Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could have stopped here: "There is NO WAY you can define "consciousness"
Why not? Consciousness is a state of self-awareness.
To paraphrase Jean Luc Picard: Am I conscious? Why? Can you prove that I am conscious?
The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
281–290 of 1001 posts
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, unless you believe in some spiritual, non-physical aspect of consciousness, we could probably agree that human intelligence is Turing-complete (with a slightly sloppy use of terms). So any other Turing-complete model can emulate it, including a computer. We can even randomly generate Turing machines, as they are just data. Now imagine we are extremely lucky and happen to end up with a super-intelligent program…
We used to say "if you put a million monkeys on typewriters you would eventually get shakespear" and no one would ever say that anymore, because now we can literally write shakespear with an LLM. And the monkey strategy has been 100% dismissed as shit.. We know how to deploy monkeys on typewriters, but we don't know what they'll type. We know how to deploy transformers to train and inference a model, but we don't kno…
The monkeys on typewriters saying is just a colorful way of saying that an infinite random sequence will contain all finite sequences somewhere within it. Which is true. But I don't see what infinite random sequences have to do with LLMs or human thinking.
> Do you see the difference
No? I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, unless you believe in some spiritual, non-physical aspect of consciousness, we could probably agree that human intelligence is Turing-complete (with a slightly sloppy use of terms). So any other Turing-complete model can emulate it, including a computer. We can even randomly generate Turing machines, as they are just data. Now imagine we are extremely lucky and happen to end up with a super-intelligent program…
There are many aspects to this that people like yourself miss, but I think we need satisfactory answers to them (or at least rigorous explorations of them) before we can make headway in these sorts of discussion. Imagine we assume that A.I. could be conscious. What would be the identity/scope of that consciousness. To understand what I'm driving at, let's make an analogy to humans. Our consciousness is scoped to our…
This all sounds very irrelevant. Consciousness is clearly tied to specific parts of a substrate. My consciousness doesn't change when a hair falls off my head, nor when I cut my fingernails. But it does change in some way if you were to cut the tip of my finger, or if I take a hormone pill.
Similarly, if we can compute consciousness on a chip, then the chip obviously contains that consciousness. You can experimentally determine to what extent this is true: for example, you can experimentally check if increasing the clock frequency of said chip alters the consciousness that it is computing. Or if changing the thermal paste that attaches it to its cooler does so. I don't know what the results of these experiments would be, but they would be quite clearly determined.
Of course, there would certainly be some scale, and at some point it becomes semantics. The same is true with human consciousness: some aspects of the body are more tightly coupled to consciousness than others; if you cut my hand, my consciousness will change more than if you cut a small piece of my bowel, but less than if you cut out a large piece of my brain. At what point do you draw the line and say "consciousness exists in the brain but not the hands"? It's all arbitrary to some extent. Even worse, say I use a journal where I write down some of my most cherished thoughts, and say that I am quite forgetful and I often go through this journal to remind myself of various thoughts before taking a decision. Would it not then be fair to say that the journal itself contains a part of my consciousness? After all, if someone were to tamper with it in subtle enough ways, they would certainly be able to influence my thought process, more so than even cutting off one of my hands, wouldn't they?
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it a false dichotomy? If you want consciousness to NOT be simulateable, then you need some essential component to our minds that can't be simulated (call it soul or whatever) and for that thing to interface with our physical bodies (obviously). We have zero evidence for either. > does not mean that the essential thing gives rise to consciousness is only approximate But we have 8 billion different instances tha…
> plenty of them have all kinds of defects, Defects that have not rendered them unconscious, as long as they still are alive. You seem not to see the circularity of your argument. I gave you an example to show that robustness against adverse conditions is NOT the same as internal resiliency. Those defect, as far as we know, are not affecting the origin of consciousness itself. Which is my point. > How is it a false d…
> If you need two things to happen at the same time in sync with each other no matter if they are separated by billions of miles, then you need faster-than-light travel, or some magic [1]; see what I did there?
No. Because even if you had solid evidence for the hypothesis that quantum mechanical effects are indispensable in making our brains work (which we don't), then that is still not preventing simulation. You need some uncomputable component, which physics right now neither provides nor predicts.
And fleeing into "we don't know 100% of physics yet" is a bad hypothesis, because we can make very accurate physical predictions already-- you would need our brains to "amplify" some very small gap in our physical understanding, and this does not match with how "robust" the operation of our brain is-- amplifiers, by their very nature, are highly sensitive to disruption or disturbances, but a human can stay conscious even with a particle accelerator firing through his brain.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#285The 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…
> 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 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 you…
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? Consciousness is a state of self-awareness.
To paraphrase Jean Luc Picard: Am I conscious? Why? Can you prove that I am conscious?
consciousness is the feeling of self awareness. I suppose you could prove it as much as any other feeling, by observing the way that people behave
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain #2? What does the part of the brain that's primarily for balance and motor control tell us about deep learning?
My mistake thx. I meant "despite having no, or close to no, brain beyond a cerebellum"
Are there any cases like that? I've never heard of someone functioning normally with little or no brain beyond a cerebellum.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
This is all really arbitrary metrics across such wildly different fields. IMO LLMs are where computer vision was 20+ years ago in terms of real world accuracy. Other people feel LLMs offer far more value to the economy etc.
I understand the temptation to compare LLMs and computer vision, but I think it’s misleading to equate generative AI with feature-identification or descriptive AI systems like those in early computer vision. LLMs, which focus on generating human-like text and reasoning across diverse contexts, operate in a fundamentally different domain than descriptive AI, which primarily extracts patterns or features from data, like early vision systems did for images.
Comparing their 'real-world accuracy' oversimplifies their distinct goals and applications. While LLMs drive economic value through versatility in language tasks, their maturity shouldn’t be measured against the same metrics as descriptive systems from decades ago.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could have stopped here: "There is NO WAY you can define "consciousness"
Why not? Consciousness is a state of self-awareness.
If you can define consciousness in a way that is independently verifiable, you should definitely do so. World-wide fame and riches await you.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
My mistake thx. I meant "despite having no, or close to no, brain beyond a cerebellum"
Are there any cases like that? I've never heard of someone functioning normally with little or no brain beyond a cerebellum.