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Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion

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Re: Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion

#41

Post by MarkusQ »

oytis wrote: post #38
MarkusQ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good example of my point about reading comprehension. The headline is "When Dawkins met Claude Could this AI be conscious?". That's a question, not a statement. By Betteridge's Law of Headlines, which states that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered "no", this would even justify claiming that he was denying that Claude was conscious. But he isn't making either claim; instead, he's asking th…

They seem to have changed the headline. The one in the archived article the post quotes is "Is AI the next phase of evolution? Claude appears to be conscious". Again, "appears to be" is not exactly the same as "is", but the post in question also quotes his Twitter extensively, and it's clear that Dawkins is acting as if he believed in Claude's consciousness.

Citation needed. All of the direct quotes I've seen have clearly stated that he can not _disprove_ the claim of consciousness, and finds this fact interesting.

Re: Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion

#42

Post by drdaeman »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #22
WarmWash wrote: post #9

To be fair, the evidence that LLM aren't conscious is entirely "because of the feels" evidence. People will very quickly attack you for suggesting consciousness, but when asked to provide a benchmark for testing this, they just laugh, look at you weird, and internally crumple.

Being conscious is by definition you must be aware of your surrounding. A consequence of this and being intelligent is that by the same definition, you have to be able to learn/to change your "belief". A LLM do not have sensory or any kind of active connections. It's also static in its structure; it can not revise its internal model. So how can it be in any way conscious?

That’s not exactly clear as it may seem. At least I can trivially form counterpoints to both of those - not necessarily true but not obviously false.

LLMs “live” in token “space”, and it’s “aware” of all its surroundings in form of input. (Quoted terms for my lack of better words.) It has no other surroundings to be directly (not intellectually) aware of, just like we aren’t immediately aware about the physics around us.

As for the static nature - LLMs are trained and aren’t exactly static, they just get updates at different cadences, and we call those updates different names or, more precisely, versions. Plus LLMs can exist in multiple versions simultaneously - we can’t “fork” a human mind but it’s simple with LLM. Claude Opus (not sure if e.g. Haiku is related or parallel development with distinct origins) is like the proverbial Ship of Theseus in this sense. Either way it’s undeniable it learns and evolves, just very differently from biological systems, and ot all depends on how we decide to call things. Which isn’t exactly surprising, given it’s based on different principles and processes.

Re: Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion

#43

Post by drdaeman »

tim333 wrote: post #40
ramraj07 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no true scientific discussion possible about the nature of consciousness. This is squarely in the realm of philosophy. I personally think its moot to discuss whether LLMs are conscious. If they are, then we have diluted the definition to something that has no relevance to morality or concepts like life and death. Lets just take them for what they are, if we feel like they deserve to be treated with respect t…

I'm not sure it's that beyond science. Some aspects can be a bit woo but there are practical questions like what anesthetics render you unconscious for surgery and how that interacts with the brain parts involved.

The way I see it, it’s purely a terminology/nomenclature problem. Consciousness is whatever speaker decides to call so. When listener has a different notion, communication hits a barrier. Language works only because most have somewhat overall similar perceptions on semantics, and it’s easy for everyday stuff (and even then people can easily miscommunicate e.g. colors). Not that many think about nature of consciousness in any fine detail, so for most folks it’s just… a hand-wavy something humans have related to thinking and awareness.

And overhauling the language to match scientific understanding requires getting everyone onboard with that scientific understanding. Good luck with that, given that we have plenty of people who believe in weirdest nonsense.

Brain is not the only thing that makes us conscious, the whole human is a super-weird collection of highly intertwined systems that work together and produce whatever we call “human.” As I get it, it’s a huge complexity all the way down to that gut bacteria that somehow affects our thinking too. And I don’t think we have a vocabulary for all that - we mostly think of “self” as a single entity.

Re: Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion

#44

Post by Obscurity4340 »

MarkusQ wrote: post #37
oytis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its in the headline. Also he talks about the persona he assigned to his chat like "she" was conscious (e.g. "she was pleased")

That's a good example of my point about reading comprehension. The headline is "When Dawkins met Claude Could this AI be conscious?". That's a question, not a statement. By Betteridge's Law of Headlines, which states that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered "no", this would even justify claiming that he was denying that Claude was conscious. But he isn't making either claim; instead, he's asking th…

What gurantees Betterridge? What is the universal basis upon which no can safely be assumed in such formulations?

Re: Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion

#45

Post by tim333 »

drdaeman wrote: post #43
tim333 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's that beyond science. Some aspects can be a bit woo but there are practical questions like what anesthetics render you unconscious for surgery and how that interacts with the brain parts involved.

The way I see it, it’s purely a terminology/nomenclature problem. Consciousness is whatever speaker decides to call so. When listener has a different notion, communication hits a barrier. Language works only because most have somewhat overall similar perceptions on semantics, and it’s easy for everyday stuff (and even then people can easily miscommunicate e.g. colors). Not that many think about nature of consciousnes…

A way around the nomenclature problems is to try and look at experiments instead. For example Turing seeming frustrated by similar discussions on will machines be able to think that turned on how people defined 'think' and instead proposed his experiment where you can see if people can tell the computer and a human apart by asking questions by text.

I'm not quite sure how you'd apply that to consciousness vs thinking say.

Re: Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion

#47

Post by jijijijij »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #19
jijijijij wrote: post #4

"The selfish gene" is one of the most influential books I read. I wish Dawkins would have stuck with biology instead of becoming this insufferable edgelord of the dark enlitenment. He's a great science educator, but failed human.

Agree. "The Selfish Gene" finally made me understand how evolution actually works. I wish more people would read and understand that book. I also enjoyed some of his works on atheism. It might not be the deepest work on the topic, but I enjoyed reading "The Blind Watchmaker." What he has done in the past decade or so, on the other hand, is deeply disappointing.

I think, Dawkins' "selfish gene" thesis didn't hold up to evidence ultimately, that is higher order selection targets do seem to matter after all, but the book is still excellent at teaching "thinking evolution", which goes beyond its application in biology. In particular his hypothetical speculations about molecular evolution stuck with me. And the statistical limit of gene complexity/length due to chromosomal crossover. I always had a good, intuitive understanding of biological evolution, but the book's expansion of domain made this concept truly mind opening for me. It's everywhere, it's the most fucking important thing to get a grasp of to understand the world!

I also do enjoy his overly thorough, slightly arrogant way of making an argument. And him talking in general, so the audiobook version read by himself is awesome, too. Dawkins could have been there with Jane Goodall, or Carl Sagan. But he chose his legacy being just another blue checkmarked divisive idiot.

Never meet your heroes... and get a library card and VPN, just in case.

Re: Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion

#48

Post by MarkusQ »

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #44
MarkusQ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good example of my point about reading comprehension. The headline is "When Dawkins met Claude Could this AI be conscious?". That's a question, not a statement. By Betteridge's Law of Headlines, which states that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered "no", this would even justify claiming that he was denying that Claude was conscious. But he isn't making either claim; instead, he's asking th…

What gurantees Betterridge? What is the universal basis upon which no can safely be assumed in such formulations?

Obviously, there is none. The point is, assuming the answer to be "yes" isn't a slam-dunk, and (in general) may not even be a good bet.

(The mechanical reason for Betteridge being true more often than not is that if a journalist want to make a claim but can't (because the facts don't support it) they frequently phrase it as a question. If the thing they want to imply were true, they'd just say it.)

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