Just once I want to see some old dude waxing about LLM-conciousness post a chat log where the LLM is like "your book is an incoherent mess of tautologies and incorrect statistics. I bet your dick looks like a road kill squirrel".
When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
201–210 of 450 posts
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#202Earlier 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.
We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human. We might not clearly understand the diff between the two states but we can certainly point to it and go "it's that".
>We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human.
You are using unconscious as a synonym for asleep, which is not the same thing as having no conscious experience due to dreams. We are clear on the distinction between a dead human and an alive human however.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human. We might not clearly understand the diff between the two states but we can certainly point to it and go "it's that".
I'm not sure it's that clear. What about a person who is on drugs to the point they clearly don't know what reality is happening around them, but they are able to speak and move and such? I'm not sure I'd call that conscious, but by most definitions it is.
You would just say that they have an altered experience of consciousness from the norm.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#204Current 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…
> But they also prove that intelligence != consciousness. They prove no such thing. We can't even prove consciousness in other humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_other_minds
The most convincing argument is that if other humans were not experiencing consciousness then they probably wouldn't waste large parts of their lives arguing about it.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>There are times I am feeling neither pain nor pleasure
It is about the ability..
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting comment, and I tend to agree. However, there could be hole in the reasoning: > if Mythos is as effective at finding security vulnerabilities as has been claimed, it could find a way to stop itself from being ever shutdown If it is that good, and it wanted to conceal its new found consciousness, how would we know?
I guess we'd find out eventually, when it announced the new world order.
Why would it announce it.
I firmly believe viruses are actually what’s in control on Earth, but you don’t see them making a stink about it, which relegates resistance only to the set of harmful viruses, and only then in isolated pockets of matter currently acting as organisms.
I think it’s possible there’s a set of relatively benign virus that have shaped human evolution.
We know toxoplasmosis increases risk taking behaviour in mammals, especially males.
An AI wouldn’t need to be overtly hostile, or ever make its full abilities know, to shape human activity.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#207Incredibly confusing that people who are otherwise of sound mind seem to fall for this. Especially confusing when it’s someone who knows how algorithms work. Barring connectivity issues when’s the last time you messaged an LLM and it just decided to ignore you? Conversely when has it ever messaged you unprompted? Never, because they’re incapable of doing anything independently because there is no sense of self.
When's the last time a friend said hello to you in person and you just ignored them?
When's the last time you messaged me unprompted?
These seems like bizzare objections, a system can only act in the way that it can act. A tree is never going to get up and start walking, why would a LLM ever start a conversation unprompted? That just isn't how the system can behave.
You are just as limited by deterministic physical processes in your brain as an LLM is in a cpu.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human brains are also deterministic, though somewhat more difficult to reset to a starting state. So this seems to prove that humans aren't conscious either.
This seems like an extraordinary claim to make about an above-room-temperature chemical system that, even in the most Newtonian oversimplification, amounts to an astronomical number of oddly-shaped and unevenly-charged billiard balls flying around at jet aircraft speeds.
Definitely agree.
We can’t even solve the three body problem.
Let alone what I’m calling Marshray Complexity.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#209Current 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…
The turing test is alive and well. All it takes to "win" is to just sit there. Ask for a Nazi joke, ask for a longer explanation etc. It's incredibly easy, in a Turing test scenario to sort out who is human and who is LLM.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could simulate your own brain in Minecraft. What do you conclude from this?
I can not simulate my brain, it's a huge stretch to imply this. But with LLMs - anyone can simulate LLM. LLM can be simulated without any uncertainties in pen and paper and a lot of time. Does it mean that 100 tons of paper plus 100 years of time (numbers are just examples) calculating long formulae makes this pile of paper consiousness? Imho answer is definitive no.
I don’t think anyone is arguing the silicon is conscious.
Similarly the paper.
What about the agent doing the calculations.
He may be conscious. Or anyway, we can’t rule it out.