271–280 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
You could have stopped here: "There is NO WAY you can define "consciousness"
I don't see how we make the jump from current LLMs to AGI. May be it's my limited understanding of the research but current LLMs seem to not have any properties that indicate AGI. Would love to get thoughts from someone that understands it
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Well, if you were to magically make an exact replica of a person, wouldn't it be conscious and at time 0 be the same person? But later on, he would get different experiences and become a different person no longer identical to the first. In extension, I would argue that magically "translating" a person to another medium (e.g. a chip) would still make for the same person, initially. Though the word "magic" does a lot…
I'm not talking about "identical" consciousnesses. I mean the same consciousness. The same consciousness cannot split into two, can it? Either it is (and continues to be) the same consciousness, or it is not. If it were the same consciousness, then you would have a person who exists in two places at once.
Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now.
Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we can achieve true reasoning via scaled matrix multiplication is understandable, but also betrays a lack of imagination and flexibility of thought. The world is full of bizarre wonders and this is just one more to add to the list.
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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.
the article misses the significance of it.
To be clear, I don't believe that current AI tech is ever going to be conscious or win a nobel prize or whatever, but if we follow the logical conclusions to this fanciful rhetoric, the outlook is bleak.
I think the challenge with many of these conversations is that they assume consciousness emerges through purely mechanical means. The “brain as a computer” metaphor has been useful in limited contexts—especially for modeling memory or signal processing; but, I don’t think it helps us move forward when talking about consciousness itself. Penrose and Hameroff’s quantum consciousness hypothesis, while still very specula…
> they assume consciousness emerges through purely mechanical means. From my view, all the evidence points in exactly that direction though? Our consciousness can be suspended and affected by purely mechanical means, so clearly much of it has to reside in the physical realm. Quantum consciousness to me sounds too much like overcomplicating human exceptionalism that we have always been prone to, just like geocentrism…
Let's take a step back from the "how" and talk about the what. The fundamental dichotomy is emergent consciousness versus panpsychism. The irony is that even though panpsychism is seen as more fringe (because materialists won, smh), it's actually the explanation preferred by Occam's razor. Emergent consciousness needs a mechanism of emergence as well as separate dimensions of consciousness and matter, whereas panpsychism is good as is. To go one step farther, idealism simplifies a lot of the weirdness around panpsychism.
It's a strange world to live in where the elegant worldview that answers difficult problems cleanly is marginalized by an epicycle-laden one that creates paradoxes just because the elegant view refutes the dominant religious paradigm and anthropocentrism.
all this "AI IS THINKING/CONSCIOUS/WHATEVER" but nobody seems worried of that implication that, if that is even remotely true, we are creating a new slave market. This either implies that these people don't actually believes any of this boostering rhetoric and are just cynically trying to cash in or that the technical milieu is in a profoundly disturbing place ethically. To be clear, I don't believe that current AI t…
There is no escape.
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…
I went to look for it on Google but couldn't find much. Could you provide a link or something to learn more about ?
I found numerous cases of people living without cerebellum but I fail to see how it would justify your reasoning.
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/mec…