41–50 of 62 posts
From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion: 1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human. 2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in w…
From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion: 1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human. 2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in w…
If human consciousness is reproducible, maybe we will long underestimate the depth and diversity it uses to model reality the way it does.
From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion: 1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human. 2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in w…
I would place myself in 3, with the caveat that I don't think any current llms or other programs/dataset/relationships are close to conscious. It's certainly possible in the future, though. Atoms arranged into a brain generate consciousness. There's no reason to think atoms in other arrangements can't. Brains aren't magic, just well optimized.
That is to say, what evidence would you need from a system in order to think that it's conscious?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"intelligence" is not well defined. LLMs are throwing this into high relief with how "spiky" their capability curve is. Yes, they can solve some crazy hard problems with enough compute and thinking tokens. Yes, they also fall down in the dumbest ways without an ability to self-correct... despite how "smart" they are, human supervision remains absolutely critical for any system of importance. But I don't think the tak…
Intelligence was supposedly well defined, but folks kept getting their definitions wrecked by modern LLMs so we had to move the goal posts. No true Scottsman fallacy.
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As someone who places themselves in #4, at some point the people in #3 need to accept a bit of scientific humility. The reason we are "biological naturalists" is that we can point to hundreds of thousands of conscious species on planet Earth which are not humans, and whose consciousness clearly has nothing to do with an ability to say "Forsooth, I am a conscious thinking being." AI folks have been ignoring this since…
What about robots? Not necessarily humanoid robots, but the classic RL demonstrations that can scurry around and achieve simple goals? In the computational functionalist argument, the thing that we share with cats, pigeons, and robots (and in some ways Claude) is the fact that we react to our environment in a way that requires computation. I myself lean (without confidence) towards weak panpsychism, where a lot of th…
The problem with the "computational functionalist" argument is that a) there's ZERO evidence other animals brains are computational, that is begging the question; and b) pretty much any embedded system is a device that reacts to its environment in a way that requires computation, and none of them have anything close to the psuedoconsciousness of a bacteria. let alone an insect. Point a) is the more important one: only humans have meaningfully Turing-complete brains. Other animals might be hardware-capable but they'll never be trained to correctly execute a program, nor does their own intelligence seem especially amenable to being described by a classical symbolic algorithm - e.g. animals are very good at object identification, quantity discrimination, causal reasoning, and we don't have anything close to a symbolic algorithm for any of these[1]. Computation is linked to the ability to communicate symbolically, and most animals do not regardless of intelligence. The idea that "the brain is a computer" has always been a poetic description, not a scientific fact. It is more correct to say humans have the ability to think computationally because we think symbolically. Again, maybe someone can identify that animals do think symbolically even if they don't communicate that way, or (somehow) we will have a non-symbolic theory of computation. Perhaps a beautiful symphony. Absent either of these two things, "the chimpanzee's brain is like a computer" is simply not scientific.
The supposed "sense/think/act cycle" is just you begging the question again, applying a computational aesthetic in place of understanding; this time it's blatantly false. Animals do not have a "cycle": sensing is an act and processing senses is a thought. Thinking is an act and many animals can perceive themselves thinking (demonstrated in crows and chimps). Dogs think very deeply while they smell, and the manner in which they sniff (tentative whiff versus greedy huffs) is itself an act requiring thought. Most importantly: even in animals, thoughts can be totally disconnected from actions and senses. Actually this might be the most major difference between a pigeon and Claude: their thoughts and actions are not directly tied to environmental stimulus, whereas Claude can only think and act according to a short-term context provided by a human. You can fake an agentic loop with a prompt, but it's not convincing agency the way a nematode has convincing agency. It's just a chatbot in a loop. If you expose it to real sensory data like a webcam, the agentic behavior becomes even more brittle and unconvincing. It's just nothing like an animal.
[1] I know there's work being done on formal causal reasoning, I thought this monograph was interesting: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/3451/Actual-Causal.... I am not convinced by it. The funny thing about these causal theories... they don't have a causal explanation :) :) :) The argument works by going through cases until you agree it works, empirically, possibly after complicating things further by patching out oversights and inadequacies. Very amusing. Causality is a tough nut to crack!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who places themselves in #4, at some point the people in #3 need to accept a bit of scientific humility. The reason we are "biological naturalists" is that we can point to hundreds of thousands of conscious species on planet Earth which are not humans, and whose consciousness clearly has nothing to do with an ability to say "Forsooth, I am a conscious thinking being." AI folks have been ignoring this since…
Oh dear, just a short while after me saying I was confused by the term too. Are you sure you're a ? [1] Which is to say, do you adhere to Searle's position about syntax not leading to semantics? Or is it more like: You're scientifically inclined, and thus you accept Ethology[2] or Neuroscience[3] as being empirically rigorous studies of animal behavior and cognition respectively? Incidentally, Alan Turing's 1950 imit…
Your response is too condescending to engage with. You should have assumed I know what neuroscience is. Please don't ever email me about anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who places themselves in #4, at some point the people in #3 need to accept a bit of scientific humility. The reason we are "biological naturalists" is that we can point to hundreds of thousands of conscious species on planet Earth which are not humans, and whose consciousness clearly has nothing to do with an ability to say "Forsooth, I am a conscious thinking being." AI folks have been ignoring this since…
What is the evidence that non-human animals have the "fuzzy cognitive concept" we call consciousness, but Claude "really does not"? I personally have not been ignoring animal consciousness in how I think about the possibility of AI consciousness and I don't see how animals having consciousness means that AI can't.
My statement is an opinionated position on how we should direct our research efforts and ascertain what is plausible: the behavioral similarities between humans and cats are much more relevant to the question of consciousness than the behavior similarities between humans and Claude, because cats are obviously conscious and that's not true for Claude. The fact that there are almost no behavioral similarities between cats and Claude suggests to me that "Claude might be conscious" is just a ridiculous statement not worth engaging with, even at the level of pre-science. At the very least, the burden is on Amanda Askell and Dario Amodei to explain why nonhuman animals are irrelevant to the question of Claude's consciousness. They have not offered anything like that; instead they seem fully ELIZAed by the chatbot, high on their own supply.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh dear, just a short while after me saying I was confused by the term too. Are you sure you're a ? [1] Which is to say, do you adhere to Searle's position about syntax not leading to semantics? Or is it more like: You're scientifically inclined, and thus you accept Ethology[2] or Neuroscience[3] as being empirically rigorous studies of animal behavior and cognition respectively? Incidentally, Alan Turing's 1950 imit…
I didn't say I was a formal biological naturalist according to Searle, I put myself in one of the four boxes the parent comment offered. Please read my comment in context. Your response is too condescending to engage with. You should have assumed I know what neuroscience is. Please don't ever email me about anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh dear, just a short while after me saying I was confused by the term too. Are you sure you're a ? [1] Which is to say, do you adhere to Searle's position about syntax not leading to semantics? Or is it more like: You're scientifically inclined, and thus you accept Ethology[2] or Neuroscience[3] as being empirically rigorous studies of animal behavior and cognition respectively? Incidentally, Alan Turing's 1950 imit…
I didn't say I was a formal biological naturalist according to Searle, I put myself in one of the four boxes the parent comment offered. Please read my comment in context. Your response is too condescending to engage with. You should have assumed I know what neuroscience is. Please don't ever email me about anything.
From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion: 1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human. 2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in w…
Obviously, language-driven thought is not a requirement for consciousness, not just in other animals, but even in humans. The thinking mind takes a secondary role in ordinary daily human life. The truth is that a human being behaves the way they do is not because of thoughts, but because of conditioning (the thoughts are not the primary driver of decisions, actions and behavior). The 99% of the action and responses are trained, the thoughts that we have are also part of this conditioning (most thoughts are unconscious and they are inter-wired with the behaviors, even a seemingly conscious self-reflection thought can be an automated pavlovian trigger). For example, one may think that they get up and go to work because they have a thought "I have to get up, now I am going to go to work", this is an illusion and complete misunderstanding of what consciousness is. Or one can have a psychological insight about oneself, if it's repeated and follows a behavior consistently, the very thought is just the equivalent of whistle-salivation. The thinking mind gives us that 1% to self-reflect, adjust our behavior, learn, predict the future and that differentiates us from other mammals, it's a powerful tool, but just a tool, but it should not be confused with consciousness and it should not be confused with the mind as a whole (in the materialistic sense). The way our brain functions is anything but like an AI agent. And what is consciousness? It's not the thinking mind. It's the experience. It's the direct perception of the senses. The consciousness is what is seen, heard, smelled, touched, thought (the experience of having a thought) in the moment. When you practice meditation, you get to discover the consciousness directly by becoming separated from the thinking thread. The thinking thread becomes more like an external tool, like a computer inside you and you realize directly that it's just a part of the cognitive faculty that makes you navigate your life, not the entire thing.
The LLM (and the harnesses) as built right now merely simulate the tool (the thinking mind). It's not that because this is some code ran on a beefy, but regular piece of tech invented in 20th century you may have at your desk that it does not have awareness (that's also a good argument), but because the way they function and operate is nothing like human (or mammalian) brain, then why would you think that regular code running on a regular PC could gain awareness? My point is that there's no similarity argument, LLMs, despite all their incredible capabilities (to threaten our jobs), are not remotely similar to the way our brain works.
Secondly, even if someone built an artificial brain made of whatever that simulates the biological structure, because of the philosophical zombie problem (the fact that there's no way to scientifically observe consciousness), you could never be too sure if a key ingredient was not missing and you are looking at an NPC. The consciousness is not a property of the physical brain, it's literally immaterial, it's the direct experience of the senses. You can make an optimistic assumption that every person and animal experiences consciousness the same way you do, but there's no way to rationally accept this assumption for anything created artificially.