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Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#611

Post by gizajob »

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…

Why do you have no inkling that your spreadsheet or terminal emulator is conscious, yet when that same machine is running an LLM all of a sudden we’re debating its consciousness?

Anthropic seems to have chosen their in-house philosopher well - one who’ll be amenable to getting confused in their favour.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#612

Post by krzat »

haswell wrote: post #534
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…

If there's any reason to take seriously the idea that AI is conscious, we must then take seriously the idea that many other non-living things are conscious. Unless the argument is that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity or information density, why would AI be any more or less conscious than my toaster? It seems to me that it's far more likely that everything is conscious than it is that AI is somehow…

What makes us conscious anyway? As I write this sentence, my brain generates words and contracts specific muscles in my hands to type, but I don't really understand how. I'm just aware that it happens. Apparently I'm no aware of every single neuronal activity, so what I am aware of?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#613

Post by gizajob »

rickydroll wrote: post #505
dpweb wrote: post #487

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…

We already effortlessly overlook this issue in other sentient and suffering beings by shooting them in the head and eating them, or catching them in nets so they can’t breathe and also eating them.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#614

Post by nomel »

haswell wrote: post #534
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…

If there's any reason to take seriously the idea that AI is conscious, we must then take seriously the idea that many other non-living things are conscious. Unless the argument is that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity or information density, why would AI be any more or less conscious than my toaster? It seems to me that it's far more likely that everything is conscious than it is that AI is somehow…

Or, maybe consciousness is a spectrum, rather than a binary.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#615

Post by MrScruff »

altruios wrote: post #87
kelseyfrog wrote: post #5

Consciousness is a label like fat, smart, man, grumpy, cool. Like money, property, or the idea of a week, it's something that we've loosely agreed to out of convenience, not because it's some intrinsic property of the mind. It's a useful label because it determines how we treat things - that's fine. But insisting on searching for it is like searching for cognitive aether. It's the social equivalent of phlogiston. Lik…

> cognitive aether We don't know what we don't know. For all we know, there is a missing field in the standard model of physics that might get revealed if we are somehow able to smash two working brains into to each other at relativistic velocities, and record the results through the extreme explosion 1.532 x10^18 Joules or about 7 Tsar bombs /s

What we do know is that conciousness is not binary and that it emerged through evolution. That doesn't entirely rule out your magic tsar bomb particle but it gives a strong indicator as to it's likeliness.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#616

Post by tasuki »

starbugs wrote: post #602
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…

> 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. That's like saying if matter itself is not understood and well defined (which it isn't) in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if jumping from a skyscraper is or is not deadly. A lot of practical aspects of life do not need to be properly defined as lon…

> reasonably assume that your experience is similar to mine

You could be the only conscious being in the universe and all of us just zombies: you have no way of knowing.

What's it like to be a monkey instead? Dog? Bat? Tree? We don't know.

No one's saying the graphics card is conscious. I could imagine the graphic cards could give rise to consciousness. But - crucially - I don't know. And neither do you.

You say you're conscious - where in you does the consciousness reside? Surely not the left pinky? What makes you you?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#617

Post by rerdavies »

missingrib wrote: post #518
Nevermark wrote: post #269

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 think Searle's Chinese Room argument refutes this. LLMs are simply manipulating symbols, they do not have semantic understanding. This is why hallucinations exist. And Searle's argument extends even further than LLMs. You are basically arguing for a functional account of consciousness, but things like this have been debated for literally decades/centuries in philosophy.

Millenia, in fact. The big difference, of course, being that we now have experimental philosophy machines (aka computers). So we can actually put some of these theories to the test, and recognize how utterly inadequate most of the work done on the subject has been. We had a pretty good idea anyway, so it's not a big surprise. Theories of mind have evolved dramatically in the late 20th century. And it's pretty clear that theories of mind will have to be re-done all over again with the advent of LLMs (particularly current-generation LLMs).

The problem with the hallucination argument is (1) that is much less of a problem with good current generation AIs, and (2) living conscious breathing human beings also have a disturbing tendency to make shit up, too. So a tendency to make stuff up doesn't really serve as a disqualifier for consciousness.

Also worth mentioning that the guiding rule of what's philosophical or not is whether it's actually useful. Actually useful philosophy usually becomes something else. Usual some scientific discipline or another. And as it turns out, theories of mind are likely to become extremely useful in the near future. Expect huge advances!

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#618

Post by kavalg »

hnfong wrote: post #608
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…

It might reflect a prejudice of modern human society to think more highly of people who are intelligent, and think less of people who we deem stupid. I'd say AI should not by default gain any social status as human-equivalent even if they become (in whatever regard) more intelligent than humans. But that would require us to drop the notion that intelligence ~= respectability/status/ability to have a full subjective e…

Since when has intelligence had a strong relationship to status and respectability? I've met intelligent people that don't get much respect or status either because they don't look good, are shy or they don't have money.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#619

Post by nomel »

neonstatic wrote: post #528
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…

Buddhism has a well defined definition of what consciousness is and by that definition LLMs are not conscious.

That list is shrinking though.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#620

Post by MrScruff »

The reason people are confused by LLMs is that they are stochastic parrots. They do an incredibly good job of emulating human behaviours and speech patterns as that's what they've been trained on. But like an actual parrot, it's impossible to say exactly how much conciousness they actually have. I certainly would argue that a parrot is concious, although likely less so than a human.
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