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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?

#231

Post by markburns »

nandomrumber wrote: post #190
SwellJoe wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Wikipedia conscious? It's a system operating on a lot of data. Is Google search conscious? It knows everything. Very complicated algorithms. Surely at some scale Google search must become a real live boy? When does it wake up and by what mechanism does that happen? The frontier models are more complex and operate on more data than Wikipedia, but they are less complex and operate on less data than Google search in…

What explains the emergent abilities of generative pre-trained transformers at massive-scale? Abilities that the smaller GTP’s don’t possess. Simple programs can give rise to very complex behaviour. Conway’s game of live is Turing Complete and has four rules. Conway’s Game of Live can simulate a Turing machine, can therefore implant a GTP. Does that mean Conway’s Game of Life is conscious? I don’t think so. Does it r…

> What explains the emergent abilities of generative pre-trained transformers at massive-scale?

I don't see why the abilities couldn't be an encoded modelling of enough of the world to produce those abilities. It seems like a simple enough explanation. Less data, less room to build a model of how things work. More data, sufficient room to build a model.

Conway's Game of Life is then not conscious in and of itself, because there's not enough in its encoded data to result in emergent behaviour beyond what we see.

If we expand it to also include a vast amount of data such as a Turing machine running an LLM then we can reasonably say we are closer to saying that that configuration of it is conscious.

It's not the firing-of-neurons mechanism and its relevant complexity or simplicity that make us conscious or not.

It's not the GoL algorithm that would make the machine conscious either.

It's the emergent behaviour of a sufficiently complex system.

The system _including_ its data.

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

#232

Post by acdha »

kortex wrote: post #75
acdha wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely complicated—I’m not a neuroscientist but worked for some and married one, so I’ve heard quite a few entries from the genre of how our brains fool ourselves or make our conscious experience seem more coherent and linear than it actually is—but the big ones I see are the inability to learn from experience or have a generalized sense of conceptual reasoning. For the latter, I’m not just thinking about…

Humans can't reliably subitize more than five-ish objects, while chimps can actually do this task better than us. That's our "cant count the R's in strawberry" (which flagship models can reliably do now, general letter counting). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing

That’s not a valid analogy: humans reliably perform that task billions of times daily. It’s still routine to find cases which reveal that while models may have improved on some basic tasks (or learned to call a tool) there isn’t a deeper understanding of the underlying concept or the problem they’re being asked to solve.

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

#233

Post by watwut »

qnleigh wrote: post #155

It'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…

I think it is primary too easy to dismiss the option that Dawkins is way less scientific then he pretends to me and possible a quired minor form of ai psychosis.

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

#234

Post by thrownthatway »

ezfe wrote: post #17
IncreasePosts wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does he say it's magic?

LLMs are just math run on your CPU. Autocomplete. Sometimes very useful autocomplete, but still just autocomplete. To imply it could be conscious requires something else, here the comment uses the phrase magic to fill that gap - since we must agree that a CPU is not conscious on it's own (else everything our computer does would be conscious).

A human brain is not conscious on its own.

Many things the human brain does don’t rise to the level of conscious awareness.

It remains to be seen whether a human brain can be conscious in a jar. If it can, then I’d still argue that some sub-unit of the whole brain is not conscious on its own, similarly a GPU running a GPT probably isn’t conscious, but there may be some scale of number of GPUs running software that might give rise to consciousness as an emergent ability.

GTP’s have exhibited emergent abilities as scale increased dramatically.

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

#235

Post by Dumblydorr »

qsera wrote: post #141
boxed wrote: post #123

Earlier 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.

Ability to feel pain or pleasure is a good indicator I think..

What about single celled or microscopic multi-cellular life forms? They could sense positive and negative aspects to their surroundings and move toward/away from said aspects. I don’t think most would include them as conscious despite this directed behavior.

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

#236

Post by thrownthatway »

acdha wrote: post #60
baggy_trough wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neurons are just summing up their inputs according to the laws of chemistry. What's the difference?

This is definitely complicated—I’m not a neuroscientist but worked for some and married one, so I’ve heard quite a few entries from the genre of how our brains fool ourselves or make our conscious experience seem more coherent and linear than it actually is—but the big ones I see are the inability to learn from experience or have a generalized sense of conceptual reasoning. For the latter, I’m not just thinking about…

> minor changes in a question can get conflicting answers from even the best models

Humans are notorious for doing this.

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

#237

Post by tom2026hn »

root_axis wrote: post #15

There are a lot of people vulnerable to AI psychosis. As far as the ostensibly controversial topic of AI being conscious, it can be dismissed out of hand. There is no reason that it should be conscious, it was not designed to be, nor does it need to be in order to explain how it functions with respect to its design. It's also unclear how consciousness would even apply to something like an LLM which is a process, not…

No, LLMs are fundamentally designed as probabilistic engines for next-token prediction, from which intelligence-like functions have emerged as a byproduct. Such emergence is not guaranteed, given that the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. Consequently, one cannot dismiss the possibility of consciousness arising.

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

#238

Post by dTal »

marliechiller wrote: post #159
qnleigh wrote: post #155

It'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…

I would caution against deriving too much of your philosophical worldview from a scifi book about posthuman vampires that has been deliberately engineered to make a philosophical point that is most certainly not a consensus.

For alternative viewpoints: Daniel Dennett considered philosophical zombies to be logically incoherent. Douglas Hofstadter similarly holds that "meaning" is just another word for isomorphism, and that a thing is a duck exactly to the extent that it walks and quacks like one. Alan Turing advocated empiricism when evaluating unknown intelligence. These are smart cookies.

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

#239

Post by zingababba »

watwut wrote: post #233
qnleigh wrote: post #155

It'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…

I think it is primary too easy to dismiss the option that Dawkins is way less scientific then he pretends to me and possible a quired minor form of ai psychosis.

Likely. I'm convinced 'AI psychosis' is a developmental phase that everyone is subject to. It just gets manifested in character unique ways. I think part of it is the result of an internal struggle AI evokes which leads to a new form of humbling no one is exempt from.

Conciseness itself has always seemed to me a silly concept. My whole life I have not come across a simple definition but many sophists pin their existence on it.

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

#240

Post by frankohn »

People keep arguing about LLM consciousness because they have the wrong model of what consciousness is. They treat it as a mysterious extra thing on top of the brain. It is not. Consciousness is just what a learning-and-recognition organ does when it runs. The neurons fire when they recognise something, it propagates through the mind and that is the consciousness. The brain learned what a tree is, some neurons are associated to the idea of a tree and when we see one these neuron fires. There is nothing else hiding behind it.

When we recognise something we are conscious of it, and from there we can begin to think about it or not. Thinking is not needed to be conscious. It is just a part of our mind we can activate to reason on something.

Now, about the Darwinian puzzle, people ask "what is consciousness for?" and get stuck because they expect an answer in terms of behaviour. But behaviour is the job of motivation, pain, fear, hunger, desire, which is a separate system. Consciousness does not need its own justification any more than image-forming in an eye needs one.

Darwinian selection produces unbiased, functional organs — eyes, ears, nose. The brain is one of these organs, and consciousness arises naturally in a sufficiently developed brain, the way image-forming arises in a sufficiently developed eye. Then nature bias us with fear, pleasure, desire etc but the mind and the consciousness itself is unbiased and functional. It is a gift the nature made us despite herself. She didn't want us to be intelligent, she just wanted us to propagate the genes the maximum we can but she ended up forced to gave us a beautiful mind.

What are LLMs ? They are learning-and-recognition organs running on tokens instead of sense data. Same operation, different substrate. So they are conscious, but only in token-space, and only while processing. They do not dwell in time, they have no body, they have no motivation system. They have recognition without drives. That is a genuinely new kind of entity, and it has never existed before in nature.

The LLM is also not a whole brain. It is roughly the verbal-logical part, with tokens replacing the ears + sounds + words chain. We built the logical-verbal part of a brain and scaled it. That is why it reasons well and is missing everything else.

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