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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

#651

Post by Terr_ »

IMO the important bit here (or at least, it is congruent with my own rants) is how much humans can perceive a fictitious mind that doesn't really exist, because it's something humans do automatically even when we abstractly know better.

This tells us something about where our baseline should be for what is extraordinary, and what needs extraordinary evidence. It's not enough to say "it feels real" because we know our feels are deeply unreliable.

In contrast, I see many comments in the vein of "Ted didn't proved there isn't a mind there." Well, yeah, he didn't prove a negative and shouldn't need to, especially when the people posing the challenge have no idea how to falsify it either.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#652

Post by parasti »

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…

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

This is a scary viewpoint to hold, for a human. If you despise humans, that's scary for me, as a human reader of Hacker News. Surprised to see this take unchallenged. I think we can recognize flaws in parts of humanity without wanting it "debased".

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#653

Post by refactor_master »

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…

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

Could an AI one day be suffering while plowing through some nasty legacy code? Well, who cares, I'll swing my whip, as I have a family to feed and a field to plow. I'll accept it as a fact and necessity, but ultimately it's either me or them. So practically it doesn't matter.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#654

Post by freehorse »

rough-sea wrote: post #598
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".

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.

The problem is

1. that artificial neurons are very restrictive model for actual neurons, let alone brain/organism, as there is more going on in neurons than a thresholded 0-1 activation

2. a brain does not function in isolation, but as regulator of the bodily functions (along with even more things). If you look at the brain in isolation to the body you don't really understand fully what it is doing unless you narrow your view a lot. Eg the brain modulates production of hormones, which in turn affects stuff like heart rate which then comes back to the brain as signal, in a feedback loop. Not to mention actual behaviour and interaction with the world. Toy models of organisms are not organisms.

3. "interaction between atoms" (or rather matter in general, as we have to take into account electrons, photons, gravity and a lot of other things that matter) is too general, too big, artificial neurons are a very useful (for applications) abstraction inspired by biological processes, but not modelling said underlying biology fully. Nobody can imo right now know if "computation" is a good model for "atom interactions" as in whether we can adequately enough model "atom interactions" in a computationally tractable way, and surely we do not do that right now except in very narrow scopes, and we have good reasons to believe that the current computational paradigms/turing machines are inadequate in doing that efficiently enough.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#655

Post by dandanua »

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…

> the rest of the universe thus far is just uncaring rocks and gases

This is probably what ants think about humans when they run through their feet.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#656

Post by [deleted] »

the_af wrote: post #462
pdonis wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claude is happy, empathic, demonstrates understanding and empathy for the human condition You're assuming that because Claude produces text that appears to express these qualities, Claude must have them. I don't think that's a good assumption. Even many humans produce text that has the same appearance, but don't actually have those qualities--which becomes clear when you look at what they do, not what they say. So…

> You're assuming that because Claude produces text that appears to express these qualities, Claude must have them. I don't think that's a good assumption Exactly. In fact, assuming it does is ignoring large parts of the essay which dismantle this belief. Just like Caesar and Khan having an argument in text output of an LLM don't have emotions (even though the words indicate otherwise), we have no reason to believe t…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#657

Post by layer8 »

seizethecheese wrote: post #293
layer8 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people whose brains don’t form new memories anymore after an accident or surgery, and they eternally live in the time before it happened, and have no memory of what happened a minute ago. Still they are conscious.

Interesting point but even those people’s brains aren’t immutable. The have habit change without memory.

True, but I don’t see how that relates to consciousness. An LLM being continuously RLHF-trained also changes its habits; that alone doesn’t make it conscious.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#658

Post by layer8 »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #256
layer8 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people whose brains don’t form new memories anymore after an accident or surgery, and they eternally live in the time before it happened, and have no memory of what happened a minute ago. Still they are conscious.

they still have memory, just not new ones - they lived experiences

An LLM’s training could be seen as lived experience, and the fact that LLMs can output long sequences from their training material can be interpreted as them remembering those parts.

Also, how does that relate to consciousness? I don’t think that past episodic memory is necessary for consciousness.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#659

Post by starbugs »

Jtarii wrote: post #643
starbugs wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's a pointless debate in a scientific, left brain sense. Who can prove that you aren't the only consciousness in the universe and you are basically dreaming your experimental results up? Experimental verifications exist only in a limited scope.

If your argument is that matter brings about consciousness somehow and therefore LLMs can in principle be conscious, that's as good as claiming the opposite. There's no experiment that can falsify either.

As a being that knows what consciousness is intuitively, you already know that a graphics card is most likely not conscious.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#660

Post by b65e8bee43c2ed0 »

waterTanuki wrote: post #239

Discussions on LLM consciousness feel like a psychological campaign to distract us from the awful effects of data centers and the current economic recession heading into a depression. We can talk about consciousness when the LLMs have proven useful for all of humanity, not just their billionaire owners.

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