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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

#641

Post by stared »

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…

Daniel Dennet in „Consciousness Explained” argues that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, and when we look at its individual components, it is like seeing an illusionist’s trick.

We may wonder how many grains of sand make a dune, of how many molecules of water make a liquid. (John Conway would argue that it takes a single spin-1 particle to have free will, but I digress.)

The same way, even if individual chemical reactions are simple (you don’t want to use that phrasing when talking with a biologists) or neural activities are simple (likewise, with a neuroscientist), it does not mean that the collective process is simple.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#642

Post by internet_points »

ijidak wrote: post #590
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…

That's actually a powerful way of stating it. If I did all of these calculations by hand, would it be conscious... That's a powerful argument I haven't seen stated quite that way before.. I do think it's hard to know when consciousness exists, because we can't really prove it for our neighbor. We just intuitively know that it would be crazy, even immoral, to assume otherwise. But, It's likely easier to dismiss consci…

> That's a powerful argument I haven't seen stated quite that way before..

It's basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room – a classic in the philosophy of consciousness and AI.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#643

Post by Jtarii »

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…

>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.

This is just a nonsensical rebuttal. We can easily experimentally verify that jumping from a skyscraper is dangerous.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#644

Post by dTal »

coldtea wrote: post #605
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…

> I think humanity deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe. It is special in the universe unless proven otherwise. Aside from the animal world (also on Earth too, anyway) which is a cruder version of humanity, much more violent as well, the rest of the universe thus far is just uncaring rocks and gases. > It takes humans a really long time to accept t…

Describing life on Earth as "a cruder version of humanity" is uh a choice. Your parrot snark is hilarious because that actually happened with Alex the African Gray - and indeed it took people a long time to accept. Your comment amounts to an anthropocentrism practically biblical in its hubris.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#645

Post by Jtarii »

gizajob wrote: post #611
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.

>Why do you have no inkling that your spreadsheet or terminal emulator is conscious

I personally believe all information processing machines possess some level of consciousness.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#646

Post by Jtarii »

pengstrom wrote: post #633
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…

I'd say these attempts at arguments (for either position) is how we make progress understanding consciousness.

Consciousness is just fundamentally outside human interpretability.

It's like asking what there was before the big bang, we will never know.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#647

Post by henrikschroder »

Jtarii wrote: post #645
gizajob wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Why do you have no inkling that your spreadsheet or terminal emulator is conscious I personally believe all information processing machines possess some level of consciousness.

PRAISE BE THE OMNISSIAH!

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#648

Post by gizajob »

Borealid wrote: post #624
gizajob wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most spreadsheet engines are turing complete, so you could use them to run an LLM. I don't think many people would say an LLM written in Python is conscious BUT an LLM written in Excel is not. People just don't ascribe consciousness to things that can't converse (or at least emote or give the appearance of emoting), and spreadsheets don't do that. The reason people are debating the consciousness of LLMs is - obviousl…

It is difficult when humour and trolling are forbidden. It was easier to tell Slashdot posters were conscious. We could easily reach the stage soon where your agent is responding to my agent and we just leave them to it to run HN automatically.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#650

Post by Terr_ »

8bitsrule wrote: post #496

The chess-playing Mechanical Turk of 1770 seemed to have a consciousness to its viewers. The viewers were encouraged to think that it did. The Turk's human chess opponent knew that there was an actual human chess-player inside the box, along with levers and magnets. That illusion was profitable for 84 years. LLM's have no problems using expressions that make them sound human. The algos are demonstrably not human, and…

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