41–50 of 79 posts
> Claude is akin to a counterfeit person. Dawkins should never have glorified such a thing. I find this sentence to diminish the author's argument. I'm not going to claim an LLM is or is not conscious, but there's a shaky ground here where you either say "consciousness is a product of the kind of biology that humans have" and dismiss the lack of lived experience or internal states as mimicry (as the author does) OR y…
I start from the assumption that I am a philosophical zombie, and that makes all this argument pretty irrelevant. More realistically, I'm in the camp that if we keep developing machine learning in the right directions, we may actually end up with something that generates emergent consciousness, or something indistinguishable from it, and the difference is not really that important to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think so, personally. I wouldn't bank a lot on "the soul" per se, but Dawkins is absolutely one of those "smart but not wise" people. I imagine people don't dig it because it can be woo and vibey, but the older I get the more I understand the value of the "imprecise" metaphysical/religious/etc whatever you want to call it. Someone in this space who handles this very well , unlike Dawkins, is Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Wise man Nassim Taleb who voted for Trump to help Palestinians and now Gaza and 10% increasing of the country he was born in is rubble. Maybe the lesson is that all those public intellectuals are not that wise and we should follow people more that stay in their lane.
> Claude is akin to a counterfeit person. Dawkins should never have glorified such a thing. I find this sentence to diminish the author's argument. I'm not going to claim an LLM is or is not conscious, but there's a shaky ground here where you either say "consciousness is a product of the kind of biology that humans have" and dismiss the lack of lived experience or internal states as mimicry (as the author does) OR y…
I think everyone should avoid talking about consciousness unless someone in the conversation provides a clear definition of it. If no one provides a definition, we can replace the word “consciousness” with the word “spirit”, and basically nothing about the conversation would change. Without a definition, every conversation about AI consciousness devolves into one camp saying that humans are special and consciousness…
FWIW as someone in the "first camp" my real claim is that many animals are meaningfully conscious, including all birds and mammals, and no claims of LLM consciousness are even bothering to reconcile with this. It is extremely frustrating that there are essentially two ideas of consciousness floating around:
- the scientifically interesting one: a vague collection of cognitive abilities and behaviors found in all vertebrates, especially refined in birds and mammals
- the sociologically interesting one: saying "cogito ergo sum" in a self-important tone
Claude has the second type in spades, no doubt. The first is totally absent. And I have a good dismissal of the second type of consciousness: it appears to be totally absent in all conscious animals except humans. So it is irrational and unscientific to take this behavior as a sign of consciousness in Claude, when Claude is missing all the other signs of consciousness that humans actually do have in common with other animals.
Sometimes I seriously wonder if people at Anthropic consider dogs to be conscious. Or even Neanderthals.
> Claude is akin to a counterfeit person. Dawkins should never have glorified such a thing. I find this sentence to diminish the author's argument. I'm not going to claim an LLM is or is not conscious, but there's a shaky ground here where you either say "consciousness is a product of the kind of biology that humans have" and dismiss the lack of lived experience or internal states as mimicry (as the author does) OR y…
An LLM cannot be conscious. A submarine cannot swim.
> Claude is akin to a counterfeit person. Dawkins should never have glorified such a thing. I find this sentence to diminish the author's argument. I'm not going to claim an LLM is or is not conscious, but there's a shaky ground here where you either say "consciousness is a product of the kind of biology that humans have" and dismiss the lack of lived experience or internal states as mimicry (as the author does) OR y…
>I think it's important that when you talk about consciousness, you pin down exactly what that means. We don't need that. It's way simpler. When we mass manufacture products we implicitly expect they all behave the same (more or less). That seems valid for humans as well. Raise one, or atomically assemble one (we imply that's possible for the sake of the argument) it will behave like one, and posses what we all assum…
This is exactly the crux of my comment. Which principles? Which human brain? If I lobotomize a human, and they lose some cognitive ability, are they still conscious? If I give someone drugs that inhibit their ability to feel emotion, are they still conscious? If yes, then surely those things are out of scope for what "consciousness" means.
Again, if you want to use abstractions like this, you need to define what they are.
Not particularly a Dawkins fan but I dont think OP really understands the philosophical point Dawkins is making. OP complains that Dawkins hasnt considered how LLMs work and how its obvious they're nothing like brains. You can’t just look at the outputs, without investigating the underlying mechanisms, and conclude that two entities with similar outputs reach those similar outputs by similar means. ... But its a long…
The broader point Marcus is making is that ignoring arguments based on causality and plausibility goes against decades of Dawkins's philosophical atheism. Why not believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Reality is consistent with its existence. It is extremely implausible that Claude is the only conscious entity on Earth which does not have desires or motivations or any understanding of its own reality. It only does…
Dawkins-style atheism is not “reject anything without a complete causal model.” It is a rejection of hypotheses with no explanatory gain, no empirical constraint, and unlimited ad hoc flexibility — like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Consciousness is different. It is first a phenomenon, not an already-settled causal model. We do not believe humans, infants, or animals are conscious because we possess a complete mechanism for subjective experience. We infer consciousness from a cluster of phenomena that need explanation.
So the lack of a full causal account warrants caution, not denial. It is reasonable to say current AI gives weak evidence for consciousness. But that is not the same as saying AI consciousness is equivalent to believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Entirely unsurprising. At the risk of whatever, your extreme atheists aren't much different from your extreme believers; they both have strong beliefs about things they can't prove, and for some reason want to go off on them. Even people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson don't go on and on about "atheism" for a reason; there are a whole lot of things that we all go around everyday "not believing."
> your extreme atheists aren't much different from your extreme believers; they both have strong beliefs about things they can't prove, and for some reason want to go off on them. You have a mistaken understanding of what atheism is. It is not a belief in anything, but an absence of belief in a deity. > there are a whole lot of things that we all go around everyday "not believing." Sure, and yet theism is part of 75%…
I consider that to also be a wrongly held position, because you'd need proof either way. So atheists are just making a bet. I think agnostic is the most valid position as far as I am concerned, lacking proof of one or the other. I do not know. We can get into technicalities as well. What exactly do we mean by God? What if some religious God does exist but it's wrongly interpreted by believers? What if there's some highly technologically advanced entity that meets the criteria as far as the more primitive religious perspective is concerned? Do we have proof such thing exists? Do we have proof such entity cannot exist in our universe? I find both perspectives shortsighted.
Having certainty something that can be perceived as God by believers cannot exist in our universe is in the end a belief, with no proof.
Not particularly a Dawkins fan but I dont think OP really understands the philosophical point Dawkins is making. OP complains that Dawkins hasnt considered how LLMs work and how its obvious they're nothing like brains. You can’t just look at the outputs, without investigating the underlying mechanisms, and conclude that two entities with similar outputs reach those similar outputs by similar means. ... But its a long…
Yet that cannot compel reality. How we define something is the measure of chance we get it right.
>Now thats its been achieved, what is the rationale for moving the goalposts?
Absolutely, if we understand it's not good enough. First of all we cannot know something is or isn't conscious. You cannot prove I am, and I cannot prove you are. We simply assume, but the scientific argument would be that we both work on the same principles, have similar brains, signals do something. If we alter those signals in certain ways we both manifest in similar ways, and it's expected to some degree since the brains work in similar ways.
So based on this it's somewhat comfortable making the jump in assuming other humans but you have what you have, as consciousness. But that doesn't mean you can gauge consciousness in something that is not coming from a human brain.
Funnily enough, if we knew how, we'd be able to make an AI that would do it better than us, an AI that would gauge consciousness in other things, better than a human could. No argument so far why a conscious individual is required to "see" consciousness in other things.
So the closest to certainty we could ever have is on something that is working like a human brain, with delays and timings and all. And considering the amount of activity, the type of activity, and the von Neumann memory bottleneck in our current computing hardware, I seriously doubt there's anything like mammalian consciousness in GPUs.
You can argue about "consciousness" in GPUs as much as you can argue about consciousness in a rock. It could be, some kind, but who knows? Way too abstract to call it out, in a scientific sense.
What I am trying to say is that we can only agree something is conscious, and only if it's working on the same principles a human brain does, closely. It's an agreement, not proof, not definitions. We collectively start accepting it, without KNOWING. And the safest way to do that is on something which is working exactly like a human brain. Anything else we can only lose certainty.
We can collectively decide tomorrow that rocks are conscious, but that means nothing. But the certainty we'd have would be so so way lower than that of any other human being conscious like us.
And the whole confusion will compound when again, unknowingly, people will start advocating to never turn LLMs off because that's the equivalent of "killing" them each time, which I think will be peak nonsense.
Now a question for you: Let's suppose someone is born, and has zero sensory input all of their lives. They live in a hospital bed for 20 years. Zero information input, of any kind. What is going on in there? Is there someone home? Are they having a conscious experience? How do you know if yes or no? How can we divorce consciousness from experience (data flow)?
> Claude is akin to a counterfeit person. Dawkins should never have glorified such a thing. I find this sentence to diminish the author's argument. I'm not going to claim an LLM is or is not conscious, but there's a shaky ground here where you either say "consciousness is a product of the kind of biology that humans have" and dismiss the lack of lived experience or internal states as mimicry (as the author does) OR y…
I think everyone should avoid talking about consciousness unless someone in the conversation provides a clear definition of it. If no one provides a definition, we can replace the word “consciousness” with the word “spirit”, and basically nothing about the conversation would change. Without a definition, every conversation about AI consciousness devolves into one camp saying that humans are special and consciousness…