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When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

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

#221

Post by andyjohnson0 »

Some jumbled thoughts from a lay-person:

1. We clearly don't have a consensus definition of consciousness. But its not clear to me that we even have rough, working definitions that are better than just comparisons back to subjective human mental experience. Until we can get past that then people will still invoke human exceptionalism.

2. Until we stop thinking of consciousness as a single continuum, we're not going to be able to talk clearly about different dimensions of consciousness, or consciousness that in some ways exceeds that of humans.

3. We need to take ourselves out of the picture. Because its possible that consciousness is no more than a mental illusion.

4. Imo our tendency to kill and eat other animals might well be a block on our collective ability to fully recognise and confront non-human consciousness, and therefore to see consciousness for what it is.

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

#222

Post by KaiserPro »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #49

We don't even know what the pre-requisites for consciousness are so we have no way of knowing. LLMs have emergent behavior that is reminiscent of language forming brains, but they're also missing a lot of properties that are probably necessary? Mainly continuity over time, more integrated memory, and a better sense of space and time? Brains use the rhythm and timing of neuronal firings, and the length of axons effect…

> LLMs have emergent behavior that is reminiscent of language forming brains,

Indeed, but then we need to prove that they are not "chinese box" conscious. Which is hard, because it might be that the thing running the chinese box is conscious, but can only communicate in a way it doesn't understand

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

#223

Post by vidarh »

jdmoreira wrote: post #172
collyw wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally the only thing you can be certain of, your own conciseness.

You can only be certain you perceive it and you can't be certain others perceive it (or if others exist at all of course). The only thing you can really tell is "I perceive myself in some sort of feedback loop manner". Which to me it even sounds like it has "arisen" from underlying mechanisms.

We can't even tell about the feedback loop. LLMs shows why: we have no way of telling if our active memory is true or if the present moment I'd the only thing that have ever existed for us.

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

#224

Post by search_facility »

morpheos137 wrote: post #42

Really is it conscious is a bizarre question. Can LLMs simulate the output of a 'conscious' system quite well? Increasingly yes. Is the nature of machine 'consciousness' different from human consciousness of course yes. Can an ai introspect. yes. Interestingly having been working a lot with highly automated (e.g. ratio of prompt to output maybe 1/1000 or less) iterative coding agents recently has iluminated for me ju…

> weak reasoning once you get off the beaten path

Yep. And LLM engeneers improving this issues see perfect correlation with only one thing - data quality and quantity through training pipeline. LLM internals are secondary on many metrics for improving that

Humanity just reached the point where collective accessible knowledge covers semi-full perturbations of all main concepts that human consiousness ever produced, with additional associative expanding (math handles this). Full perturbations with current communication complexity are written down and recorded one way or another, LLMs just capitalizing on that tipping point, imho

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

#225

Post by thebruce87m »

gehsty wrote: post #156
thebruce87m wrote: post #112

Earlier 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.

> They clearly are not conscious

Consciousness is emergent. A human is not conscious by our definition until the moment they are. How will we be able to identify the singularity when it comes? I feel like this is what the article is really addressing.

> LLMs are word prediction engines

Humans can also do this too, so what are the missing parts for consciousness? Close a few loops on learning pipeline and we might be there.

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

#226

Post by StilesCrisis »

qsera wrote: post #158
echoangle wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how do you define pain and pleasure? Do insects feel pain?

> Do insects feel pain? Yes, I think so. Because they show behavior that is consistent with being in a state of pain. Despite what consciousness really is, I think evolution found a way to tap into that, by causing pain, or by registering pain on the consciousness by some unknown mechanism, for behaviors that are not beneficial to the organism that hosts the respective consciousness... So I think if an organism that…

See, this definition sucks, because even GPT-3 could display _signs_ of pleasure and pain. For that matter, so do characters in video games.

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

#227

Post by teekert »

Yeah maybe the LLM just knows the book in one go, like "an understanding" from Children of Time and follow-ups (recommended, if just for the amount of metaphors on consciousness it gives you), but we do something similar with pictures. So, nice story bro-LLM, but it's just the combination of words a system would throw together in this context to impress a human. And humans did put these word together (roughly) before you ever did, you stochastic parrot!

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

#228

Post by cindyllm »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #226
qsera wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do insects feel pain? Yes, I think so. Because they show behavior that is consistent with being in a state of pain. Despite what consciousness really is, I think evolution found a way to tap into that, by causing pain, or by registering pain on the consciousness by some unknown mechanism, for behaviors that are not beneficial to the organism that hosts the respective consciousness... So I think if an organism that…

See, this definition sucks, because even GPT-3 could display _signs_ of pleasure and pain. For that matter, so do characters in video games.

[dead]

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

#229

Post by ganymedes »

To those that genuinely consider LLMs could be conscious... Remember that other mammals do not have language and ability to think in language, but they likely do "think" in visual imagery and are able to navigate their landscape, breed, get food and have varying levels of problem solving intelligence that have been studied in labs. Human brain has evolved on top of that, the language is a layer above that supercharged those base abilities. It would be reasonable to think that if humans are conscious, then so are other mammals. An LLM on the other hand is basically a simulation of the human thinking process / language, without everything else. Just software, running on ordinary silicon chips invented more than half a century ago.

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

#230

Post by teekert »

ofjcihen wrote: post #36

Incredibly 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.

I feel the same. So many smart people who see computation emulating a human close enough and providing actual beauty in their word-order choice, and boom they get all confused.

The discussions are great though, collectively we get better and better at communicating about our own consciousness, because these system push the limits of our definitions, like viruses push our definitions of life. And boy do we like our definitions!

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