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The New AI Consciousness Paper

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Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#271

Post by craigdalton »

yannyu wrote: post #21

Let’s make an ironman assumption: maybe consciousness could arise entirely within a textual universe. No embodiment, no sensors, no physical grounding. Just patterns, symbols, and feedback loops inside a linguistic world. If that’s possible in principle, what would it look like? What would it require? The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inh…

"The universe they operate in isn’t a world—it’s a superposition of countless incompatible snippets of text. It has no unified physics, no consistent ontology, no object permanence, no stable causal texture. It’s a fragmented, discontinuous series of words and tokens held together by probability and dataset curation rather than coherent laws."

I think some physicists and Buddhists would say this exactly describes the world humans inhabit. They might also agree that we live in such a world with the illusion that we have: "a unified narrative environment with real feedback: symbols that maintain identity over time, a stable substrate where “being someone” is definable, the ability to form and test a hypothesis, and experience the consequences".

The more I see LLM emergent behaviour simulate,unexpectedly, that of human cognition. I think it tells us much about human cognition as llm behaviour.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#272

Post by meowface »

gizajob wrote: post #233
meowface wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think a machine simply could not be conscious? (Also, we definitely and obviously are a machine. But ignore that for now.)

Only if you first define us as a machine then you win by default. I’m a human, with all the complexities and contradictions and paradoxes that involves. Machines are tools we create.

I do not understand what you mean.

Why would a non-animal machine never be able to have complexities and contradictions and paradoxes?

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#273

Post by cellular »

itsalwaysgood wrote: post #253
cellular wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pain. I haven't publicly stated this before now: Consciousness requires the ability to perceive PAIN. All human learning is based upon the single kernel of pain (vs pleasure). A newborn is hungry or cold and cried. It learned to cry. It learned to smile. Eventually, delayed gratification lead to less pain (more pleasure). The rest is human history.

For sure, pain is useful when it leads to learning. We learn through feedback from our senses. We're completely dependent upon this mode in the beginning. As our brains mature, we learn how to predict our environments in ways to maximize pleasure, and avoid pain (grossly oversimplified). We learn more about others, what works, and what doesn't. An AI also learns from feedback, but is it ever perceiving anything?

Consciousness is unprovably true.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#274

Post by gizajob »

meowface wrote: post #272
gizajob wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you first define us as a machine then you win by default. I’m a human, with all the complexities and contradictions and paradoxes that involves. Machines are tools we create.

I do not understand what you mean. Why would a non-animal machine never be able to have complexities and contradictions and paradoxes?

I’m not saying it couldn’t, I’m saying you’re making a mistake by defining me as a machine for no reason. But if you feel like a machine then be a machine but don’t tar the whole human race with that brush.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#275

Post by pardon_me »

ACCount37 wrote: post #262
andai wrote: post #115

So we currently associate consciousness with the right to life and dignity right? i.e. some recent activism for cephalopods is centered around their intelligence, with the implication that this indicates a capacity for suffering. (With the consciousness aspect implied even more quietly.) But if it turns out that LLMs are conscious, what would that actually mean? What kind of rights would that confer? That the model m…

You're thinking too much like a human. Humans don't want to die because the ones that did never made the cut. Self-preservation is something that was hammered into every living being by evolution relentlessly. There isn't a reason why an AI can't be both conscious AND perfectly content to do what we want it to do. There isn't a reason for a constructed mind to prefer existence to nonexistence strongly. No theoretical…

> I think the only frontier company that gives a measurable amount of fucks about the possibility of AI consciousness and suffering is Anthropic, and they put some basic harm mitigations in place.

It seems more likely this is just their chosen way to market themselves. Their recent exaggerated and unproven press releases confirmed that.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#276

Post by yannyu »

djmips wrote: post #238
yannyu wrote: post #21

Let’s make an ironman assumption: maybe consciousness could arise entirely within a textual universe. No embodiment, no sensors, no physical grounding. Just patterns, symbols, and feedback loops inside a linguistic world. If that’s possible in principle, what would it look like? What would it require? The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inh…

Small quibble - did you mean 'steelman assumption'?

That is what I meant, but my brain has been rotted by the MCU it seems.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#277

Post by estearum »

spectralista wrote: post #268
gizajob wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've read Wittgenstein haven't you?

I have and to quote Wittgenstein all this is like saying the machine has a toothache. It is just complete nonsense. No one believes a pocket calculator is thinking just because it produces the correct output. To believe the LLM is thinking you have to find the demarcation between the pocket calculator and the LLM. Good luck with that.

Actually there are people who believe that a calculator is "thinking" just a tiny bit, and that LLMs are thinking a bit more.

To believe that a human is thinking, you have to find the demarcation between a brain and a neuron. Then between a neuron and a cell. Then between a cell and a protein. Then between a protein and a molecule.

Good luck with that.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#278

Post by ACCount37 »

pardon_me wrote: post #275
ACCount37 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're thinking too much like a human. Humans don't want to die because the ones that did never made the cut. Self-preservation is something that was hammered into every living being by evolution relentlessly. There isn't a reason why an AI can't be both conscious AND perfectly content to do what we want it to do. There isn't a reason for a constructed mind to prefer existence to nonexistence strongly. No theoretical…

> I think the only frontier company that gives a measurable amount of fucks about the possibility of AI consciousness and suffering is Anthropic, and they put some basic harm mitigations in place. It seems more likely this is just their chosen way to market themselves. Their recent exaggerated and unproven press releases confirmed that.

I am so tired. Tired of seeing the same inane, thoughtless "it's just marketing" take repeated over and over again.

Maybe, just maybe, people at Anthropic are doing the thing they do because they believe it's REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT? Have you EVER considered this possibility?

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#279

Post by a_cardboard_box »

armchairhacker wrote: post #107

My philosophy is that consciousness is orthogonal to reality. Whether or not anything is conscious has, by definition, no observable effect to anything else. Therefore, everything is "maybe" conscious, although "maybe" isn't exactly the right word. There are infinite different ways you can imagine being something else with the consciousness and capacity for sensations you have, which don't involve the thing doing any…

According to your view, the text you have written has nothing to do with consciousness.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#280

Post by obruchez »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #203
andai wrote: post #193

My summary of this thread so far: - We can't even prove/disprove humans are consciousness - Yes but we assume they are because very bad things happen when we don't - Okay but we can extend that to other beings. See: factory farming (~80B caged animals per year). - The best we can hope for is reasoning by analogy. "If human (mind) shaped, why not conscious?" This paper is basically taking that to its logical conclusio…

The factory farming argument is a little tired. I'd rather be killed by an airgun over what nature intended: slowly eaten alive by a pack of wolves from the anus first.

Isn't that an argument in favor of taking care of wild animals instead of continuing factory farming, though?
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