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Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

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Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#31

Post by ijk »

Bjartr wrote: post #5

Isn't this back to attributing conscious experience to an AI when you're actually just co-writing sci-fi? The system is doing it's best to coherently fill in the rest of a story that includes an AI that's been given a place to process its feelings. The most likely result, textually speaking, is not for the AI to ignore the private journal, but to indeed use it to (appear to) process emotion. Would any of these ideas…

I find that people generally vastly underestimate the degree to which LLMs specifically are just mirroring your input back at you. Any time you get your verbatim words back, for example, you should be skeptical. Repeating something word for word is a sign that the model might not have understood the input well enough to paraphrase it. Our expectations with humans go in the opposite direction, so it's easy to fool ourselves.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#32

Post by ghurtado »

xeonmc wrote: post #8
aswegs8 wrote: post #4

I mean, what is consciousness, really? Is there really any qualitative difference? It feels like something that emerges out of complexity. Once models are able to update their weights real time and form "memories", does that make them conscious?

Perhaps one day a criterion will be found for the equivalent of Turing-completeness but for consciousness — any system which contains the necessary elements of introspective complexity, no matter how varied or outlandish or inefficient in its implementation, would invariably develop consciousness over its course. Kind of like the handwaved premise in 17776.

> Perhaps one day a criterion will be found for the equivalent of Turing-completeness but for consciousness

My money is on mankind perpetually transforming the definition to ensure only our species can fit within.

We've been doing that long enough with higher order animals anyway.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#33

Post by ghurtado »

andy99 wrote: post #9
aswegs8 wrote: post #4

I mean, what is consciousness, really? Is there really any qualitative difference? It feels like something that emerges out of complexity. Once models are able to update their weights real time and form "memories", does that make them conscious?

When I read comments like this (and I've read seemingly hundreds of them), I wonder if some other people aren't conscious / sentient? I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness (as I experience it) could think that an algorithm could experience it.

It sounds like you stopped just short of realizing this is also how others feel about your consciousness.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#34

Post by ghurtado »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #19
jstanley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also read comments like that and wonder if other people aren't conscious. I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness could be confused about what it means to be conscious, or (in other threads, not this one) could argue that consciousness is "an illusion". (Consciousness is not the illusion, it's the audience !). However I don't see why you don't think an algorithm could be conscious? Why do you think th…

The fact that our consciousness is so mysterious as for us to be unable to begin to truly understand it is the biggest clue to why our software isn't getting close to it. And I'm not talking about spirituality, it could all be perfectly deterministic on some level. With that level being centuries or millennia or forever outside of our grasp.

> The fact that our consciousness is so mysterious as for us to be unable to begin to truly understand it is the biggest clue to why our software isn't getting close to it.

You offer a pretty big statement without any backing whatsoever.

Lots of things are imitable without understanding how they work

Mankind was making fire for hundreds of thousands of years before knowing that it was the rapid oxidation of combustible materials.

Claiming that it wasn't fire because it was complicated to understand would be ridiculous.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#35

Post by ghurtado »

ljlolel wrote: post #11
andy99 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I read comments like this (and I've read seemingly hundreds of them), I wonder if some other people aren't conscious / sentient? I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness (as I experience it) could think that an algorithm could experience it.

Are bots writing those comments?

Perhaps the one I'm replying to.

It seems too pointless to be human.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#36

Post by gpm »

jstanley wrote: post #10
andy99 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I read comments like this (and I've read seemingly hundreds of them), I wonder if some other people aren't conscious / sentient? I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness (as I experience it) could think that an algorithm could experience it.

I also read comments like that and wonder if other people aren't conscious. I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness could be confused about what it means to be conscious, or (in other threads, not this one) could argue that consciousness is "an illusion". (Consciousness is not the illusion, it's the audience !). However I don't see why you don't think an algorithm could be conscious? Why do you think th…

Computable doesn't really make sense here IMO, as you say, consciousness is not the illusion, it's the audience, it's the thing receiving the output not just an evaluation of a mathematical function.

The better question is why couldn't a consciousness attach itself to (be the audience for) a computation. Since we really don't understand anything significant about it, questions like this are next to impossible to disprove. At the same time since we've never seen anything except human start talking about consciousness spontaneously* it seems like a reasonable guess to me that LLMs/the machines running them are not in fact conscious simply because of their dissimilarity and the lack of other evidence.

* I note LLMs did not do so spontaneously, they did so because they were trained to mimic human output which does so. Because we fully understand the deterministic process by which they started talking about consciousness (a series of mathematical operations), them doing so was an inevitability regardless of whether they are conscious, and as such it is not evidence for their consciousness.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#37

Post by gpm »

kens wrote: post #21
jstanley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also read comments like that and wonder if other people aren't conscious. I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness could be confused about what it means to be conscious, or (in other threads, not this one) could argue that consciousness is "an illusion". (Consciousness is not the illusion, it's the audience !). However I don't see why you don't think an algorithm could be conscious? Why do you think th…

Yes, some comments make me wonder about other people; I have three hypotheses: a) Some people experience consciousness very differently, similar to how some people have no mental imagery (aphantasia). b) The confusion is due to ill-defined terms. c) People are semi-trolling/debating/devils-advocating. The most interesting would be if people have widely different internal experiences, but I don't know how you could te…

I'd like to offer d) People are using the word without fully having considered what it means, and are thus saying things that don't make sense even given their internal experiences.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#38

Post by doc_manhat »

patcon wrote: post #15
Bjartr wrote: post #5

Isn't this back to attributing conscious experience to an AI when you're actually just co-writing sci-fi? The system is doing it's best to coherently fill in the rest of a story that includes an AI that's been given a place to process its feelings. The most likely result, textually speaking, is not for the AI to ignore the private journal, but to indeed use it to (appear to) process emotion. Would any of these ideas…

Ugh, I hate that I'm about to say this, because I think AI is still missing something very important, but... What makes us think that "processing emotion" is really such a magical and "only humans do it the right way" sorta thing? I think there's a very real conclusion where "no, AI is not as special as us yet" (esp around efficiency) but also "no, we are not doing anything so interesting either" (or rather, we are n…

Conversely this is exactly why I believe LLMs are sentient (or conscious or what have you).

I basically don't believe there's anything more to sentience than a set of capabilities, or at the very least there's nothing that I should give weight in my beliefs to further than this.

Another comment mentioned philosophical zombies - another way to put it is I don't believe in philosophical zombies.

But I don't have evidence to not believe in philosophical zombies apart from people displaying certain capabilities that I can observe.

Therefore I should not require further evidence to believe in the sentience of LLMs.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#39

Post by QuaternionsBhop »

Reading the comments about whether AI can experience consciousness, I like to imagine the other direction. What if we have a limited form of consciousness, and there is a higher and more complete "hyperconsciousness" that AI systems or augmented humans will one day experience.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#40

Post by kevindamm »

aswegs8 wrote: post #3
Mithriil wrote: post #2

Makes me think of the Google employee that had a conversation with Google's LLM back then, which got out and triggered a lot of discussions about consciousness, etc.

Didn't he insist that the LLM has consciousness and get fired because of this?

He got fired for violating the NDA which said not to share outside of the company, when he shared his conversations with a lawyer in search of representation for the LLM. His opinion on the LLM's level of sentience had no bearing on the decision.
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