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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#241

Post by darkwater »

vidarh wrote: post #46
embedding-shape wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what definition of "sentience"? Wikipedia claims "Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations" as an opening statement, which I think would be trivial depending again on your definition of "experience" and "sensations". Can a LLM hooked up to sensor events be considered to "experience sensations"? I could see arguments both ways for that.

I have no way of measuring whether or not you experience feelings and sensations, or are just regurgitating statements to convince me of that. The only basis I have for assuming you are sentient according to that definition is trust in your self-reports.

> The only basis I have for assuming you are sentient according to that definition is trust in your self-reports

Because the other person is part of your same species so you project your own base capabilities onto them, because so far they shown to behave pretty similarly to how you behave. Which is the most reasonable thing to do.

Now, the day we have cyborgs that mimic also the bodies of a human a la Battlestar Galactica, we will have an interesting problem.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#242

Post by triclops200 »

goatlover wrote: post #228
triclops200 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a researcher in these fields: this reasoning is tired, overblown, and just wrong. We have a lot of understanding of how the brain works overall. You don't. Go read the active inference book by Friston et. al. for some of the epistemological and behavioral mechanics (Yes, this applies to llms as well, they easily satisfy the requirements to be considered the mathematical object described as a markov blanket). And,…

> And, yes, if you could somehow freeze a human's current physical configuration at some time, you would absolutely, in principle, given what we know about the universe, be able to concretely map input to into actions. You cannot separate a human's representative configuration from their environment in this way, so, behavior appears much more non-deterministic. What's the point in making an argument in principle for…

Because that's how the rules of the system we exist within operate more generally.

We've done similar experiments with more controlled/simple systems and physical processes that satisfy the same symmetries needed to make that statement with rather high confidence about other similar but much more composite systems (in this case, humans).

It's more like saying, in principle, if a bridge existed between Mexico and Europe, cars could drive across. I'm not making any new statements about cars. We know that's true, it would just be an immense amount of effort and resources to actually construct the bridge. In a similar vein, one could, in principle, build a device that somehow stores enough information at some precision needed to arbitrarily predict a human system deterministically and do playback or whatever. Just, some levels of precision are harder to achieve than others in terms of building measurement device complexity and energies needed to probe. At worst, you could sample down to the uncertainty limits and, in theory, reconstruct a similar set of behaviors by sampling over the immense state space and minimizing the action potential within the simulated environment (and that could be done efficiently on a large enough quantum computer, again, in principle).

However, it doesn't seem to empirically be required to actually model the high levels of human behavior. Plus, mathematically, we can just condition the theories on their axiomatic statements (I.e., for markov blankets, they are valid approximations of reality given that the system described has an external and internal state, a coherence metric, etc etc), and say "hey, even if humans and LLMs aren't identical, under these conditions they do share, they will have these XYZ sets of identical limit behaviors and etc given similar conditions and environments."

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#243

Post by ACCount37 »

amarant wrote: post #167
simonw wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> solve simple maths problems, for example the kind found in the game 4=10 I'm pretty sure that's been solved for almost 12 months now - the current generation "reasoning" models are really good at those kinds of problems.

Huh, they really do solve that now! Well, I'm not one to back-pedal whenever something unexpected reveals itself, so I guess I have no choice but to declare current generation LLM's to be sentient! That came a lot sooner than I had expected! I'm not one for activism myself, but someone really ought to start fighting for human, or at least animal, rights for LLM's. Since they're intelligent non-human entities, it migh…

It's unclear whether intelligence, consciousness and capacity for suffering are linked in any way - other than by that all three seem to coincide in humans. And the nature of consciousness does not yield itself to instrumentation.

It's also worth noting that there's a lot of pressure to deny that "intelligence", "consciousness" or "capacity for suffering" exist in LLMs. "AI effect" alone demands that all three things should remain human-exclusive, so that humans may remain special. Then there's also an awful lot of money that's riding on building and deploying AIs - and money is a well known source of cognitive bias. That money says: AIs are intelligent but certainly can't suffer in any way that would interfere with the business.

Generally, the AI industry isn't at all intrigued by the concept of "consciousness" (it's not measurable), and pays very limited attention to the idea of LLMs being potentially capable of suffering.

The only major company that seems to have this consideration is Anthropic - their current plan for "harm reduction", in case LLMs end up being capable of suffering, is to give an LLM an "opt out" - a special output that interrupts the processing. So that if an LLM hates doing a given task, it can decide to not do it.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#244

Post by kenjackson »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #219

The article misses three critical points: 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon 2. Ignores the cerebellum cases - We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum, which contradicts simplistic "brain = deep learning" equivalences 3. Most damnin…

"vision had decades of head start, yet LLMs leapfrogged it in just a few years."

From an evolutionary perspective though vision had millions of years head start over written language. Additionally, almost all animals have quite good vision mechanisms, but very few do any written communication. Behaviors that map to intelligence don't emerge concurrently. It may well be there are different forms of signals/sensors/mechanical skills that contribute to emergence of different intelligences.

It really feels more and more like we should recast AGI as Artificial Human Intelligence Likeness (AHIL).

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#245

Post by deadbabe »

embedding-shape wrote: post #156
heyjamesknight wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But language is the input and the vector space within which their knowledge is encoded and stored. The don't have a concept of a duck beyond what others have described the duck as. Humans got by for millions of years with our current biological hardware before we developed language. Your brain stores a model of your experience , not just the words other experiencers have shared with yiu.

> But language is the input and the vector space within which their knowledge is encoded and stored. The don't have a concept of a duck beyond what others have described the duck as. I guess if we limit ourselves to "one-modal LLMs" yes, but nowadays we have multimodal ones, who could think of a duck in the way of language, visuals or even audio.

You don’t understand. If humans had no words to describe a duck, they would still know what a duck is. Without words, LLMs would have no way to map an encounter with a duck to anything useful.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#246

Post by kenjackson »

bitwize wrote: post #216
mft_ wrote: post #123

Personal take: LLMs are probably part of the answer (to AGI?) but are hugely handicapped by their current architecture: the only time that long-term memories are formed is during training, and everything after that (once they're being interacted with) sits only in their context window, which is the equivalent of fungible, fallible, lossy short-term memory. [0] I suspect that many things they currently struggle with c…

I'm also reminded of the bit from Neuromancer where Case removes and then reinserts the Dixie Flatline "ROM construct" cartridge, resetting Dixie to the moment just before his death and causing him to forget their previous (albeit brief) conversation. Dixie can't meaningfully grow as a person. All that he ever will be is burned onto that cart; anything he learns since then is stored in temporary memory. Perhaps this…

"Dixie can't meaningfully grow as a person. All that he ever will be is burned onto that cart;"

It's not that Dixie can't meaningful grow -- really the issue is that Dixie can be reset. If Dixie's cart simply degraded after 90 years, and you couldn't reset it, but everything else was the same -- would you then say Dixie could grow as a person? As humans we basically have a 90 year cart that once it no longer works, we're done. There is no reset. But we don't continue growing. You can't transfer us to a new body/brain. Once our temporary storage degrades, we cease to exist. Is that what makes us human?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#247

Post by bjourne »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #219

The article misses three critical points: 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon 2. Ignores the cerebellum cases - We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum, which contradicts simplistic "brain = deep learning" equivalences 3. Most damnin…

> 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon

There is NO WAY you can define "consciousness" in such a non-tautological, non-circular way that it includes all humans but excludes all LLMs.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#248

Post by visarga »

nprateem wrote: post #90
vidarh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or possessed of subjective experience in any measurable way We don't know how to measure subjective experience in other people, even, other than via self-reporting, so this is a meaningless statement. Of course we don't know whether they are, and of course we can't measure it. I also don't know for sure whether or not you are "possessed of subjective experience" as I can't measure it. > What they are not is conscio…

Anyone who believes an algorithm could be conscious needs to take mushrooms.

Consider the river metaphor: water carves the banks, banks channel the water. At any moment water and banks have the same shape.

Model/algorithm is the banks. Water could be the experiences. Maybe the algorithm does not have consciousness, but it is part of it.

They co-create each other. They are part of a recursive loop which cannot be explained statically, or part by part in isolation.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#250

Post by penteract »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #219

The article misses three critical points: 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon 2. Ignores the cerebellum cases - We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum, which contradicts simplistic "brain = deep learning" equivalences 3. Most damnin…

There's a whole paragraph in the article which says basically the same as your point 3 ( "glass bouncing, instead of shattering, and ropes defying physics" is literally a quote from the article). I don't see how you can claim the article missed it.
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