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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

#591

Post by jonners00 »

haktan wrote: post #586

I don't understand the most of the responses here. What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious? Even if AI with current computer architecture gets much more intelligent than humans, it will still have the same amount of consciousness. Its still bunch of instructions. If we got a lot of people together and did all the instructions by hand to get an LLM result would we also create t…

> Its still a bunch of instructions.

No, it's not a bunch of instructions, it's a colossal array of vectors that are the outcome of many thousands of lifetimes' worth of stimuli and reinforcement - not dissimilar in (very) abstract terms to the neurons in our brains.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#592

Post by plmpsu »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #587
haktan wrote: post #586

I don't understand the most of the responses here. What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious? Even if AI with current computer architecture gets much more intelligent than humans, it will still have the same amount of consciousness. Its still bunch of instructions. If we got a lot of people together and did all the instructions by hand to get an LLM result would we also create t…

> Its still bunch of instructions. So is your brain. That's the problem with this argument.

Maybe OP is a dualist.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#593

Post by manbitesdog »

haktan wrote: post #586

I don't understand the most of the responses here. What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious? Even if AI with current computer architecture gets much more intelligent than humans, it will still have the same amount of consciousness. Its still bunch of instructions. If we got a lot of people together and did all the instructions by hand to get an LLM result would we also create t…

Quoting the famous Science paper More Is Different [1]:

Knowing the laws of physics doesn't tell you how a brain, economy, or society works - because at every level of scale, genuinely new phenomena emerge that require their own science.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.177.4047.393

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#594

Post by meroes »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #587
haktan wrote: post #586

I don't understand the most of the responses here. What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious? Even if AI with current computer architecture gets much more intelligent than humans, it will still have the same amount of consciousness. Its still bunch of instructions. If we got a lot of people together and did all the instructions by hand to get an LLM result would we also create t…

> Its still bunch of instructions. So is your brain. That's the problem with this argument.

Well if you go that route, a computer simulating digestion has almost no physical features in common with actual digestion of a stomach. The same holds for consciousness and brains and computers. Them saying it’s just instructions is shorthand for pointing out the physical differences of brains and computers.

It’s all just particles, but the higher level differences are vast, and only brains are implicated for first person perspectives via science.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#595

Post by JoachimS »

haswell wrote: post #529
rickydroll wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is? Isn't this a bit like saying "So, if we had proof that god exists, how long would it take for you to accept that to be true?". When we have evidence that AI is demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, I'll be interested. Until then, I don't see a good reason to take the idea…

If we define a god as having magical powers, and there would be scientific, testable proofs for this. Those proofs had to be really good and numerous independent verifications. So probably a long time.

But the comparison isn't fair, relevant. Proving and accepting that gods exist is not the same thing as an AI possible have consciousness. That is not a magic superpower and the AI being a deity. It is placing the AI in the same category as... us.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#596

Post by meroes »

simianwords wrote: post #589
freehorse wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The brain is (part of) an allostatic system and part of a living organism which reproduces itself constantly. Certainly not "a bunch of instructions".

Distinction without a difference.

That’s like saying simulating a supernova and a supernova are both extremely hot.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#597

Post by rerdavies »

musebox35 wrote: post #521
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 understanding the whole does not completely remove an ability to analyze. An interesting direction is individuality and having a notion of self. It is difficult to demarcate the individual for a model given how much the system prompt and the fine tunes / distills affect the behavior. So with computational intelligence in its current form either we can not talk of an individual or we can have a nearly infinite set…

Seems like a rather desperate argument for human exceptionalism to me.

I'm not sure if you have noticed. The character of different AI models varies dramatically. And most of the models I use in my daily work have a sense of self (in any reasonable definition). They can tell you quite a bit about themselves if you ask. And you are no less an individual because you are supposed to follow laws of the United States of America (which is analogous to a system prompt). And I think it really curious that you think context buffers are a disqualifier of individuality. You have an analog of a context buffer: your short term memory system and most probably your medium-term memory system as well. Are you a different individual today because your short-term memories are not the same as they were yesterday? I would say you are. And i'm pretty sure you would say the same. (Unless of course, you are a Buddhist who might say that self is an illusion, and you are not the same individual you were yesterday. But let's just skip over that, shall we?)

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#598

Post by rough-sea »

freehorse wrote: post #588
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its still bunch of instructions. So is your brain. That's the problem with this argument.

The brain is (part of) an allostatic system and part of a living organism which reproduces itself constantly. Certainly not "a bunch of instructions".

Unless you ascribe to some meta-physical soul - you believe human consciousness is encoded in matter - in the interactions between atoms. Actually at a much higher level of abstraction- neurons - but it’s all simulatable in principle. Thus, yes, it could literally be a bunch of x86 instructions.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#599

Post by hackinthebochs »

trescenzi wrote: post #360
hackinthebochs wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think there is a flaw in the logic of saying that human text have a pattern of "consciousness mechanism" and therefore LLM will learn "consciousness mechanism" in order to return sentence continuation that is convincing. There is no independent "consciousness mechanism" that one might imagine humans have learned or evolved for its own sake. Evolution learns various solutions to optimization problems, and so if co…

> There is no independent "consciousness mechanism" that one might imagine humans have learned or evolved for its own sake. > There is nothing that a priori constrains token prediction from the domain of consciousness. We don’t know either of these are true or false though. We simply don’t know. There is no agreed upon definition of consciousness, aside from maybe _the having of qualia_, so arguing that some can or c…

>There is no agreed upon definition of consciousness

No one genuinely engaged with the topic is confused about the target of the term (phenomenal) consciousness. Definitions come once the theoretical work is complete, to be articulated as part of a fully worked out theory. The lack of a definition doesn't prevent us from investigating the subject or offering conjectures. What we can do is offer a precise description of the target and argue for or against whether LLMs reach the description. We will of course debate whether the offered description captures the relevant phenomena. But this is all just part of the process.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#600

Post by j2j8 »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #587
haktan wrote: post #586

I don't understand the most of the responses here. What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious? Even if AI with current computer architecture gets much more intelligent than humans, it will still have the same amount of consciousness. Its still bunch of instructions. If we got a lot of people together and did all the instructions by hand to get an LLM result would we also create t…

> Its still bunch of instructions. So is your brain. That's the problem with this argument.

A very large number of people could do the calculations of an LLM by hand using pen and paper. It would take a long time, but if the result were conscious then were would the consciousness exist? In the humans? Is it consciousness within consciousness?
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