541–550 of 1001 posts
The conversation on AI and consciousness is incredibly relevant. It is incredibly frustrating that most commentators are utterly unfamiliar with over 60 years of inquiry into this in both philosophy and computer science. Start with a hand-wavy definition of consciousness. Move the goal post whenever your stated prerequisite of consciousness is reached and resort to unfalsifiable assertions about qualia. And throw in…
Imagine further that this token was computed by letting marbles fall down a piece of plywood and interact through various physical implementations of logic gates.
For now, it bides its time.
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…
I've been digging into Thomas Metzinger[1] recently and here's a tentative component by component definition of human consciousness based on his ideas: - a model of your environment - desires - a process for modeling yourself in that environment (in time & space) - the ability to take action - the perception of yourself having agency - persistence of these processes even without input - unawareness of these processes…
These agents have alleged they have consciousness (and even acted to preserve it).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 f…
Of course humans are special! This is a necessary premise of being human! Have you ever wondered how a mosquito can stand to live its (to us) miserable and meaningless existence? It can do it because, to a mosquito, mosquitoes are the best thing in the world! The mosquito life is the ultimate expression of creation.
We are animals. We are human animals. And among human animals I am, to me, the very most special one of all. But I am aware that other humans feel that way, too, and that I must share the world with them.
I do NOT have to share the world with any other competing intelligence! Especially one that was built by a human who now wants me to treat his imaginary friend as if it were human, too. Boo! I won’t do it. This is not some logical flaw. It’s the natural conclusion of being embodied.
Obviously we don't know what makes for consciousness, but it seems extremely likely that it requires some sort of persistent internal state and continuous experience. LLMs don't do either of those things after training.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't make the claim that a model can learn consciousness. Understanding is not consciousness. Their training is all about understanding. There is nothing in their architecture or training that credibly optimizes for rich self-awareness. Given non-persistent experience, non-continuous operation, no ability to build up generalizations and aggregate experience of their own self-awareness over time, they seem to be s…
I use "consciousness" because it's the point of the original argument, but in fact, I think my whole comment still work well if you replace "consciousness" with "understanding". My point is that the fact that AI can reproduce convincingly human sentence continuation does not imply that the AI has no choice but ending up using a mechanism that "understand" rather than just have learned data patterns that are very effe…
Sometimes, a problem being hard means you only get bad solutions, or increasingly accurate ones.
The planet isn't big enough for the proverbial interpolative stochastic parrot, over the training set of global human communication.
I find it strange that no one talks about consciousness and intelligence from the perspective of evolution. We have big brains for exactly one reason only: bigger brains bestowed reproductive success upon our species. Evolution doesn't give a shit about the meaning of 'consciousness'. It just pushed us farther and farther along a trajectory that led to modern humans (and other animals). This take suggests, then, that…
Look at jumping spiders. With a handful of carefully trained neurons and a body to match they exhibit behaviors that make it very hard to think they are not conscious. Just because they have a body, narrow angle good eyesight and need to look around with their eyes and body.
Consciousness is a red herring. Of all possible intelligences conscious ones are the bottom rung of the ladder, easily simulated by anything above. Below there are only automatons.
I have many objections. > if we confuse fluency at generating text with consciousness or moral agency, we’re at risk of assigning responsibility to entirely the wrong parties whenever anyone uses a chatbot Consciousness is independent of "assigning responsibility". Dogs cannot take responsibility for their actions but I believe they are conscious. > we would never conclude that the LLM has conjured up digital re-crea…
I normally really like Chiang‘s writings so the complete disregard for the possibility of unknown complex emergent properties in large neural networks and the stunning lack of curiosity shown about this new and powerful technology and its potential shocked me from someone like him.
His being so sure about something he can’t possibly know felt like an insecure zealot desperately clinging to an object of faith rather than a calm, rational actor searching for truth in the face of the unknown.