agree that a CPU is not conscious on it's own (else everything our computer does would be conscious).

Neurons are just summing up their inputs according to the laws of chemistry. What's the difference?

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

#24

Post by wrs »

ChrisClark wrote: post #13
RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #7

It is terribly sad when someone undeniably brilliant in a particular field fails to recognize their own incompetence in other areas - in this case mistaking advanced technology for magic.

So, how is consciousness generated?

Not simply by reading every word ever written by a conscious being and learning to reproduce them with high probability.

At least, that’s certainly not how I got here.

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

#25

Post by api »

throwyawayyyy wrote: post #19

Current LLMs prove that the Turing Test was insufficient all along. But they also prove that intelligence != consciousness. One can, after all, be conscious without a thought in one's head. We certainly have ongoing work in identifying the neural correlates of consciousness in animals, none of which is going to be remotely applicable to machines. We're genuinely blind to the question of whether a sufficiently large n…

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 intelligent.

The consciousness of a bacterium or a tree might be radically unlike ours. It might not have a sense of self in the same way we do, or experience time the same way, but it probably has some form of experience of existing.

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

#26

Post by digitaltrees »

api wrote: post #18
root_axis wrote: post #15

There are a lot of people vulnerable to AI psychosis. As far as the ostensibly controversial topic of AI being conscious, it can be dismissed out of hand. There is no reason that it should be conscious, it was not designed to be, nor does it need to be in order to explain how it functions with respect to its design. It's also unclear how consciousness would even apply to something like an LLM which is a process, not…

If AI as presently designed and operated is conscious, this ends up being an argument for panpsychism. As you say it’s static, fixed, deterministic, and so on, and if you know how it works it’s more like a lossy compression model of knowledge than a mind. Ultimately it’s a lot of math. So if it’s conscious, a rock is conscious. A rock can process information in the form of energy flowing through it. It’s a fixed mode…

Why would current AI be an argument for panpsycism? I don’t understand the connection.

AI is stochastic, not static and deterministic.

As I said, in another post, there is evidence that sensory experience creates the emergent property of awareness in responding to stimulus, self-awareness and consciousness is an emergent property of a language that has a concept of the self and others. Rocks, just like most of nature, like both sensory and language systems

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

#27

Post by ofjcihen »

digitaltrees wrote: post #21
root_axis wrote: post #15

There are a lot of people vulnerable to AI psychosis. As far as the ostensibly controversial topic of AI being conscious, it can be dismissed out of hand. There is no reason that it should be conscious, it was not designed to be, nor does it need to be in order to explain how it functions with respect to its design. It's also unclear how consciousness would even apply to something like an LLM which is a process, not…

There is evidence that awareness is an emergent property from sensory experience. And consciousness is an emergent property of language that has grammatical meaning for self and other.

What you’re missing is a “self” to have the “experience”.

LLMs do not have a self. This is like arguing that the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness.

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

#28

Post by brookst »

digitaltrees wrote: post #21
root_axis wrote: post #15

There are a lot of people vulnerable to AI psychosis. As far as the ostensibly controversial topic of AI being conscious, it can be dismissed out of hand. There is no reason that it should be conscious, it was not designed to be, nor does it need to be in order to explain how it functions with respect to its design. It's also unclear how consciousness would even apply to something like an LLM which is a process, not…

There is evidence that awareness is an emergent property from sensory experience. And consciousness is an emergent property of language that has grammatical meaning for self and other.

These LLMs don’t have senses, they have a token stream. They have no experience of the world outside of the language tokens they operate on.

I’m not sure I believe that consciousness emerges from sensory experience, but if it does, LLMs won’t get it.

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

#29

Post by colechristensen »

digitaltrees wrote: post #26
api wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI as presently designed and operated is conscious, this ends up being an argument for panpsychism. As you say it’s static, fixed, deterministic, and so on, and if you know how it works it’s more like a lossy compression model of knowledge than a mind. Ultimately it’s a lot of math. So if it’s conscious, a rock is conscious. A rock can process information in the form of energy flowing through it. It’s a fixed mode…

Why would current AI be an argument for panpsycism? I don’t understand the connection. AI is stochastic, not static and deterministic. As I said, in another post, there is evidence that sensory experience creates the emergent property of awareness in responding to stimulus, self-awareness and consciousness is an emergent property of a language that has a concept of the self and others. Rocks, just like most of nature…

I think it's the opposite argument

IF current AI is conscious, so are trees, rocks, turbulent flows, etc.

The argument being that LLMs are so simple that if you want to ascribe consciousness to them you have to do the same to a LOT of other stuff.

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

#30

Post by Myrmornis »

RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #7

It is terribly sad when someone undeniably brilliant in a particular field fails to recognize their own incompetence in other areas - in this case mistaking advanced technology for magic.

I don't think you read carefully what he said. At the end he gave three quite interesting thoughts about what might be true assuming LLMs are less conscious than we are (i.e. assuming our consciousness is not a purely algorithmic phenomenon as we obviously know LLMs are).
Post reply on HN