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Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

theatlantic.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#51

Post by dtj1123 »

Edman274 wrote: post #9
kelseyfrog wrote: post #5

Consciousness is a label like fat, smart, man, grumpy, cool. Like money, property, or the idea of a week, it's something that we've loosely agreed to out of convenience, not because it's some intrinsic property of the mind. It's a useful label because it determines how we treat things - that's fine. But insisting on searching for it is like searching for cognitive aether. It's the social equivalent of phlogiston. Lik…

Do you believe in the existence of any noun words which serve as something other than a "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience"?

Metre.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#52

Post by Marsymars »

oidar wrote: post #15

A person can certainly be conscious, but can they also be not-conscious? I think that most of our cognitive time is spent in activities that don't require consciousness and consciousness itself isn't needed for the majority of activities that people do. I would go so far as the a non-trivial part of people's time is spent in a not-conscious state.

That doesn't jive with normal definitions of consciousness. The word we use for "not-conscious" humans is "unconscious".

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#53

Post by speak_plainly »

gobdovan wrote: post #27
speak_plainly wrote: post #19

“Counsciousness” is the ultimate moving goalpost, and historically, it’s been one of humanity’s most effective intellectual weapons. An indefinable black box we intentionally gatekeep to draw an arbitrary line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. I don’t know if AI is conscious or not, and I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious. historically, by claiming a monopoly on it, we’ve successfully manufactured the phi…

> I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious > subjugate other cultures (assuming you mean they're not conscious in other's minds) Have you ever considered you might be a philosophical zombie? [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

I can live with that.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#54

Post by Barrin92 »

throwaway713 wrote: post #22

Suppose one selects an arbitrary hot-button issue [X] with two opposing sides and one side has anything less than overwhelming support. And then that person writes an article titled "Side 1 of issue [X] is true". Not "maybe" or "possibly". Just a straight-up declaration by fiat. Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying? And before you say "persuasive" because you're thinking…

>and one side has anything less than overwhelming support

except that's not the case here. Chiang is explaining and reiterating what is the position that has overwhelming support on the question, and the people he is arguing the opposite side sound like this, which he helpfully quoted in the article

"Amanda Askell (who is credited as a lead author of Claude’s constitution), said, “I want Claude to be very happy—and this is a thing that I want Claude to know more, because I worry about Claude getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff"

When the person you're arguing with sounds like an eight year old girl talking about her toy teddy I think Ted Chiang is if anything being charitable, if you're of a more honest and straight-forward persuasion you might argue these people belong into a mental health clinic not in charge of technological infrastructure

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#56

Post by layer8 »

energy123 wrote: post #25
speak_plainly wrote: post #19

“Counsciousness” is the ultimate moving goalpost, and historically, it’s been one of humanity’s most effective intellectual weapons. An indefinable black box we intentionally gatekeep to draw an arbitrary line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. I don’t know if AI is conscious or not, and I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious. historically, by claiming a monopoly on it, we’ve successfully manufactured the phi…

The only reason I care about animal welfare is because I think they're probably conscious, capable of feeling fear and pain.

While I agree that this is the case for many animals, I would say that consciousness and emotions are two largely orthogonal things. Certainly consciousness is conceivable without emotions, and having emotions without consciousness also seems plausible. You can have fear and distressing pain without a reflective awareness of being a self with those feelings.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#57

Post by moonu »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #49
moonu wrote: post #43

My favorite explanation for what consciousness is one I read in a Thousand Brains, I found it quite elegant. It posited that consciousness is a natural derivation of embodiment + memory + the ability to create reference frames (which the book lays forth as the fundamental basis by which our brains work). Essentially, the idea is that just as we create reference frames to understand the world around us, because of mem…

how would you build memory into the weights? and why is RAG not enough? Our hippocampus is at a bit of a distance from our frontal cortex.

Yeah it's a good question, I've also been thinking about harnesses and all these tacked on things we've done to add persistent memory, what makes that different, I don't know the answer, I guess that still 'feels' different than what we have, but it's hard to articulate how. As for the memory into weights thing, I meant along the lines of the Google TITANS/MIRAS papers that were released I think late last year.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#58

Post by suddenlybananas »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #23
Edman274 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe in the existence of any noun words which serve as something other than a "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience"?

"Car" is a good example of a label that's pretty strictly agreed to. If someone tells me they've developed a new car and then shows me a motorcycle, it's easy to prove that it's not a car, even though many of its engineering principles and functional components are identical to those in cars. With consciousness, on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any motorcycle-equivalent. Essentially everyone I've discussed…

You really don't have much experience in philosophy of language do you? It's notoriously hard to pin down the edges of such terms, even something like car or table.

Is a Reliant Robin a car or a tricycle? If it's a car, why aren't other tricycles? What about a side-car of a motorcycle? What about an APC? What's the distinction between a flying car and a plane?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#60

Post by eberkund »

throwaway713 wrote: post #22

Suppose one selects an arbitrary hot-button issue [X] with two opposing sides and one side has anything less than overwhelming support. And then that person writes an article titled "Side 1 of issue [X] is true". Not "maybe" or "possibly". Just a straight-up declaration by fiat. Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying? And before you say "persuasive" because you're thinking…

It's only declaration by fiat if you stop reading at the end of the title. Should authors add a qualifier like in my opinion to every statement that they make?

The essay structure you're criticizing is exactly how I was taught to write from primary school through to university. You start with a title or hook, introduce the topic and propose a thesis. That is followed up upon with supporting arguments for the primary claim.

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