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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?

#241

Post by thrownthatway »

energy123 wrote: post #178
marliechiller wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are people who think Google Maps is a tiny bit conscious (the union of computational functionalists and panpsychists), to resolve the dilemma of some magical binary threshold.

When a honey bee does its little dance to communicate to its sisters where the foods at, similarly to Google Maps computing and communicating the shortest path to your destination, is the bee conscious?

Yeah, probably. At least a little bit.

Are 80,000 bees conscious, or more conscious? Well, they’re definitely capable of some emergent behaviours that one be alone can’t achieve.

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

#242

Post by boxed »

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..

Now you have do define pleasure AND pain without using the word "consciousness" as that would be circular logic.

Is pleasure then any reward function? Then a mathematical set of equations performed by a human by writing on a piece of paper can qualify. Does that mean pen and paper is conscious? Or certain equations?

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

#243

Post by dwh452 »

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…

The mechanistic view gets weirder if you imagine all the states of the system being written down on a giant tape. Not just the "current" state but all the past and future states. What makes this tape not alive or conscious?

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

#244

Post by gizajob »

vidarh wrote: post #219
marliechiller wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A large part of the problem is what you consider consciousness. If you talk about having a subjective experience, then we don't know of any way to prove that even other humans than ourselves have one. We go entirely by assumptions based on physical similarity and our ability to communicate. But we have no evidence that physical similarity is a prerequisite, nor that it is sufficient. So the bigger trap is to assume t…

“If you talk about having a subjective experience, then we don't know of any way to prove that even other humans than ourselves have one.“

Wittgenstein kinda blows this burden of proof apart. Just because you can doubt something like the subjectivity of others to the point where it needs to be reconstructed from proofs, that’s an issue with the doubting experiment more than the subjectivity. Others possessing Subjectivity is the kind of hinge certainty upon which your world is constructed, it’s not a proof worthy endeavour to doubt it - it’s something you’re certain is the case. If it wasn’t then pretty well everything else about reality would be in doubt and needing constant reconstruction from proofs, which is an exercise in madness and futility, not philosophy. There’s really nothing in your experience where others not possessing subjective experiences of some kind really arises, except for the philosophical exercise of doubting and requiring epistemological proofs which can’t ever exist in the face of a relentless and unconvincable doubter. Heidegger talks about pretty well the same idea as Wittgenstein.

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

#245

Post by threethirtytwo »

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…

HN is full of experts who know despite lack of evidence. It’s the strangest thing because their confidence on this topic is completely authoritative despite total ignorance.

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

#246

Post by threethirtytwo »

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…

Except we don’t know how those words are strung together. Right? Why don’t you analyze it a little further and stop shutting down your own brain before coming to this superficial conclusion.

You ask the LLM a complex question and it gives you a correct answer. Yes it has to string words together to answer your question but how did it know the order and which words to use in order to make the answer correct? You don’t actually know. No one does and it is in that unknown space that we suspect consciousness may lie. Something is there and humanity as a whole cannot understand it and this lack of understanding is exactly the same fundamental lack of understanding we have for how a monkey brain or dog brain or even human brain works. We do not know whether humans dogs or monkeys are conscious… you only assume other living beings are conscious because you yourself experience it and just assume it exists for others. We can’t even define what it is because consciousness is a loaded word like spirituality.

This is not anthropomorphism. You attribute the bias wrongly. Instead it is a stranger phenomenon among people like you who can mysteriously only characterize the LLM as a next token predictor and nothing else beyond that even though the token prediction clearly indicates greater intelligence at work.

The tldr is that we don’t actually know and that consciousness is a highly viable possibility given what we don’t know and given the assumptions of consciousness we have on other living beings with equivalent understanding of complex topics.

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

#247

Post by richhhh »

marliechiller wrote: post #199
dumpsterdiver wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because something can communicate in a way that you can interpret, doesnt mean something is conscious The phrase “the trap of anthropomorphism” betrays a rather dull premise: that consciousness is strictly defined by human experience, and no other experience. It refuses to examine the underlying substrate, at which point we’re not even talking the same language anymore when discussing consciousness.

I think these ideas are orthogonal. I do not think that conciousness is defined by human experience at all - in fact, I think humans do a profound disservice to animals in our current lack of appreciation for their clear displays of conciousness. That said, if a chimpanzee bares its teeth to me, I could interpret that to be a smile when in fact its a threatening gesture. Its this misinterpretation that I am trying to…

What makes you certain that human thought is more than pattern matching?

As I understand it neuroscience hasn’t come up with a clear explanation of thought, much less a mind or consciousness. It seems to me complex pattern matching is a reasonable a cause of consciousness as anything else.

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

#248

Post by AlecSchueler »

mrandish wrote: post #117
AlecSchueler wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness. Can such an algorithm reason about itself in relation to others?

> Can such an algorithm reason about itself in relation to others? No, but an LLM doesn't do that either. An LLM is an algorithm to generate text output which can simulate how humans describe reasoning about themselves in relation to others. Humans do that by using words to describe what they internally experienced. LLMs do it by calculating the statistical weight of linguistic symbols based on a composite of human-g…

> LLMs do it by ...

That they do it at all is the point and is what separates then from MP3 encoding algorithms. The "how" doesn't seem to me to be as important as you're suggesting.

You asked a hypothetical above about a different algorithm and now we've ascertained the reasons why that was reductive.

> LLMs never experienced ...

What is experience beyond taking input from the world around you and holding an understanding of it?

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

#250

Post by boxed »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #176
qsera wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That would be the physically embodied definition. Which is a useful starting point, because clearly our consciousness is physically embodied, while an LLM's isn't. This matters more than it seems, because we're not calculators, and we're not just brains. There are proven links between mental and emotional states and - for example - the gut biome. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77673-z There's a huge amoun…

First of all: arguing about the details of a thing that actually exists is an enormous difference from arguing details of a thing that does NOT exist.

As for your dig at Dawkins, I just read https://archive.ph/Rq5bw which I assume you're referring to. Notice how he never defined "conscious" and he seems to use it as equivalent to "can process data logically" which is not at all how I would define the word. And if you use that word clearly Claude is conscious. I wouldn't use that definition though.

It ALWAYS comes back to the fact that people argue about what consciousness is and never define what they mean. Sam Harris defines it as subjective experience, which is afaik impossible to measure in any way so you can just assume rocks are conscious and move on. I personally like Julian Jaynes' definition.

You assumed YOUR definition and judged Dawkins without first comparing definitions. I think that's showing your problem with critical thinking in this case, not his.

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