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When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
211–220 of 450 posts
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#212Incredibly 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.
This is the way! I also do not understand the awareness-cult. It seems they willingly want to be fooled by LLM:s.
That being said however, yes, we do not have any good definition of consciousness that is universally accepted, which makes the whole discussion useless or at risk of people talking past each other.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#213Incredibly 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 p…
They are not. The challenge is the turing test, and due to these behaviours they fail. It is as easy as that, and the objections are valid.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#214Incredibly 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.
If you've followed Dawkins' trajectory, I don't think it's clear that he's "otherwise of sound mind" anymore. He's had some very strange output on biological gender, where he tries to handwave away the existence of intersex people. And he's a biologist.
Biological gender exists. If you have a Y you're male, and if not, you're female. Easy as that. I, for one, am happy that wokeness and the post-truth ideology that tries to teach that there is no truth in math, is on its way to the garbage heap of history. It has done enough damage already, and must be thrown away quickly.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#215It's starting to look more and more to me as if conscious is just an illusion that we ourselves perceive. There is nothing fundamental about it, just an artefact of a certain style of computing as perceived by the reasoner itself. We look at the current llms and because we see them for how they are fundamentally operating we assume they can't be "conscious" but we really don't even know what conscious is. The only pe…
IMHO consciousness is just the ability to detect change. Everything can be calm and static, and then, suddenly, something changed. I think that is our capacity to notice that change that makes us conscious.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ..
I guess that just seems like an incredibly arbitrary criteria. Why would the potential for pleasure in the future determine if I am currently conscious even if I am not in fact experiencing pleasure.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#217On the one hand I'm not sure Dawkins has read/thought enough about how LLMs actually work. I'm getting the impression he doesn't fully appreciate or is somehow forgetting that it's a text completion algorithm with a vast number of parameters and that even if the patterns of learned parameter tunings are not really comprehendible, the architecture was very deliberately designed. But on the other hand his thoughts at t…
GTP’s, or transformers more generally can be trained on data other than language (text / audio).
They can operate on data other than natural language.
So can humans.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#218Earlier 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.
The human brain is an electrical signal prediction machine.
Anything that looks like intelligence will look like a prediction machine because the alternative is logic being hardcoded apriori.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#219It'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…
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…
A large part of the problem is what you consider consciousness.
If you talk about having a subjective experience, then we don't know of any way to prove that even other humans than ourselves have one. We go entirely by assumptions based on physical similarity and our ability to communicate.
But we have no evidence that physical similarity is a prerequisite, nor that it is sufficient.
So the bigger trap is to assume that we know what causes a subjective experience, and what does not.
None of us even know if a subjective experience exists for more than a single entity.
But the second problem is that it is not clear at all whether that subjective experience in any way matters.
Unless our brains exceed the Turing computable, for which we have no evidence is even possible, either whatever causes the subjective experience is also within the Turing computable or it can not in any way influence our actions.
Ultimately we know very little about this, and we have very little basis for ruling out consciousness in computational systems, and the best and closest we have is whether or not they appear conscious when communicating with them.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#220I'd recommend anyone to push their favorite AI into a corner on it being conscious, and listen to their gut feeling while doing it.
Also:
https://gitlab.com/codr7/sudoxe/-/blob/main/digital-psychopa...