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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?

#261

Post by Towaway69 »

petters wrote: post #128

Many dismiss Dawkins here but Ilya Sutskever wrote in 2022: “it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious.”

Well then it must be so. Btw what exactly is “consciousness”? Oh, we don’t really know that either.

So two (AI and consciousness) concepts we don’t fully understand seem to be seem to uniting into something we definitely won’t understand. Which doesn’t matter since humankind is busy doom scrolling, talking about what color Trumps fart was last night and invading each others countries.

/s

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

#262

Post by threethirtytwo »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #189
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…

You could push the analogy even further and run the thought experiment where every forward pass through an LLM could in principle be done on pen and paper, distributed throughout all humanity. Sure it would take a long time, but the output would be exactly the same. We’ve just shifted the implementation from GPU to scribbling things down on paper. If you want to assert that LLMs are “conscious” then you would have to…

We know the brain can be modeled by math (and therefore thought can be written down on paper).

We know because we have mathematical models for atoms. And we know the brain is made out of atoms therefore the brain is simply a mathematical model of interconnected atoms that form a specific structure called the brain.

Thusevery facet of macro (keyword) reality should be able to be written on paper and calculated. That goes for everything… from the emotions you feel to the internal forward pass of an LLM.

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

#263

Post by gizajob »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #253
gizajob wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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 Subject…

The problem with your thinking here is that we are creating artificial beings now that display and output the same subjectivity. The argument you present like many arguments breaks down when the topic becomes self referential. It makes sense for other topics as analyzing subjectivity becomes pedantic when asking questions like why is the sky blue. But now subjectivity itself is in question. The argument you present c…

Haha hilarious. Heraclitus might be old school but Wittgenstein and Heidegger not so much. The state of the art in what might meaningly be said, proved or metaphysically challenged has changed little since their time.

At no point in my post did I mention artificial beings or LLMs. I made a counter claim about the need for proof towards the subjectivity of others.

But while I’m here, LLMs do not “display and output the same subjectivity” as human beings. They might produce similar textual outputs as those produced when human beings are forced to use computers to produce textual outputs, but that is only an tiny part of our way of being and way of potentially expressing subjectivity. It’s the totality of how those LLMs can express their subjectivity though.

One of the main failures of the Turing test (and why it is “old school” and invalid), and Turing’s consideration of humans, is that it forces us to demonstrate the totality of our subjectivity on the only playing field where a computer might possibly match us or win. This fails to capture much of our subjectivity in how it is intersubjectively attuned to others in ways more fundamental than textual outputs.

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

#264

Post by pydry »

boxed wrote: post #252
pydry wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human. We might not clearly understand the diff between the two states but we can certainly point to it and go "it's that".

Those terms are not really how we use the word "conscious" in any other situation though. With a definition like that you would say a rock is unconscious (I guess reasonable), a pretty cold bacteria is unconscious (hmm.. ok I guess?), and a warm bacteria is conscious (now I'm not on board anymore). We have to be WAY more specific in what the word even means!

I dont see a problem here. A warm bacterium is no more conscious than I am when I've been knocked out. Bacteria are alive but they arent conscious ever.

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

#265

Post by qsera »

boxed wrote: post #242
qsera wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Yes, so consciousness is inextricably tied to the ability to feel. In fact, I think consciousness is the ability to feel.

Hence to even ask the question "Is LLMs conscious?" is absurd. It is not at all about intelligent behavior. That is what I think.

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

#266

Post by pydry »

Jtarii wrote: post #202
pydry wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human. We might not clearly understand the diff between the two states but we can certainly point to it and go "it's that".

>We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human. You are using unconscious as a synonym for asleep, which is not the same thing as having no conscious experience due to dreams. We are clear on the distinction between a dead human and an alive human however.

Unconsciousness is not the same thing as sleeping.

Im not sure where sleeping lies but it's probably somewhere between the consciousness and unconsciousness depending on which phase of sleep you are in and perhaps whether you are lucid dreaming.

Which is to say, this is still a mystery but it still isnt a definitional problem it's a regular old scientific mystery.

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

#267

Post by marliechiller »

frankohn wrote: post #240

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 as…

[dead]

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

#268

Post by IncreasePosts »

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).

It sound like you believe in magic then? What is this "something else" to consciousness that can't be done with sufficiently advanced math?

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

#269

Post by roxolotl »

richhhh wrote: post #247
marliechiller wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of the comments in this thread are ignoring his primary point. He's not saying pattern matching doesn't equal consciousness. He's actually saying something more fundamental. He's saying there's no reason to believe that language pattern matching/algorithms are more, or less, conscious than other similarly complex algorithms.

The stance being presented here isn't that LLMs aren't conscious but that we as humans are much more willing to assign consciousness to language algorithms than to pathing or other ones.

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

#270

Post by pheaded_while9 »

gizajob wrote: post #263
threethirtytwo wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with your thinking here is that we are creating artificial beings now that display and output the same subjectivity. The argument you present like many arguments breaks down when the topic becomes self referential. It makes sense for other topics as analyzing subjectivity becomes pedantic when asking questions like why is the sky blue. But now subjectivity itself is in question. The argument you present c…

Haha hilarious. Heraclitus might be old school but Wittgenstein and Heidegger not so much. The state of the art in what might meaningly be said, proved or metaphysically challenged has changed little since their time. At no point in my post did I mention artificial beings or LLMs. I made a counter claim about the need for proof towards the subjectivity of others. But while I’m here, LLMs do not “display and output th…

How so? If a person were confined to text only (a la Hawkins), does that qualify us to dismiss their subjectivity on the basis of the medium? Also, why can training not be at least analogized to the attunement to the popular intersubjective perception?
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