331–340 of 450 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
This sort of determinism has been a problem for Dawkins going back to the late chapters of The Selfish Gene.
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…
>in principle simulate the laws of physics This sort of implies that consciousness arise from physical laws. But this is not a safe assumption. Physical laws stand on top of observations that is registered on consciousness. I mean, consciousness could be lower level than physics. For example, when you dream, you have some physical laws in your dream, perhaps laws that are different from the real world physics. So the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think these ideas are orthogonal. I do not think that conciousness is defined by human experience at all - in fact, I think humans do a profound disservice to animals in our current lack of appreciation for their clear displays of conciousness. That said, if a chimpanzee bares its teeth to me, I could interpret that to be a smile when in fact its a threatening gesture. Its this misinterpretation that I am trying to…
Why does a neuron, which is simply a cell that takes in chemicals and electricity, and shits out neurotransmitters; why does 90 billion of those give rise to human intelligence? Neurons are just next chemical state machines. We can model individual ones on a computer. Yet 90 billion of them together make up a human brain, and gives rise to consciousness and intelligence. If you get stuck on the next word prediction p…
Right now humans think it is self evident that physical laws give rise to consciousness. Arguments such as yours arise from this implicit assumption that premeditate all our thoughts and reasoning. But this is a dead end. Like how the earth centeric model reached a dead end and run out of steam before it can explain all the observations.
So to progress I think we should turn this down on its head and ask what if consciousness is fundamental? And the cosmos (or the experience of inhabiting one) arises from it? May be some recent advances in quantum mechanics and hypothesis like MUH are already in that direction...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could push the analogy even further and run the thought experiment where every forward pass through an LLM could in principle be done on pen and paper, distributed throughout all humanity. Sure it would take a long time, but the output would be exactly the same. We’ve just shifted the implementation from GPU to scribbling things down on paper. If you want to assert that LLMs are “conscious” then you would have to…
This is literally Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've had a lot of thoughts and conversations Do LLM's have thoughts? When you composed your post, your thought already existed in you head and you chose words that expressed the thought you held in your head. When LLM's choose words, they choose them on the fly and the end result could be concept X or it could be concept Y, it meandered to a destination.
the latent space of the LLM when it chooses each token is 10s or even hundreds of GB for each word that it chooses. It's not really useful to look at LLMs from the perspective of its prediction head which is a very small part of the model.
Latent spaces are maps of thoughts other people have had, not the thoughts themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>in principle simulate the laws of physics This sort of implies that consciousness arise from physical laws. But this is not a safe assumption. Physical laws stand on top of observations that is registered on consciousness. I mean, consciousness could be lower level than physics. For example, when you dream, you have some physical laws in your dream, perhaps laws that are different from the real world physics. So the…
Very odd counter argument to make. Are you suggesting that consciousness can arise outside of physical laws or making semantic argument along the lines of 'directly a result of'?
Wrote a bit more about this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48000035
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are not intelligent. And they won't pass turing tests if it cannot count or some simple thing like that..
They clearly are intelligent to some extent. But I agree they still wouldn't quite pass the Turing test if you have a competent examiner.
May be they appear intelligent to us because we are primitive and new to such an entity. Imagine some laymen from like a thousand years back could experience Google and Stack overflow. Having no idea of the internet or computers, wouldn't they consider it to be intelligent to some extent?
And just like those ancient people had not have an understanding of the concept of an internet and massive capacity to store and retrive data, we does not have a widespread understanding of how LLMs map concepts in a way that can do fuzzy searches. Once we understand it, may be they will look like a regular search...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There are times I am feeling neither pain nor pleasure It is about the ability ..
I guess that just seems like an incredibly arbitrary criteria. Why would the potential for pleasure in the future determine if I am currently conscious even if I am not in fact experiencing pleasure.