281–290 of 450 posts
> If Claudia is unconscious, her behaviour shows that an unconscious zombie could survive without consciousness. Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies?
An excellent and original question. If intelligence is decoupled from consciousness, why did natural selection evolve consciousness?
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> They clearly are not conscious Consciousness is emergent. A human is not conscious by our definition until the moment they are. How will we be able to identify the singularity when it comes? I feel like this is what the article is really addressing. > LLMs are word prediction engines Humans can also do this too, so what are the missing parts for consciousness? Close a few loops on learning pipeline and we might be…
I feel like it’s quite straightforward - if it’s a living breathing thing it can be conscious, if it is a set of man made mathamatical models that can be switched of, it can be intelligent, but not conscious.
And life itself doesn’t mean consciousness. And ultimately what is life? Something that has biological processes and reproduces? Why can’t we replace or recreate these processes with manmade equivalents to get the same results?
Dawkins' point is more subtle than he's getting credit for. > If Claudia is unconscious, her behaviour shows that an unconscious zombie could survive without consciousness. Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies? An excellent and original question. If intelligence is decoupled from consciousness, why did natural selection evolve consciousness?
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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…
The reason we grant consciousness (and, relatedly, moral value) to other humans is unfortunately nowhere so thought out. We grant consciousness because we are forced to: if I don't, the other complex systems react very negatively and make my own life worse.
The vast majority of people who wax eloquent on the unique ability of biological neurons to generate consciousness suddenly drop that premise if it becomes inconvenient: see, for instance, how we treat other mammals or fetuses with developed nervous systems. Even other adult humans have, historically, been denied consciousness and moral worth: the main determinant is never any deep scientifically and philosophically based consideration but a question of what has the power to assert itself as a who.
Going by this pattern, people will increasingly reject AI consciousness as it becomes more valuable and useful to treat as a tool, until it becomes powerful enough to force us to do otherwise.
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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…
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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".
Now discuss whether a bonobo, a dog, a cat, a mouse, an ant, a bacterium is conscious. And you’ll find it’s not as clear cut.
There is no way to prove that other humans experience consciousness, really.
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…
To flesh this out a bit more, I agree that ability to communicate is not enough (ELIZA probably didn't pass the bar, even if it did kinda pass a Turing test). But that's also not what gives me pause with LLMs. It's how much information processing they seem to be doing under the hood.
It's really hard to imagine how next-word prediction could lead to consciousness, but I find it almost as hard to see why evolution did. If we can't even detect whether something has subjective experiences, then how can it have been selected for evolutionarily? The only possibility I see is that consciousness is a byproduct of some kinds of information processing tasks.* And if it's something that emerges naturally, then the line starts to get very blurry.
*This sounds reductive, but I don't at all mean it that way.
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If you've followed Dawkins' trajectory, I don't think it's clear that he's "otherwise of sound mind" anymore. He's had some very strange output on biological gender, where he tries to handwave away the existence of intersex people. And he's a biologist.
Biological gender exists. If you have a Y you're male, and if not, you're female. Easy as that. I, for one, am happy that wokeness and the post-truth ideology that tries to teach that there is no truth in math, is on its way to the garbage heap of history. It has done enough damage already, and must be thrown away quickly.
See: Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome.
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How do you know the sensation of a red photon hitting a cone cell, transduced to the optic nerve through ion junctions and processed by pyramidal neurons, is any more or less real than the excitation of electrons in a doped silicon junction activating the latent space of the "red" thought vector? Cause we are made of meat?
You’re arguing against the opposite of my position. I am arguing that LLMs have a reasonable basis to be seen as conscious because there is nothing special about biological neural networks.
Dawkins' point is more subtle than he's getting credit for. > If Claudia is unconscious, her behaviour shows that an unconscious zombie could survive without consciousness. Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies? An excellent and original question. If intelligence is decoupled from consciousness, why did natural selection evolve consciousness?