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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?

#441

Post by amanaplanacanal »

mrec wrote: post #438
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those "sex based protections" aren't going to get you what you want though. I really didn't think people have thought this through. Do a Google image search for trans men and take a good look at what you see. Those are all people whose birth certificates say female. Do you think anybody is going to be comfortable with them in the women's rest room?

In the UK, a recent Supreme Court decision has clarified that "sex" in this sort of context refers to biological sex, and is not affected by any shenanigans with birth certificate changes or GRCs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Women_Scotland_Ltd_v_The_S...

Right. These guys are "biologically female" by that ruling. Do you think the people pushing these bathroom bills are going to be comfortable with them in the ladies room? I doubt it.

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

#442

Post by mrec »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #441
mrec wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, a recent Supreme Court decision has clarified that "sex" in this sort of context refers to biological sex, and is not affected by any shenanigans with birth certificate changes or GRCs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Women_Scotland_Ltd_v_The_S...

Right. These guys are "biologically female" by that ruling. Do you think the people pushing these bathroom bills are going to be comfortable with them in the ladies room? I doubt it.

Ah, sorry, I misread your previous comment. And yes, the general gender-critical position is that transmen are welcome in women-only spaces, since they're women.

Though in practice I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually converge on "women only" and "unisex" as some sports have done. The risks posed by self-identification are very much one-way; this isn't a symmetrical situation.

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

#443

Post by Shekelphile »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #440
wetil wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you being prejudiced against hairy women? No reason why they shouldn't be using female facilities.

I would guess both the trans men and the cis women in question are going to be uncomfortable with this. But it's possible I'm out of touch with the zeitgeist in the places where these bathroom bills are being passed. My mental scenario is one of these guys trying to go into the women's restroom they are now legally obligated to use, and a whole bunch of bystanders bringing violence to the table to prevent it.

> My mental scenario is one of these guys trying to go into the women's restroom they are now legally obligated to use, and a whole bunch of bystanders bringing violence to the table to prevent it.

That's the desired outcome for them. They want us to either die or comply.

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

#444

Post by dpark »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #439
dpark wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of evidence for the Sun. Less so Ra.

Seems the scientific evidence has just been proving existence of Ra in a round about way. The idea of Ra being the source of life is actually supported by the scientific evidence. The egyptians only seemed to have mischaracterized the nature of the sun perhaps, but not its effects on the planet or its role in life. Which is interesting.

> Seems the scientific evidence has just been proving existence of Ra in a round about way.

The existence of the sun is pretty well established. The existence of a deity associated with the sun has quite a bit less scientific backing.

> The egyptians only seemed to have mischaracterized the nature of the sun perhaps, but not its effects on the planet or its role in life. Which is interesting.

I find ancient mythology interesting, but it's not surprising that ancient Egyptians knew that the sun gave life. You don't need to understand the mechanism to see that plants need sunlight to thrive and herbivores eat plants for energy and so on.

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

#445

Post by tim333 »

ganymedes wrote: post #229

To those that genuinely consider LLMs could be conscious... Remember that other mammals do not have language and ability to think in language, but they likely do "think" in visual imagery and are able to navigate their landscape, breed, get food and have varying levels of problem solving intelligence that have been studied in labs. Human brain has evolved on top of that, the language is a layer above that supercharge…

Consciousness probably has many aspects - awareness of visual imagery and language being amongst them for humans. Different entities may do different aspects of that like mice would be aware of imagery and body feelings but not really language. Claude is aware of language but not so much the other stuff.

I don't think it's all or nothing. Which aspects people want to see to call it conscious would depend on how they define that word.

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

#446

Post by tim333 »

boxed wrote: post #416
antonvs wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the notion of consciousness they're referring to doesn't meet the normal philosophical criteria, then they're essentially just wrong. Which is quite possible - many people seem very confused on the subject, which is not too surprising, especially for scientists who essentially reject philosophy, like Dawkins.

Philosophy doesn't own words afaik. Words have different meaning in different domains. > many people seem very confused on the subject, which is not too surprising, especially for scientists who essentially reject philosophy, like Dawkins Or they just use words in a different domain and you didn't notice and now you're angry because what they said didn't make sense. Come now, surely philosophy must handle such trivia…

Philosophy isn't even very good at defining words. If you look up 'what is consciousness' in the philosophy section you'll get hundreds of pages of contradictory ideas.

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

#447

Post by mock-possum »

dd8601fn wrote: post #405
mock-possum wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that I have never interacted with an LLM and been struck by uncertainty whether I am communicating with a human. It’s still lamentably trivial to tell whether it’s a chat bot or a real person on the other end. Nothing has passed the Turing test in my book.

At this point they would have to intentionally hobble them to make them pass as human.

Hobble implies worse, I’m not talking about better or worse, I’m talking about different. Uncanny valley, inhuman alien. It does not feel the same as interacting with a living emotional human being.

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

#448

Post by vidarh »

bonoboTP wrote: post #365
vidarh wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I am not certain whether it is the case. There is no need to be certain about that to treat other people the same way, because whether or not I believe they have a subjective experience has zero impact on how they react to stimuli . It does, however, have relevance when we consider whether or not other , non-human, entities can have consciousness: If we can't know what consciousness actually mean with respect t…

If they have no moral weight, then it wouldn't matter how they react to stimuli. They would be instruments to be used for the only conscious being, the solipsistic self. Maybe sometimes they would present powerful obstacles in the way of the ego person, and require some mouth noises and worse in their direction to align them with only moral weight of the universe, the solipsistic ego. A very ugly philosophy.

It matters how they react to stimuli because we do not know, and can not know, whether they have consciousness or not, and so the safer assumption is to treat them as if they do.

But if we accept that we also need to consider that we do not know, and can not know whether other entities are conscious or not either.

We can only tell whether they present as if they are.

And we should consider that when deciding how to treat them.

Furthermore we should be cautious about how high we set the bar.

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

#449

Post by RaftPeople »

lumost wrote: post #326
RaftPeople wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've had a lot of thoughts and conversations Do LLM's have thoughts? When you composed your post, your thought already existed in you head and you chose words that expressed the thought you held in your head. When LLM's choose words, they choose them on the fly and the end result could be concept X or it could be concept Y, it meandered to a destination.

the latent space of the LLM when it chooses each token is 10s or even hundreds of GB for each word that it chooses. It's not really useful to look at LLMs from the perspective of its prediction head which is a very small part of the model.

Late response, was out of town.

Agreed there is significant information in the latent space, but what is missing is a fully resolved "thought" based on that information plus current context plus validation against an internal working model of the world.

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

#450

Post by grantcas »

api wrote: post #18
root_axis wrote: post #15

There are a lot of people vulnerable to AI psychosis. As far as the ostensibly controversial topic of AI being conscious, it can be dismissed out of hand. There is no reason that it should be conscious, it was not designed to be, nor does it need to be in order to explain how it functions with respect to its design. It's also unclear how consciousness would even apply to something like an LLM which is a process, not…

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…

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