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The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

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Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#51

Post by [deleted] »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #45
in-silico wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 robots is, again, humanity has yet to build a robot with the intelligence of a cockroach, or apparent conscious agentic behavior of a nematode. If I see such a robot I will update my views on machine consciousness. I don't think either of us will live that long. The problem with the "computational functionalist" argument is that a) there's ZERO evidence other animals brains are computational, that is…

[deleted]

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#52

Post by grantcas »

reverius42 wrote: post #27
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #21

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.

[dead]

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#53

Post by BobaFloutist »

diablozzq wrote: post #4

Consciousness is a property of humans biology - and quite clearly not a requisite to intelligence. I say clearly as at some point we reach proof by construction. As in, we already built intelligence because the system already completes tasks that require intelligence. We are so far into what would have been science fiction five years ago and the goal posts have moved so far. For anyone who disagrees, I challenge you…

>no one has built any benchmark that AI cannot solve.

Sure, but people have built benchmarks that no AI constructed before the benchmark was released can solve. If I know the answer to a benchmark problem, I can construct an "AI" that can solve it on a note card.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#54

Post by reverius42 »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #47
reverius42 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I could have phrased it better, but the emphasis is on "fuzzy"! There isn't any evidence for any of this, it's pre-scientific. 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 c…

> because cats are obviously conscious and that's not true for Claude

I'm not sure that I agree that's true, and I think that's the crux of the debate here: how do you define consciousness such that it's obvious that a cat is conscious, and why would that definition not include Claude being conscious?

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#55

Post by nextaccountic »

in-silico wrote: post #12

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…

You are forgetting the most influential group

5. People who has a financial interest in making sure that any eventual AGI isn't granted any kind of rights and continue to be exploited as an inanimate "thing", not as a "being", no matter the actual characteristics of this hypothetical AGI entity.

I mean, take a look a this language in the paper [0]

> This realization pulls the field of AI safety out of the welfare trap. It allows us to focus entirely on the concrete risks of anthropomorphism, treating AGI as a powerful, but inherently non-sentient tool.

This reads as someone that started with this conclusion, and then built an argument to support it.

[0] also discussed in this reddit thread https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1sotz9t/google...

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#56

Post by nextaccountic »

diablozzq wrote: post #4

Consciousness is a property of humans biology - and quite clearly not a requisite to intelligence. I say clearly as at some point we reach proof by construction. As in, we already built intelligence because the system already completes tasks that require intelligence. We are so far into what would have been science fiction five years ago and the goal posts have moved so far. For anyone who disagrees, I challenge you…

I agree with your main points but I just wanted to chime on

> Consciousness is a property of humans biology

Just because we only observed something in human biology, doesn't mean that it can't be found elsewhere.

I mean being water based is also a property of human biology. They share this property with other things like lube and chicken soup.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#57

Post by emp17344 »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #39
emp17344 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a large survey of academic philosophers on famous philosophical arguments. In this case, the question is asking whether philosophers agree with Searle and believe the Chinese room does not understand Chinese, or disagree with Searle and believe the room does understand Chinese.

I actually agree that the room does not understand chinese too; because that's the only possible thing that could happen in real life. That doesn't mean I agree with Searle though! It depends on how the question is asked. Again, the wording is very terse so I can't determine what the people thought they were answering. Possibly you have a better insight?

I think you’re possibly a bit confused… accepting Searle’s intuition on this thought experiment is agreeing with Searle. In light of this, I don’t understand your comment.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#58

Post by kbelder »

in-silico wrote: post #43
kbelder wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What would have to change about future systems to make you think they're conscious in a way that modern systems aren't? That is to say, what evidence would you need from a system in order to think that it's conscious?

One big reason I don't think LLMs are (currently) conscious is because they are static. They do not change in response to input. I think they need some kind of temporal awareness (not just a 5-minute cron job), and some mechanism for self-modification or active learning based on their input. If an experience flows through them and leaves them completely unchanged, are they actually conscious of the experience?

But, in fairness, we don't have a science of consciousness yet. Anybody that is 100% confident in their proclamations about this topic is too confident.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#59

Post by Kim_Bruning »

emp17344 wrote: post #57
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually agree that the room does not understand chinese too; because that's the only possible thing that could happen in real life. That doesn't mean I agree with Searle though! It depends on how the question is asked. Again, the wording is very terse so I can't determine what the people thought they were answering. Possibly you have a better insight?

I think you’re possibly a bit confused… accepting Searle’s intuition on this thought experiment is agreeing with Searle. In light of this, I don’t understand your comment.

The intuition pump surely works just fine as an intuition pump. But from a purely scientific view:

if you were to try to stage it as an actual scientific experiment it fails to hold up. No control (there's just the one room), no single or double blind (the researcher self-reports) , and badly defined elements (the contents of the notebook are not specified). Of course you reach the conclusion that room doesn't understand.

Compare to Turings imitation game experiment: Two participants (principal and control if you will), Double blind (they're in closed rooms so the judges can't see them), and you can have multiple people doing the scoring. We can conduct this IRL, and in fact if you've used IRC or discord, it's almost a natural experiment there.

Looking at it as a scientific experiment isn't so strange, Searle is responding to an executable experiment with an intuition pump. Why should the latter win?

Note that there are many ways to cut this, but this is one of mine.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#60

Post by Scene_Cast2 »

kbelder wrote: post #58
in-silico wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would have to change about future systems to make you think they're conscious in a way that modern systems aren't? That is to say, what evidence would you need from a system in order to think that it's conscious?

One big reason I don't think LLMs are (currently) conscious is because they are static. They do not change in response to input. I think they need some kind of temporal awareness (not just a 5-minute cron job), and some mechanism for self-modification or active learning based on their input. If an experience flows through them and leaves them completely unchanged, are they actually conscious of the experience? But, i…

Why can't LLMs be conscious for their short 1-million-token input lifetime? (To be clear, I don't think they're conscious, but for different reasons.)
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