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If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
51–60 of 119 posts
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most sci-fi is about genuinely sentient AI, and we are far from that. There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation. If you know anything about machine learning, you know that the idea that LLMs have any form of consciousness is ridiculous. Humans just like to anthropomorphise, that is all.
This is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but everybody is 100% sure that LLMs don't "have any form" of it. Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identi…
If it drives you up a wall maybe you can look intoning there are any arguments for the positing driving you up there.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#53Reminds me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/505/ Replace universe simulation with a LLM an it’s hard to consider a bunch of rocks shuffling on a beach as conscious. Or alternatively, our own minds are simply (squishy, organic) rocks on a beach, which is quite humbling if you think about it long enough.
Indeed a classic (upvoted!), but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists. Nor do we know whether it's possible to simulate "just" neurons and get meaningful results on some higher level. People have been trying at that for decades, so far without success. (nice overvie…
Thank you for the link to the post. It was a fascinating read and also entertaining.
After seeing the story of the fruit fly brain simulation I figured stuff like the nematode would be trivial.
The lack of active plasticity in LLMs causes a lot of frustration imo. Having agents make the same mistakes over and over and not be able to correct course without prompt engineering is the biggest symptom.
Obviously a static mind is more helpful from a performance perspective, especially if you consider model deployments into gateware.
Maybe this will be an inherent limitation to LLMs that won’t be solvable without a new approach.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#54I'm so bored with the "are machines conscious" debate. The only thing it has proven is how desperately humans will continue to move the goalposts to the point of ontological collapse in order to preserve their internal sense of primacy. You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where…
I fully agree with this. I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed. This used to be a thing of science fiction, that people dreamed, fantasized about. Now they are everywhere, people rely on them for the most mundane of tasks, and the only debates happening about them are - is their water use efficient enough? Is this CEO likable enough? There seems to be no sense of wonder. Do androids drea…
> I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed.
I had an eye surgery last year. The first day after was magical, I felt like I was on acid because the entire world felt different.
I went for a checkup one week later and told the doctor the vision has gone down since. They checked and it was objectively the same as on the first day. They told me: "People get used to good vision very fast".
I think it's just human nature.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#55"we cannot be certain that the subjective experience which they [digital minds] may be having is like what we imagine it to be like"
It is even more interesting: we cannot be certain that other people have the subjective experience like we imagine it to be like. It seems to me that the rest of author's arguments implicitly assume that we can be certain about other people's subjective experiences, but if you take this assumption away the arguments can't explain why digital consciousness hypothesis is any different from the hypothesis that the Universe contains at least one person besides me.
I mean I see no point in proving that LLM is not conscious if your methods do not enable us to prove that there are at least two people who is conscious.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#56Thinking LLMs are conscious is as ridiculous as thinking a thermostat wants the room to be warm
Why though? There are only two reasonable reasons I can think of: 1. Scale. There's clearly a scale of consciousness (a jellyfish isn't very conscious but an ape is). Current LLMs are so small (on the scale of brains) that they must be not very conscious at all. 2. Structure. There might be some fundamental structure of computation that is required for consciousness that LLMs don't have yet. For example the ability t…
No matter how large the llm hardware is it won’t be made of brain meat. The stuff we actually know is conscious.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#57A very interesting, dense article that will require multiple reads. My only immediate comment is that it talks about qualia being "experienced" without defining what the nature of that experience is. And it kind of assumes that qualia have an ultimate physical manifestation - rather than being merely a rhetorical device. Also, this site would really benefit from an rss/atom feed.
myth of the given strikes again
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fully agree with this. I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed. This used to be a thing of science fiction, that people dreamed, fantasized about. Now they are everywhere, people rely on them for the most mundane of tasks, and the only debates happening about them are - is their water use efficient enough? Is this CEO likable enough? There seems to be no sense of wonder. Do androids drea…
Most sci-fi is about genuinely sentient AI, and we are far from that. There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation. If you know anything about machine learning, you know that the idea that LLMs have any form of consciousness is ridiculous. Humans just like to anthropomorphise, that is all.
> There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation.
I don't think that the way we frame the question about consciousness makes it easy to resolve.
But I do want to point out that humans are very diverse. There're many functional adults lacking any internal motivation besides getting food, sleep, and some kind of entertainment. There're millions of people who just act on external stimuli.
So the gap between the "least conscious" human and the "most conscious" machine might be more narrow than we expect.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most sci-fi is about genuinely sentient AI, and we are far from that. There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation. If you know anything about machine learning, you know that the idea that LLMs have any form of consciousness is ridiculous. Humans just like to anthropomorphise, that is all.
This is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but everybody is 100% sure that LLMs don't "have any form" of it. Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identi…
I like your argument.
It is said that absent any input these thinking machines we are inert, quiescent. That they have no intrinsic motivation of their own.
Whereas we, along with at least some other mammals but especially humans, seem to be infinitely inquisitive about the world.
But our minds don’t exist in a substrate of hyper sterile rigid silicon form.
What if some of the differences between us and our silicon based machines are merely embodiment (senses both internally and externally oriented, limbs and locomotion, etc) plus the noise of biochemistry?
Would be very interesting to be a fly on the wall in the labs these experiments are, presumably, taking place.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#60I think there are a lot of serious problems with this article but don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, as such. I do think robots and whatnot might be conscious some day. (I am a bit outraged that LLMs, despite totally lacking free will, seem to gain moral patienthood based on their fluency with ethical philosophy. It's childish and misanthropic.)
However, the real issue, as always completely unaddressed, isn't attempting to make a gague-invariant theory of qualia, or even defining what "qualia" is (I am totally unconvinced it is an EM field, there must be an epigenetic component). The first step is defining what "consciousness" is! Is it awareness of qualia or awareness of reality? These are not the same thing. It seems significant that any animal I would call a little conscious, even ants, are capable of being startled or curious when their sensations mismatch or incompletely describe reality (and animals that lack any sense of curiosity are at most borderline conscious). Curiosity and surprise[1] seems hard to convey in an EM field. Qualia strikes me as a somewhat technical problem of neuroscience, and the "hard problem of consciousness" is unscientific BS. The simplest basics aren't understood, which leads to totally unhinged statements like "in some ways a thermostat is conscious" because in some ways it seems to fit the hard problem. But statements like that are ideologically motivated by a sort of tech futurism: rationally, we should be deeply skeptical of an account of consciousness which insists that clocks perceive the flow of time.
[1] There's an information-theoretic version of surprise which intuitively describes "surprising" data. A sudden bright light has high surprise and is certainly surprising. A sudden realization that the vine you're leaning on is a large snake might involve very low information-theoretic surprise... and is far more alarming. So how do you systematically quantify this second form of surprise?