Many dismiss Dawkins here but Ilya Sutskever wrote in 2022: “it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious.”
IS quite literally gets paid to think that
Karpathy replied to IS with ”agree” at the time
When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
351–360 of 450 posts
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#352Dawkins' 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?
I've been pondering this one for a while. In a purely mechanistic universe, why does consciousness as we experience it even exist?
With respect to the Dawkins quote: Claude doesn't survive we just built it, like yesterday, the Claude that Dawkins is interacting with might be replaced next month because it can't survive.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#353Earlier 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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Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#354Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such a weird comment. > Since the times GPT-2 was reimplemented inside Minecraft - its quite obvious LLMs are just math. This was obvious since LLMs were first invented. They published papers with all the details, you don't need to see something implemented in Minecraft to realize that it's just math. You could simply read the paper or the code and know for certain. [0] > math is the only area of human knowle…
Math used in LLMs is perfectly reducible and Gödel have nothing to do with it - inside commonly used axioms (which sufficient for LLM to exist and outside of Kurt Gödel scope) there are ZERO questions/uncertainties how it works, it's just a fact :)
Go on, name the axioms required for LLMs to work. I’ll wait. Obviously you are just talking out your ass about something you don’t understand.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it will respond to tokens telling it about a temperature change. It has no sense of warmth. It cannot be burned. Conflating senses with cognitive awareness of sensory input is a mistake.
The human Brain is a neural network. Your sense of “knowing what warmth is” reduces down to the weights of connections between neurons in an analog of LLMs. What is different about the human brain that warrants saying that the same emergent characteristics for one network are inaccessible to another?
You really don't think there's an experiential difference between putting your hand on a hot stove, versus reading the text "the stove is 200c, and will hurt if you touch it"?
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#357Earlier 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.
Well, "baby girls born with Y chromosomes" is very clearly begging the question, and I'm not sure where you're getting your "millions" figure from. Even the upper estimates of CAIS have it around 1 in 20,000 XY individuals, which would put global numbers in the order of 200,000.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Intersex" is a misleading umbrella term for a whole bunch of different DSDs, each of which is 100% specific to one biological sex. And I don't think I've ever seen the term "biological gender"; about the only thing gender proponents seem to agree on is that it's NOT biological.
Biological gender is the inconsistent "sex=gender" conception that cranks and conservative grifters operate under. I'm not sure what a "gender proponent" is, but Dawkins has come out and written some pseudo-scientific bullshit about there only being two sexes/genders, and that everyone fits nearly into one of them. Which is patently false. Intersex people are a real phenomenon, and are not clearly classifiable into e…
> Biological gender is the inconsistent "sex=gender" conception that cranks and conservative grifters operate under.
I don't know about cranks and conservative grifters, but it's definitely not a feature of the "gender critical" position which I thought Dawkins was broadly aligned with. That's more that "sex" is absolutely binary, with your "intersex people" being umambiguously classified through genetics, while "gender" is too vague and undefined a term to be useful for much of anything in the public sphere.
> Dawkins has come out and written some pseudo-scientific bullshit about there only being two sexes/genders, and that everyone fits nearly into one of them
It'd be surprising for Dawkins to make any kind of definitive statement about gender. I do think that your use of "sexes/genders" in that sentence is symptomatic of exactly the kind of conflation you're complaining about. "There are only two sexes" is a completely different statement from "there are only two genders", and far more defensible.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
We know the brain is made up of atoms and we know how to model atoms. So we do know for a fact that the brain can be modeled mathematically and we do know that human thought can be written down symbolically as an algorithm on paper even though we don’t explicitly know the exact formulation of said algorithm… That is fact. The blue brain project has already modeled the hippocampus and cortex of the rat brain uses adva…
> We know the brain is made up of atoms and we know how to model atoms. Incorrect. There's still a lot we don't know about atoms. We can (sort of) model them, but not with the degree of accuracy you appear to think we have. I mean, it's only recently that we discovered surprising changes in the properties of quarks, gluons and nucleons in relation to each other! So, yeah, the following foundation for your argument: >…
> Incorrect. There's still a lot we don't know about atoms. We can (sort of) model them, but not with the degree of accuracy you appear to think we have.
Not incorrect. You are misinformed and getting pedantic. Our knowledge of atoms is enough to model macro level phenomena and has spawned fields such as materials science and molecular biology. What is intractable is the computational power needed to accurately model things like the physics of protein folding. The computational power needed for that scales exponentially such that we can’t model it. That is the reality.
That being said we don’t need to model quantum level phenomena to model macro level effects like the biological mechanism of a neuron. There are simplified models that we can use as we have used in the blue brain project.
Additionally the thing we actually can’t model and don’t know about are extreme physics like black hole physics where the quantum world interacts with gravity but that is largely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
I hope this excerpt educates you a bit.
> Is untrue. We can't do that, we have never done that.
We haven’t done that just like we haven’t actually actualized the biggest number ever calculated by a computer. We know that number exists in theory but you’d be an idiot to claim it doesn’t exist as it’s foundational. For example the number a Google exists but no one has seen evidence for its existence. We know it through logic. From the blue brain project we can infer relatively confidently that the human brain can be emulated on silicon. This also follows from Turing completeness.
> They've got something, but they don't know how close or how far away they are from accuracy to the real thing.
The emulation is Quite accurate from imaging and emulation. The properties of the emulation that match in vitro and in vivo experimental data without specific parameter tuning. It is accurate as far as we know. That is about the same extent that we understand the human brain the LLM. The better question for you is how do you know it’s not accurate? You don’t. What we do know is that from measurable properties we understand that the blue brain emulation is accurate to the section of the mouse brain it emulates. This is exactly the same reasoning applied to LLMs… the tokens LLMs generate are remarkably inline with consciousness such that it is indistinguishable and thus can be speculated to actually BE conscious.
> What makes you think we are anywhere close to the base layer when there is no more refinement to be made? Because while there is still things in brains that our outside of our knowledge (which, by definition, we don't know yet), we don't know enough about brains to make a replica of one as a mathematical model, or in silicon.
Who says we need to make a replica of humans to make it conscious? We know the brain is made up thousands of evolutionary side effects orthogonal to the concept of consciousness like hunger, sleep and anger. All we need to do is replicate a sliver of the subset of human output we do consider as consciousness and that’s it.
But right now we can’t even fully define what that subset is and we can’t even understand how an LLM replicates human output.
What we do know is that the LLM replicates human output to a degree never done before indicating that it understands what is being told. From the evidence observed it is a valid speculation to consider it a form of consciousness. That is entirely different from saying AI is human. It is clearly not human but it is unclear whether or not it is conscious.
To be confidently claiming an LLM is not conscious is fundamentally misguided because it meeting most of our intuitive expectations of what consciousness is. It’s just people can’t face the reality that their own consciousness is not a form of exceptionalism.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
“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.“ Wittgenstein kinda blows this burden of proof apart. Just because you can doubt something like the subjectivity of others to the point where it needs to be reconstructed from proofs, that’s an issue with the doubting experiment more than the subjectivity. Others possessing Subject…
It's all words, man!
-- Wittgenstein, probably