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When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

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Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#311

Post by SwellJoe »

nandomrumber wrote: post #190
SwellJoe wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Wikipedia conscious? It's a system operating on a lot of data. Is Google search conscious? It knows everything. Very complicated algorithms. Surely at some scale Google search must become a real live boy? When does it wake up and by what mechanism does that happen? The frontier models are more complex and operate on more data than Wikipedia, but they are less complex and operate on less data than Google search in…

What explains the emergent abilities of generative pre-trained transformers at massive-scale? Abilities that the smaller GTP’s don’t possess. Simple programs can give rise to very complex behaviour. Conway’s game of live is Turing Complete and has four rules. Conway’s Game of Live can simulate a Turing machine, can therefore implant a GTP. Does that mean Conway’s Game of Life is conscious? I don’t think so. Does it r…

"What explains the emergent abilities of generative pre-trained transformers at massive-scale? Abilities that the smaller GTP’s don’t possess."

What "emergent" abilities do you mean? In my experience, smaller models behave exactly as I would expect a model with a lot fewer data and fewer connections between the data to behave. It is a difference of scale and not of kind when comparing Gemma 4 E2B (which runs on literally any modern computing device, including a CPU in a modest laptop or phone) to the current frontier models. Each step up adds more knowledge of how to do more things, and more working memory and tool capability to do more, but it does not look anything like a line being crossed into sentience, to me. They all still seem like machines. If you compare outputs across each step up in size and capability, which is something I've done, you'll see incremental improvements. You won't see a sudden spark where it's a different type of thing, it's just gradually getting more capable.

I think the memory features companies are sticking on these things is detrimental to mental health. It adds to the illusion that there's something else happening, other than some equations being calculated with some randomness thrown in. But, it's just the model querying the memory database (whatever form that takes) because it's been instructed to do so. The model doesn't want to know anything about who it's talking to. It's just following the system prompt. That doesn't make it your friend. Humans will see a face on the moon, that doesn't mean the moon will be my friend, either.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#312

Post by ofjcihen »

rolisz wrote: post #277
ofjcihen wrote: post #36

Incredibly confusing that people who are otherwise of sound mind seem to fall for this. Especially confusing when it’s someone who knows how algorithms work. Barring connectivity issues when’s the last time you messaged an LLM and it just decided to ignore you? Conversely when has it ever messaged you unprompted? Never, because they’re incapable of doing anything independently because there is no sense of self.

Opus 4.7 starts to try to shut down conversations if you are rude to it (it's easier to do this via API, look up what @repligate is doing). And unprompted messaging: OpenClaw can message you unprompted (yes, there's a cronjob behind it, but the instructions matter and it won't always message you, only when there's something relevant).

Trying to shut down conversations if you’re rude to it is what I would expect an algorithm owned by a company to do.

Your second example is by definition not unprompted. That’s like setting an egg timer for 5 minutes and then being amazed it went off.

When Claude cli decides to print out an ASCII middle finger entirely of its own volition we can say it’s acting unprompted.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#313

Post by lo_zamoyski »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #221

Some jumbled thoughts from a lay-person: 1. We clearly don't have a consensus definition of consciousness. But its not clear to me that we even have rough, working definitions that are better than just comparisons back to subjective human mental experience. Until we can get past that then people will still invoke human exceptionalism. 2. Until we stop thinking of consciousness as a single continuum, we're not going t…

1. Human consciousness is characterized by intentionality and aboutness. This aboutness has semantic content. We know LLMs lack semantic content, and we know this because computers are purely syntactic simulators. This is definitional. It’s not some mystery. Furthermore, unless you’re a Cartesian dualist, I don’t know of anyone who denies non-human animals consciousness. The consciousness of non-human animals differs, because it isn’t intellectual in nature (non-human animals operate at the level of the sensory/imaginary/particular; human beings further abstract from sensory experience concepts which gives us universal or general knowledge; LLMs don’t even rise to the level of the most primitive life form’s consciousness).

3. The idea of consciousness being an illusion is incoherent. An illusion is by definition a phenomenon of consciousness!

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#314

Post by sirsau »

morpheos137 wrote: post #50
RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #7

It is terribly sad when someone undeniably brilliant in a particular field fails to recognize their own incompetence in other areas - in this case mistaking advanced technology for magic.

the problem is asking if ai is conscious is like asking does ai have a soul. it is not a scientific question and presupposes humans are 'conscious' without even defining the term. to me it is 100% irrelevant if ai is conscious and all discussions about it are based on fallacies and assumptions. what matters to me about ai and matters to other people as well in terms of theory of mind about others is: can i predict ho…

IMHO the only rational way to think about this

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#315

Post by throw310822 »

marliechiller wrote: post #159
qnleigh wrote: post #155

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…

Because what you call "stringing words together" requires understanding and intelligence, and these are capabilities that we commonly associate with consciousness.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#316

Post by pydry »

boxed wrote: post #276
pydry wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont see a problem here. A warm bacterium is no more conscious than I am when I've been knocked out. Bacteria are alive but they arent conscious ever.

With your definition they clearly are. They move around, they respond to their environment and take decisive actions when needed. If a human does that they are absolutely "conscious" if you only mean it as the sense of conscious/unconscious. If you define that bacteria are never conscious, you should be able to come up with a definition that doesn't accidentally make them conscious in your definition of the word with…

>With your definition they clearly are.

No absolutely not. My definition was exclusively defining in terms of a human phenomena.

>I'll state it again: DEFINE THE WORD

Instead of repeating yourself reread again what I initially wrote. I think you missed more than it being scoped exclusively to humans.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#317

Post by gizajob »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #301
gizajob wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha hilarious. Heraclitus might be old school but Wittgenstein and Heidegger not so much. The state of the art in what might meaningly be said, proved or metaphysically challenged has changed little since their time. At no point in my post did I mention artificial beings or LLMs. I made a counter claim about the need for proof towards the subjectivity of others. But while I’m here, LLMs do not “display and output th…

> At no point in my post did I mention artificial beings or LLMs. I made a counter claim about the need for proof towards the subjectivity of others. You don’t need to mention this. The context is LLMs I am saying your claim is pointless in context. The subjectivity of others is completely relevant because it is the topic of subjectivity itself that is in question. Get it? You didn’t counter my own counter and instea…

Come and read your post in twenty years time.

Who you’re describing as idiots are the mass of humanity constantly standing outside and beyond the Turing test. It’s another deficiency in that test that Turing overlooked - it requires that better and better machine outputs are met with humans nailed in place before the machine came along. It’s a valid fail of the Turing test for a human interrogator to say “yeah but it’s just ChatGPT” and fail the machine when two weeks earlier the same outputs would have been sufficient for the same human to pass the machine. As fast as machines move, we move quicker. It’s not that we move the goal posts, it’s that we find that they were in the wrong place to begin with. And they’ll always be in the wrong place because abstract state machines running on silicon don’t possess consciousness in the same way we know a rock doesn’t. And the definition of generality can be shrunk down until AI evangelists can proclaim AGI has been reached but the mass of everyone else will still find that all of a sudden, intelligence is linked to things like suffering and desiring and passion and the machine still isn’t general enough to warrant any kind of description as a sentient, subjective being.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#318

Post by boxed »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #285
boxed wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I honestly don't see how Dawkins is so confused. Claude says it can't tell if it has any kind of inner life. Can you imagine a human saying that?

Again: you haven't defined what you mean by the word. Dawkins didn't either. It's absolute nonsense without the definition.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#319

Post by boxed »

pydry wrote: post #316
boxed wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With your definition they clearly are. They move around, they respond to their environment and take decisive actions when needed. If a human does that they are absolutely "conscious" if you only mean it as the sense of conscious/unconscious. If you define that bacteria are never conscious, you should be able to come up with a definition that doesn't accidentally make them conscious in your definition of the word with…

>With your definition they clearly are. No absolutely not. My definition was exclusively defining in terms of a human phenomena. >I'll state it again: DEFINE THE WORD Instead of repeating yourself reread again what I initially wrote. I think you missed more than it being scoped exclusively to humans.

> My definition was exclusively defining in terms of a human phenomena

Well that's a horrible definition. You put into the DEFINITION that ONLY humans can be conscious?

> Instead of repeating yourself reread again what I initially wrote.

The problem is that you were only talking about a very narrow English expression, and then just insinuating that this had some implication which you then didn't define.

Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

#320

Post by tempaccountabcd »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #288
abc123abc123 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is clearly nonsense. You are taking about sex, not gender. There are a millions of baby girls born with Y chromosomes that aren't discovered until adolescence when they don't get their period, or even adulthood when they can't get pregnant. See: Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome.

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