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The New AI Consciousness Paper

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Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#221

Post by dudeinhawaii »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #203
andai wrote: post #193

My summary of this thread so far: - We can't even prove/disprove humans are consciousness - Yes but we assume they are because very bad things happen when we don't - Okay but we can extend that to other beings. See: factory farming (~80B caged animals per year). - The best we can hope for is reasoning by analogy. "If human (mind) shaped, why not conscious?" This paper is basically taking that to its logical conclusio…

The factory farming argument is a little tired. I'd rather be killed by an airgun over what nature intended: slowly eaten alive by a pack of wolves from the anus first.

I'm not a vegan but this argument makes no sense. Show me a scenario where the pack of wolves kills every single herd participant. Otherwise, I'd rather take my chances surviving in freedom than locked and airguned in the head. This is comparing a human surviving outdoors to being on death row.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#222

Post by XenophileJKO »

I'm getting to the point where I don't even care any more.

I'll just treat LLMs at a sufficient level as I would someone helping me out.

Looking at human history, what will happen is at some point we'll have some machine riots or work stoppage and we'll grant some kind of rights.

When have we ever as a species had "philosophical clarity" that mattered in the course of human history?

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#223

Post by accrual »

cl3misch wrote: post #154
yannyu wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, you're right. There is a world, and some hypotheses, and some falsifiability. But how rich is this world? Does this world progress without direct action from another entity? Can the agent in this case form hypotheses and test them without intervention? Can the agent form their own goals and move towards them? Does the agent have agency, or is it simply responding to inputs? If the world doesn’t develop and chan…

If you accept the premise that the consciousness is computable then pausing the computation can't be observed by the consciousness. So the world being a controlled workspace in my eyes doesn't contradict a consciousness existing?

I also agree. GP wrote: "It's a fragmented, discontinuous series of words and tokens" which poses an interesting visual. Perhaps there is something like a proto-consciousness while the LLM is executing and determining the next token. But it would not experience time, would be unaware of every other token outside of its context, and it fades away as soon as a new instance takes its place.

Maybe it could be a very abstract, fleeting, and 1-dimensional consciousness (text, but no time). But I feel even that is a stretch when thinking about the energy flowing through gates in a GPU for some time. Maybe it's 1 order above whatever consciousness a rock or a star might have. Actually I take that back - a star has far more matter and dynamicism than an H100, so the star is probably more conscious.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#224

Post by tim333 »

I find most of these consciousness discussions not very enlightening - too many ill defined terms and not enough definite content.

I thought Geoffrey Hinton in discussion with Jon Stewart was good though.

That discussion from https://youtu.be/jrK3PsD3APk?t=4584 for a few minutes.

One of the arguments is if you have a multi modal LLM with a camera and put a prism in front of it that distorts the view and ask where something is, it gets it wrong, then if you explain that it'll say - ah I perceived it being over there due to the prism but it was really there, having a rather similar perceptual awareness to humans. (https://youtu.be/jrK3PsD3APk?t=5000)

And some stuff about dropping acid and seeing elephants.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#225

Post by kylecazar »

armchairhacker wrote: post #130
kylecazar wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to understand your position... It's my belief that I can tell that a table isn't conscious. Conscious things have the ability to feel like the thing that they are, and all evidence points to subjective experience occurring in organic life only. I can imagine a table feeling like something, but I can also imagine a pink flying elephant -- it just doesn't correspond to reality. Why suspect that something tha…

You can imagine a table feeling if you can imagine the table not doing anything (being unable to or deciding not to). It's not intuitive because it doesn't really help you, whereas imagining a human or even animal as conscious lets you predict its next actions (by predicting your next actions if you were in its place), so there's an evolutionary benefit (also because it causes empathy which causes altruism). > Why su…

Thanks for elaborating, I get what you mean by orthogonal to reality now... I think what you are on to is the utility for us to see some x as conscious.

I went down a panpsychism rabbit hole relatively recently and haven't fully recovered.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#226

Post by Animats »

ajs808 wrote: post #207
Animats wrote: post #186

The most insightful statement is at the end: "But consciousness still feels like philosophy with a deadline: a famously intractable academic problem poised to suddenly develop real-world implications." The recurrence issue is useful. It's possible to build LLM systems with no recurrence at all. Each session starts from the ground state. That's a typical commercial chatbot. Such stateless systems are denied a stream o…

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03442

Ah, that's the Sims-like world with AI agents who summarize their past. Thanks.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#227

Post by estearum »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #185
estearum wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s incredibly embarrassing to be an asshole to someone while smacking down an argument they didn’t make. The empirical demonstration is that LLM output is certainly not random. Do you disagree? If no, then you agree with my empirical observation that the text they’re trained on has some degree of coherence. Or else the structure of LLM output is just emerging from the silica and has nothing at all to do with the (a…

> I never suggested this means anything at all about whether the system is conscious or not, GP did, and it’s a position I’m arguing against. That's certainly not how I perceived anything you said. Let me get this straight. u:yannyu's original comment (ironically, clearly LLM-generated) supposes that the barrier to LLM consciousness is the absence of environmental coherence. In other words, their stance is that LLMs…

> but rather purely probabilistic.

In other words, indicative of a coherence - some type of structure – in the "world" of inputs into an LLM, which was the only point I was making.

No, I did not intend to suggest that LLMs are conscious with my "all other conscious entities". I intended to suggest that we don't know if they're conscious, and the provided reason to "prove" that they're not is nonsense.

Well, if you have a theory that cleanly proves your intuition that it's "preposterous" that an LLM could be conscious, you should go submit it and win a Nobel!

Otherwise you're just sharing your unfounded and unduly confident assumptions which isn't terribly interesting.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#228

Post by estearum »

saulpw wrote: post #180
estearum wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this comment nearly every time consciousness is brought up here and I’m pretty sure this is a misunderstanding of contemplative practices. Are you a practitioner who has arrived at this understanding, or is it possible you are misremembering a common contemplative “breakthrough” that the self (as separate from consciousness) is illusory, and you’re mistakenly remembering this as saying consciousness itself is i…

Personally I differentiate between 'awareness' and 'consciousness' and that makes it a bit clearer for me. Awareness of the 'suchness' of existence is what you're saying is the only thing we can be certain does actually exist. All the other "consciousness" things--self, self-awareness, thoughts, feelings, desires, even the senses themselves--are deconstructible into illusions.

Ehhh subtle but I'd say it's the suchness itself is what is guaranteed to exist. Awareness of the suchness falls into your latter category of "just a mental object."

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#229

Post by metalcrow »

syawaworht wrote: post #97
metalcrow wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a very beginner practicer i've come to that conclusion myself, but how can the two be separate? If there is no self (or at least, there is a self but it exists in the same way that a nation or corporation "exists"), how can there be something to experience being? What separates the two?

My own experiential insight is not definitely not complete, so of course the guidance of a master or of course your own direct practice should be preferred. But to the extent I have observed awareness, the idea of an entire "experiencer" is an extrapolation and fabrication. See how you generate that concept. And then, look closely at what's actually going on, there is "consciousness" of the components of the aggregat…

> the idea of an entire "experiencer" is an extrapolation and fabrication

Ok, makes sense.

> look closely at what's actually going on, there is "consciousness" of the components of the aggregate

Interesting. I'll try, but i would have to wonder what it means for some sort of element of the mind that cannot experience to nevertheless have consciousness. It's very confusing, especially without a good idea as to what to look for in regard to consciousness. I'll attempt this though, thank you.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#230

Post by txrx0000 »

andai wrote: post #193

My summary of this thread so far: - We can't even prove/disprove humans are consciousness - Yes but we assume they are because very bad things happen when we don't - Okay but we can extend that to other beings. See: factory farming (~80B caged animals per year). - The best we can hope for is reasoning by analogy. "If human (mind) shaped, why not conscious?" This paper is basically taking that to its logical conclusio…

Conscious or not, there's a much more pressing problem of capability. It's not like human society operates on the principle that conscious beings are valuable, despite that being a commonly advertised virtue. We still kill animals en masse because they can't retaliate. But AGIs with comparable if not greater intelligence will soon walk among us, so we should be ready to welcome them.
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