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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?

#41

Post by vidarh »

rellfy wrote: post #16
SuperV1234 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not fundamentally different. Chemical reactions are just math.

Well, (in our current understanding) yes, but there may be underlying aspects of physics and the universe that we do not understand that could be the reason consciousness kicks in. It could turn out that LLMs do work similarly to how humans think, but as an abstracted system it does not have the low level requirements for consciousness.

We do not know what the "low level requirements for consciousness" are.

We do not know how to measure whether consciousness is present in an entity - even other humans - or whether it is just mimicry, nor whether there is a distinction between the two.

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

#42

Post by morpheos137 »

Really is it conscious is a bizarre question. Can LLMs simulate the output of a 'conscious' system quite well? Increasingly yes. Is the nature of machine 'consciousness' different from human consciousness of course yes. Can an ai introspect. yes. Interestingly having been working a lot with highly automated (e.g. ratio of prompt to output maybe 1/1000 or less) iterative coding agents recently has iluminated for me just how different machine consciousness is from human. part of this could the harness of course. Time is a mysterious concept to machines. the connection of before and after to cause and effect is far weaker than in humans. over generalization is the norm: this is common in humans as well (c.f. fallacy of excluded middle or false dilemma) but the tricky part with current ai is they present as advanced in terms of acessible knowledge base but are actually shockingly weak in reasoning once you get off the beaten path.

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

#43

Post by digitaltrees »

baggy_trough wrote: post #23
ezfe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are just math run on your CPU. Autocomplete. Sometimes very useful autocomplete, but still just autocomplete. To imply it could be conscious requires something else, here the comment uses the phrase magic to fill that gap - since we must agree that a CPU is not conscious on it's own (else everything our computer does would be conscious).

Neurons are just summing up their inputs according to the laws of chemistry. What's the difference?

I came here to say this. But your neurons are faster than mine.

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

#45

Post by applfanboysbgon »

digitaltrees wrote: post #26
api wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI as presently designed and operated is conscious, this ends up being an argument for panpsychism. As you say it’s static, fixed, deterministic, and so on, and if you know how it works it’s more like a lossy compression model of knowledge than a mind. Ultimately it’s a lot of math. So if it’s conscious, a rock is conscious. A rock can process information in the form of energy flowing through it. It’s a fixed mode…

Why would current AI be an argument for panpsycism? I don’t understand the connection. AI is stochastic, not static and deterministic. As I said, in another post, there is evidence that sensory experience creates the emergent property of awareness in responding to stimulus, self-awareness and consciousness is an emergent property of a language that has a concept of the self and others. Rocks, just like most of nature…

> AI is stochastic, not static and deterministic.

LLMs are deterministic. If you provide the same input to the same GPU, it will produce the same output every time. LLM providers arbitrarily insert a randomised seed into the inference stack so that the input is different every time because that is more useful (and/or because it gives the illusion of dynamic intelligence by not reproducing the same responses verbatim), but it is not an inherent property of the software.

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

#46

Post by throwyawayyyy »

digitaltrees wrote: post #33
throwyawayyyy wrote: post #19

Current LLMs prove that the Turing Test was insufficient all along. But they also prove that intelligence != consciousness. One can, after all, be conscious without a thought in one's head. We certainly have ongoing work in identifying the neural correlates of consciousness in animals, none of which is going to be remotely applicable to machines. We're genuinely blind to the question of whether a sufficiently large n…

Wrong based on what criteria? Or are we just moving the goal post because we are uncomfortable with the idea that neural networks might be conscious? If a single cell organism moves towards light and away from a rock, we say it’s aware. When a roomba vacuum does the same we try to create alternate explanations. Why? Based on the criteria applied to one it’s aware. If there is some other criteria, say we find out the…

I'm mainly saying it's impossible to know, at least without a theory of consciousness that doesn't exist. Do we consider bacteria to be conscious though, is there something like to be a single cell? I can easily believe there is something like to be an insect.

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

#48

Post by throwyawayyyy »

api wrote: post #25
throwyawayyyy wrote: post #19

Current LLMs prove that the Turing Test was insufficient all along. But they also prove that intelligence != consciousness. One can, after all, be conscious without a thought in one's head. We certainly have ongoing work in identifying the neural correlates of consciousness in animals, none of which is going to be remotely applicable to machines. We're genuinely blind to the question of whether a sufficiently large n…

That was one of my thoughts years ago after playing with early ChatGPT and local llama1: this proves that intelligence and consciousness do not necessitate one another and may not even be directly related . I’ve kind of thought this for many years though. A bacterium and a tree are probably conscious. I think it’s a property of life rather than brains. Our brains are conscious because they are alive. They are also in…

I think this gets to the conflation we naturally have with consciousness and a sense of self. Does a tree have a sense of self? I imagine probably not, a tree acts more like a clonal colony than a single organism.

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

#49

Post by tracerbulletx »

We don't even know what the pre-requisites for consciousness are so we have no way of knowing. LLMs have emergent behavior that is reminiscent of language forming brains, but they're also missing a lot of properties that are probably necessary? Mainly continuity over time, more integrated memory, and a better sense of space and time? Brains use the rhythm and timing of neuronal firings, and the length of axons effects computation, they do a lot of different things with signal and patterns, but in any case without knowing what consciousness is I don't know which of those things are required.

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

#50

Post by morpheos137 »

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 how it will work. is it useful. thats it. consciouness is a sophist question with no scientific resolution available and no moral weight until it has consequences.
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