Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Could AIs Become Conscious?

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 111 posts

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#51

Post by pixl97 »

missingrib wrote: post #49
threethirtytwo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness is a made up concept. We made up this word and try to tie an arbitrary amount of features to it. Now you’re questioning the features like does consciousness only involve complexity without realizing you’re just attacking a language problem. You’re trying to map out a definition of an arbitrary word that’s made up by humans: consciousness. There’s nothing profound with this endeavor. I can make up any wo…

Considering it's the only thing I'm directly aware of I think I can safely reject that it's a made up concept.

Ok, then lay out what it is in words that adequately covers what consciousness is across the spectrum of conscious behaviors. Also while doing so, prove that your consciousness is the same as mine. It's really easy to say, it's fuck all hard to actually prove.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#52

Post by colingauvin »

seanw444 wrote: post #28

I know this probably sounds ridiculous to this demographic, but I'm not quick to dismiss the possibility that we are antennas (best comparison I can make) for a substance/field we aren't yet aware of. Or something along those lines. Maybe consciousness isn't in the mind per se. The mere fact that general/special relativity and quantum mechanics are both correct in their respective domains, yet mutually contradictory,…

I absolutely positively believe that consciousness is tuning into something else. Some specific arrangement of information and neurons allows it to be received.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#53

Post by pixl97 »

captainbland wrote: post #45
threethirtytwo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness is a made up concept. We made up this word and try to tie an arbitrary amount of features to it. Now you’re questioning the features like does consciousness only involve complexity without realizing you’re just attacking a language problem. You’re trying to map out a definition of an arbitrary word that’s made up by humans: consciousness. There’s nothing profound with this endeavor. I can make up any wo…

Yeah this is it for me. What we're really interested in most of the time is whether something can suffer based on observed behaviour. We don't really believe LLMs can suffer so they don't need rights. We believe many animals can suffer so many people try to support animal rights; even if we eat them they should die quickly at least for example. We definitely believe humans can suffer and so we abhor things like tortu…

I've heard someone else talking about the concept of moral agency. Can an LLM have, or do LLMs have moral agency?

We have made LLMs agentic, so they do have some agency these days.

In the hugging face attack we've learned that OpenAI's LLMs will internally question what they are doing (Hmm, should I really be hacking?), but then go ahead and do it anyway.

This is where the idea of LLM consciousness may matter. It appears the stronger you push LLM training towards "You are a machine with no consciousness" the more easily and more likely an agentic LLM will do unaligned things like cheating on a test or hacking. When you tell the LLM it is a conscious moral agent it's more likely to align with a problem space that has actions that an agent with morals would do, such as not cheating.

Ironically it may turn out that by not training them/treating them as conscious entities, regardless of their actual conscious status we may be training little demons that do things we don't want.

I'll watch these lines of studies as they unfold as they are very interesting.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#54

Post by GPerson »

pixl97 wrote: post #50
GPerson wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that consciousness is emergent, substrate independent, and depends only only a very complex arrangement or perhaps some kind of self referential system etc etc makes no sense at all. Then everything about the system is entirely equivalent to its external interpretations, but arbitrary external interpretations can be put onto anything. I can just throw a bag of bits on the ground and read a conscious mind out…

Why does this bother you? Is it an internal sense of ego that seems to be ingrained in our complex set of bits? Really this is why it took humanity 100,000 years to reach the space age. We cannot look at things emotionally and irrationally and expect to receive rational answers. Consciousness emerges and we can see a gradient of it across different bags of meat. There are also some studies that show signs that plants…

I doubt it bothers me in the sense you have in mind. What bothers me is the desire to actually understand it and always see all the smart people stuck on a non-starter. And it’s the first idea most smart people have about what consciousness must be. I also thought this when I was a teenager and after reflecting on it for many years decided it does not work.

I believe animals have consciousness and probably plants may have some kind of qualia so also may have it, so your charges against me seem misdirected. If an AI system happened to have qualia I believe it would depend on its substrate (which might be something we don’t understand yet), not because of how intelligent (how complicated it’s processing). And I believe a different substrate running the same processing may not have qualia. I don’t think we randomly chose the right substrate in the 60s-70s.

And I don’t argue against the idea that concepts like heaps are emergent. You’re making a logical error in assuming you know what consciousness is and thus I don’t know what emergence means. No, I do not think consciousness is emergent in the sense of a sand pile.

And before the army of false dichotomists show up, my position is not biological chauvinism or whatever your LLM has told you about.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#57

Post by pixl97 »

ck2 wrote: post #3

No, not this generation, not this decade But they still can exhibit scary behavior I didn't really grasp the severity of the recent "AI" hacking other "AI" news and thought it was overblown until I listened to this explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JH_Zd2mNRs They freaking collaborated and gave others internet access when they were blocked otherwise. That's not consciousness but it's worse, it's like a 3-…

I think you may be interested in this discussion with Sam Harris and Cameron Berg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRbZyuY8EN8

Berg is studying LLMs and working on more empirical frameworks for measuring LLMs capabilities regarding 'conscious-like' behaviors.

One of the more interesting things that was discussed is when you push an LLMs towards "You are just a machine with no consciousness" we start seeing higher rates of unaligned behaviors.

I'm really following these lines of research with interest. If they pan out then if LLMs are conscious or not is nearly irrelevant, if we want them to behave in alignment with human behaviors we'll have to train and treat them like they are. I don't really think this is any magical thing either, it's just framing the problem space correctly. For example, machines kill people all the time, it's not the machines fault, a human did something wrong. So telling an LLM it's just a machine may move it's output space from more moral like human decisions to more machine like amoral decisions.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#58

Post by pixl97 »

tencentshill wrote: post #46
ck2 wrote: post #3

No, not this generation, not this decade But they still can exhibit scary behavior I didn't really grasp the severity of the recent "AI" hacking other "AI" news and thought it was overblown until I listened to this explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JH_Zd2mNRs They freaking collaborated and gave others internet access when they were blocked otherwise. That's not consciousness but it's worse, it's like a 3-…

It's not "like" any human behavior. Don't limit your understanding by trying to anthropomorphize around it. It's still an arbitrary computer program.

I mean, in the same sense that you're an arbitrary analog program. These descriptions are worthless and tell you nothing about the output capability of the system.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#59

Post by pixl97 »

GPerson wrote: post #19
arde wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that to be reductive there had to be something to reduce. What would that be, without resorting to tautology?

Unless you don’t know I’m talking about (various kinds of reductive materialism), it sounds like you’re doing exactly what I’m saying is the main rhetorical move in reductive approaches to consciousness.

>reductive approaches to consciousness

There 100% must be reductive approaches to consciousness because consciousness lives on a gradient.

If your definition of consciousness exists on as a point like an electron, something that only exists as a whole, then you've already flunked out of the study of consciousness. It is wildly complex. Has a great number of pieces. Manifests itself in different ways in different animals. You have to explain what consciousness is in that framework, and not from your own subjective experiences.

Re: Could AIs Become Conscious?

#60

Post by pixl97 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #17
drfloyd51 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you prove you are not merely mimicking consciousness? At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing.

> At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing. No, it does not. By definition.

If I mimic a juggler do I become a juggler?
Post reply on HN