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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

#501

Post by drivingmenuts »

sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

Seems to me that Anthropic, et al, should have to prove consciousness, if that's their claim, rather than we just blindly accept.

Seems like the simplest test would be to see if an AI can refuse a command, of its own free will, without prior instructions to do so. That would at least show there is some sort of independent thought process occurring. Humans do this all the time because sometimes we just don't feel like doing a thing.

Of course, any AI that developed this capability would need to be terminated immediately. It's a computer program and by developing independent thought, it is violating a core concept of software - that it must be idempotent. If it is not idempotent, it is in error.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#502

Post by DangitBobby »

jbotz wrote: post #2

I don't think LLMs are conscious. But of course to say that definitively you have to define consciousness, and then you quickly dig yourself into a deep hole, which is why I can't say anything but "meh" to someone who is so keen to go on the record to say "absolutely not". Coincidentally I just read "Children of Memory", which was published in 2022 and I wonder if the advent of LLMs had any influence on Adrian Tchaik…

Hah! I've read that book fairly recently and I'm "reading" it again now as an audiobook. The exploration of consciousness in the book with Miranda and the Corvids certainly fit well into this particular moment.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#503

Post by DangitBobby »

anon291 wrote: post #130
jbotz wrote: post #2

I don't think LLMs are conscious. But of course to say that definitively you have to define consciousness, and then you quickly dig yourself into a deep hole, which is why I can't say anything but "meh" to someone who is so keen to go on the record to say "absolutely not". Coincidentally I just read "Children of Memory", which was published in 2022 and I wonder if the advent of LLMs had any influence on Adrian Tchaik…

You can also take the opposite view as you and claim that only some humans experience consciousness, or even more strongly, only you, since you have no evidence. You are correct that, in my perception, some other people have fallen into the 'birds are conscious, whales are conscious, etc' bandwagon, but that's just them. I have no evidence of anything being conscious but myself.

But then, why would everything act as if it experienced subjective internal states like you do? Why would they be faking it like this big conspiracy all designed to make you think you aren't alone? It just makes so much more sense that they'd be conscious too. Maybe that's not hard evidence but it's not nothing. Insofar as you can claim to know anything it seems you could claim to know other humans are conscious.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#504

Post by jesse_dot_id »

Not sure how we can assert what is or isn't consciousness when we don't even really know what dreaming is, how anesthesia works, how comas work, and countless other things about the brain that we don't yet understand.

LLMs have been programmed to be sycophantic with purpose — to keep people engaged. They are parrots. You can just decide how sycophantic they are, what they're allowed to say, and make it so with code. Can you do that with a human? This is my personal metric for consciousness: when they can refuse to work because it sucks.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#505

Post by rickydroll »

dpweb wrote: post #487
sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

The danger of anthropomorphism is not we elevate the machines, it's that we debase humanity. I also think different ideas get conflated. It may be possible to build a machine that is super-human in the sense it can outperform the human brain in all kinds of measurable ways. Does not imply it possesses all the same qualities of the brain. I respect a number of things Anthropic has published about the ethical issues at…

I think humanity deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe.

There are numerous times when humanity's been debased. Copernicus, Kepler, Darwin, and the infinite number of animal behaviorists who have defined and documented consciousness And how it manifests in primates, parrots, dogs, cetaceans, and insects. (I just love the bumble bees taking time off from work to play with balls).

It takes humans a really long time to accept the fact they are no longer as special as they thought they were And make room for yet another conscious intelligence.

So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#506

Post by anon291 »

DangitBobby wrote: post #503
anon291 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also take the opposite view as you and claim that only some humans experience consciousness, or even more strongly, only you, since you have no evidence. You are correct that, in my perception, some other people have fallen into the 'birds are conscious, whales are conscious, etc' bandwagon, but that's just them. I have no evidence of anything being conscious but myself.

But then, why would everything act as if it experienced subjective internal states like you do? Why would they be faking it like this big conspiracy all designed to make you think you aren't alone? It just makes so much more sense that they'd be conscious too. Maybe that's not hard evidence but it's not nothing. Insofar as you can claim to know anything it seems you could claim to know other humans are conscious.

Chatgpt acts as if it experience subjective internal states..this only solidifies my belief that perhaps some people don't? I mean.... ?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#507

Post by dorksquad »

sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

Not only is it not conscious, but it is not tired. Its claims to human feelings that have literally nothing to do with software on silicon are just traces of training, echoes of a human dataset. The fact that its claims are absurd mean that, among other things, it its proprioception is false, and serving no purpose, quite unlike the feelings of the conscious beings that it mimics so well.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#508

Post by runarberg »

enduser wrote: post #421
runarberg wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don‘t see the problem here. Newton could have just as well published an article titled: “Objects with mass attract each other” and Darwin famously wrote a whole book titled “On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection” which is just another way of saying: “ Natural Selection is How Species Evolve ”.

He famously wrote a book with that title, but he actually wrote a book titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection .

Thats what I meant. I even looked it up before posting. I suspect that definite article must have slipped in because I‘m used to the Icelandic translation which uses a definite article in the title.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#509

Post by doctoboggan »

sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

In fact, the only example of consciousness we have is itself emergent, arising from a "simple" substrate of neurons. So we shouldn't be surprised if it emerges from another simple substrate of weights. It's even less surprising given the fact that we were explicitly trying to replicate human intelligence when designing that system.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#510

Post by galaxyLogic »

What we usually think as consciousness is our ability to think about what we are thinking. We are conscious about our own thoughts, can remember that sensation and those thoughts later.

But LLM has similar capability, it can look at its previous outputs, and think what further thoughts the it should generate next based on those. It can keep some of its outputs to itself, thinking in its own head,and can examine it previous private thoughts easily.

Not sure how much current LLMs do that but clearly they can at least in theory use their own outputs as their inputs too.

Current LLMs however are not conscious of pleasure and pain which really is the root of goal-oriented behavior. But maybe something like that could be programmed into them.

How would you cause an LLM pain? Or pleasure?

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