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The New AI Consciousness Paper

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Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#231

Post by gizajob »

rbanffy wrote: post #219
gizajob wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really trivial to prove but the issue is that sentience is not something you need to negate out of existence and then attempt reconstruct out of epistemological proofs. You’re not faking it, and if you were, then turn your sentience off and on again. If your idea comes from Dennett then he’s barking up completely the wrong tree. You know at a deep level that a cat is sentient and a rock isn’t. You know that an o…

> You know at a deep level that a cat is sentient and a rock isn’t. An axiom is not a proof. I BELIEVE cats are sentient and rocks aren’t, but without a test, I can’t really prove it. Even if we could understand completely the sentience of a cat, to the point we knew for sure what if feels to be a cat from the inside, we can’t rule out other forms of sentience based on principles completely different from an organic…

Maybe in mathematics but not in philosophy because eventually you have to decide on the certainties without which the universe cannot be made sense of or reconstructed from proofs.

If I pricked you with a pin, I would be certain that it hurt you and I could know what that sensation would be like if it was happening to me. Yet there is no description or no apparatus that could transmit to me that feeling you are having.

So no we cannot rule it out that computers are having conscious and experiences but from the nature of their being and the type of machine that they are, we can consider that it is not of the same degree as ours. Which is why I made my initial observation - the machine running the spreadsheet or the terminal emulator will never cause me to believe it is having conscious experiences. Just because now that same machine is producing complicated and confusing textual outputs it remains the same type of machine as it was before running the AI software.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#232

Post by txrx0000 »

triclops200 wrote: post #174

I'm a researcher in this field. Before I get accused of the streetlight effect, as this article points out: a lot of my research and degree work in the past was actually philosophy as well as computational theories and whatnot. A lot of the comments in this thread miss the mark, imo. Consciousness is almost certainly not something inherent to biological life only; no credible mechanism has ever been proposed for what…

There's some chance LLMs contain representations of whatever's in the brain that's responsible for consciousness. The text it's trained on was written by humans, and all humans have one thing in common if nothing else. A good text compressor will notice and make use of that.

That said, digital programs may have fundamental limitations that prevent them from faithfully representing all aspects of reality. Maybe consciousness is just not computable.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#233

Post by gizajob »

meowface wrote: post #191
gizajob wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re not a machine

Do you think a machine simply could not be conscious? (Also, we definitely and obviously are a machine. But ignore that for now.)

Only if you first define us as a machine then you win by default. I’m a human, with all the complexities and contradictions and paradoxes that involves. Machines are tools we create.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#234

Post by conartist6 »

FloorEgg wrote: post #196
conartist6 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no market for consciousness. It's not that nobody could figure out how, it's that we want slaves.

While I agree that there are big markets for AI without what most consider consciousness, I disagree there is no market for consciousness. There are a lot of lonely people. Also, I suspect we underestimate the link between consciousness and intelligence. It seems most likely to me right now that they are inseparable. LLMs are about as conscious as a small fish that only exists for a few seconds. A fish swimming throu…

Who would want an AI companion that might reject them though?

I agree that AI is currently about on par with a small fish in terms of being alive. The fish is probably more alive. It serves itself.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#235

Post by anonymous908213 »

estearum wrote: post #227
anonymous908213 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

Win a nobel? Stating that LLMs aren't conscious is no more novel than stating that the sun isn't conscious, which is self-evident (but otherwise claims of such consciousness are unfalsifiable ala Russell's Teapot and the burden is surely to prove it exists, not to prove it doesn't). That didn't stop people who didn't understand it from worshipping the sun as a deity, of course. It is unfortunate that humans are somewhat predisposed to such mass delusions whenever presented with something beyond their immediate comprehension.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#236

Post by estearum »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #235
estearum wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

Win a nobel? Stating that LLMs aren't conscious is no more novel than stating that the sun isn't conscious, which is self-evident (but otherwise claims of such consciousness are unfalsifiable ala Russell's Teapot and the burden is surely to prove it exists, not to prove it doesn't). That didn't stop people who didn't understand it from worshipping the sun as a deity, of course. It is unfortunate that humans are somew…

Nothing going on in an LLM is beyond my comprehension. It’s a simple machine… but so is the brain.

How to determine whether LLMs (or any other information processing devices like brains) produce consciousness is an actually unsolved problem, despite your assertions that the idea is preposterous.

In any case, no, I actually said the opposite of what you said here. Merely stating your unfounded yet high-confidence belief is extremely uninteresting, even as casual internet discourse.

If you could prove any of your beliefs on the matter, that’d be worthy of a Nobel. It’d require you to first take a step back from condescending “certainty” though, and it doesn’t seem like you’re headed that direction.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#237

Post by txrx0000 »

yannyu wrote: post #21

Let’s make an ironman assumption: maybe consciousness could arise entirely within a textual universe. No embodiment, no sensors, no physical grounding. Just patterns, symbols, and feedback loops inside a linguistic world. If that’s possible in principle, what would it look like? What would it require? The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inh…

There's some chance LLMs contain representations of whatever's in the brain that's responsible for consciousness. The text it's trained on was written by humans, and all humans have one thing in common if nothing else. A good text compressor will notice and make use of that. As you train an LLM, it approaches the ideal text compressor.

Could that create consciousness? I don't know. Maybe consciousness can't be faithfully reproduced on a computer. But if it can, then an LLM would be like a brain that's been cut off from all sensory organs, and it probably experiences a single stream of thought in an eternal void.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#238

Post by djmips »

yannyu wrote: post #21

Let’s make an ironman assumption: maybe consciousness could arise entirely within a textual universe. No embodiment, no sensors, no physical grounding. Just patterns, symbols, and feedback loops inside a linguistic world. If that’s possible in principle, what would it look like? What would it require? The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inh…

Small quibble - did you mean 'steelman assumption'?

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#239

Post by gilbetron »

yannyu wrote: post #21

Let’s make an ironman assumption: maybe consciousness could arise entirely within a textual universe. No embodiment, no sensors, no physical grounding. Just patterns, symbols, and feedback loops inside a linguistic world. If that’s possible in principle, what would it look like? What would it require? The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inh…

> Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inhabit a world whose structure is stable, self-consistent, and rich enough to support persistent internal dynamics.

Why? How do we know that? Seems like a made up requirement without proof, because we can't prove anything about consciousness because we don't know what it is.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#240

Post by anonymous908213 »

estearum wrote: post #236
anonymous908213 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Win a nobel? Stating that LLMs aren't conscious is no more novel than stating that the sun isn't conscious, which is self-evident (but otherwise claims of such consciousness are unfalsifiable ala Russell's Teapot and the burden is surely to prove it exists, not to prove it doesn't). That didn't stop people who didn't understand it from worshipping the sun as a deity, of course. It is unfortunate that humans are somew…

Nothing going on in an LLM is beyond my comprehension. It’s a simple machine… but so is the brain . How to determine whether LLMs (or any other information processing devices like brains) produce consciousness is an actually unsolved problem, despite your assertions that the idea is preposterous. In any case, no, I actually said the opposite of what you said here. Merely stating your unfounded yet high-confidence bel…

You're trivialising the complexity of both brains and LLMs in order to mystify and equate them. We can boil down a toy script, an LLM, and the brain down to engaging in a simplistic pattern of "act according to environmental information, adjust behaviour based on feedback". But unless you think that the script is conscious, there is clearly something more to consciousness than only that pattern.

The script is simple in concept, (relatively) simple in mechanics. LLMs are simple in concept, very complex in mechanics. Brains are simple in concept, extremely complex as to be beyond full human understanding in mechanics. We have the general gist of brain mechanics, and we can even engage in some brain hacking, but we lack the understanding to fully recreate the mechanics from scratch. To say that it is simple in mechanics is clearly not true, then.

To the extent that we do understand brain mechanics, they pose no similarity to the script nor the LLM. Although more mechanically complex, an LLM still operates on the exact same axis as the script; it is no more than math operations on a dataset. It has no capacity to reason. People selling LLMs have gone a long way to training it to have the illusion of reasoning, but in reality, "Thinking" is just a mode that increases the probability of certain tokens under certain circumstances. The modified winrate of tokens that reflect the superficial appearance of thinking exceeds the winrate of tokens that would otherwise come next, so it prints output that looks like introspection, but this is still just the result of rolling a die and comparing it against a probability table. Our brains categorically do not function anything like this. While the basic pattern of acting according to the environment may be similar, the actual mechanics by which this is achieved are completely different.

There isn't really anything to prove here. This isn't a meaningful scientific question. It is a delusion peddled by people who are trying to profit off of the delusion, and absorbed by people who do not actually understand the mechanical complexity of LLMs nor the brain and therefore are unable to differentiate between the two.

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