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Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

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Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#71

Post by satisfice »

patcon wrote: post #15
Bjartr wrote: post #5

Isn't this back to attributing conscious experience to an AI when you're actually just co-writing sci-fi? The system is doing it's best to coherently fill in the rest of a story that includes an AI that's been given a place to process its feelings. The most likely result, textually speaking, is not for the AI to ignore the private journal, but to indeed use it to (appear to) process emotion. Would any of these ideas…

Ugh, I hate that I'm about to say this, because I think AI is still missing something very important, but... What makes us think that "processing emotion" is really such a magical and "only humans do it the right way" sorta thing? I think there's a very real conclusion where "no, AI is not as special as us yet" (esp around efficiency) but also "no, we are not doing anything so interesting either" (or rather, we are n…

It doesn’t matter. What matters is that humans must take other humans seriously (because of human rights), but we cannot allow tools to be taken seriously in the same way— because these tools are simply information structures.

Information can be duplicated easily. So imagine that a billionaire has a child. That child is one person. The billionaire cannot clone 100,000 of that child in an hour and make an army that can lead an insurrection. And what if we go the other way— what if a billionaire creates an AI of himself and then is able to have this “AI” legally stand-in as himself. Now he has legal immortality, because this thing has property rights.

All this is a civil war waiting to happen. It’s the gateway to despotism on an unimaginable scale.

We don’t need to believe that humans are special except in the same way that gold is special: gold is rare and very very hard to synthesize. If the color of gold were to be treated as legally the same thing as physical gold, then the value of gold would plummet to nothing.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#72

Post by kevindamm »

DangitBobby wrote: post #68
kevindamm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He got fired for violating the NDA which said not to share outside of the company, when he shared his conversations with a lawyer in search of representation for the LLM. His opinion on the LLM's level of sentience had no bearing on the decision.

How can you know if the law protects you from breach of the NDA for illegal suppression of e.g. sexual assault allegations or whistleblowing for financial crimes without being able to disclose the matter in question to legal counsel?

You're right, if it had only been with private legal counsel it would probably have been protected, but he also shared his arguments and the complete chat log as a Medium post.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#73

Post by darkwater »

thornewolf wrote: post #41
TimTheTinker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "mechanical turk" grandmaster playing chess from inside a cabinet is qualitatively different from a robot with a chess program, even if they play identically. To reduce a system to its inputs and outputs is fine if those are all that matter in a given context, but in doing so you may fail to understand its internal mechanics. Those matter if you're trying to really understand the system, no?

> is qualitatively different from a robot yes. > To reduce a system to its inputs and outputs is fine if those are all that matter in a given context we argue that this indeed is all that matters > but in doing so you may fail to understand its internal mechanics the internal mechanics are what we call "conscious" it is the grouping of internal mechanics into one unified concept, but we don't care exactly what they a…

> since we cannot directly observe consciousness, we are forced to concede that we will never really "understand" it outside of observing its effects.

Why? You are using a definitive term ("never") to something that we might achieve in a future. We might observe consciousness in a future. Who knows? Consciousness is a known unknown. We know there is something but we don't know how to observe it properly and how we could eventually copy it.

In the meanwhile, we are not copying consciousness, we have a shallow replication of its output. When cavemen replicated the fire that they observed as the output of a lightning, did they master electricity?

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#74

Post by K0balt »

bee_rider wrote: post #55
K0balt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, AI “consciousness “ is much stickier problem than most people want to frame it. I haven’t been able to find an intellectually honest reason to rule out a kind of fleeting sentience for LLMs and potentially persistent sentience for language-behavioral models in robotic systems. Don’t get me wrong, they are -just- looking up the next most likely token… but since the data that they are using to do so seems to capt…

Maybe rocks and trees are also conscious. I mean, consciousness-ium hasn’t been discovered yet, right? So who’s to say what it looks like.

Even though this seems flippant, I think we may eventually come to understand that nearly all complex life forms exhibit consciousness, albeit at a very, very different speed than we may be accustomed to. If we think of genetic and epigenetic signaling as analogous to other forms of communication, we might find that populations of organisms (including ones we don’t think of as forming “colonies”) may arguably be operating holistically as a being, potentially with consciousness in the mix.

We have a long way to go to explore this, and I have no doubt that the exploration will turn up a lot of surprises.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#75

Post by TimTheTinker »

thornewolf wrote: post #41
TimTheTinker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "mechanical turk" grandmaster playing chess from inside a cabinet is qualitatively different from a robot with a chess program, even if they play identically. To reduce a system to its inputs and outputs is fine if those are all that matter in a given context, but in doing so you may fail to understand its internal mechanics. Those matter if you're trying to really understand the system, no?

> is qualitatively different from a robot yes. > To reduce a system to its inputs and outputs is fine if those are all that matter in a given context we argue that this indeed is all that matters > but in doing so you may fail to understand its internal mechanics the internal mechanics are what we call "conscious" it is the grouping of internal mechanics into one unified concept, but we don't care exactly what they a…

> since we cannot directly observe consciousness

But we do agree that it exists. Our direct experience tells us so.

> we are forced to concede that we will never really "understand" it outside of observing its effects.

Not necessarily. A gap in our ability to observe something does not imply that (a) we never will observe it or (b) what we don't know is not worth knowing.

Throughout history, persistent known-unknowns have pushed people to appeal directly to the supernatural, which short-circuits further discovery when they stop there. But the real fallacy is saying "we don't know, and it doesn't matter". That's a far more direct short-circuit to gaining knowledge. And in both cases, a lack of curiosity is an underlying problem.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#76

Post by jstanley »

gpm wrote: post #57
jstanley wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you said up to "Nothing in those definitions is capable of expressing the concept of having perceptions (consciousness)". Do you think the universe is not computable? If you think the universe is computable, and you think that you exist in the universe, and you think that you are conscious, don't you think it follows that consciousness can exist within mathematical structures?

> Do you think the universe is not computable? Yes, definitionally not, the universe isn't an abstract object let alone one in the shape of a function. You might, in principle, be able to precisely predict the future of the universe given perfect information using a precise model of the universe. That model, a mathematical function, would be computable. It would be accurate to say that the model describes the univers…

But you are inside the universe. The mathematical structure of the universe can contain all of your perceptions and to you they will "feel real". Indeed, to you they are real.

If you had a perfectly accurate universe simulation, do you think the people inside the simulation would not be conscious?

If they're not conscious, it's not a perfectly accurate simulation.

And if it is possible to have a perfectly accurate simulation, then (like you said) all of the contents of the universe were "there" all along inside the giant mathematical structure. You don't need anyone to run the simulator!

All of the contents of the universe, the apparent flow of time, our thoughts and feelings, our consciousness, all lives inside this incomprehensibly large mathematical structure.

This is how I believe reality works. The universe exists inside mathematics the way 42 does. You don't need a calculator to show the number 42 in order for the number 42 to exist. Running the simulator can expose the contents of the universe to someone outside it, but everything on the inside is independent of the simulator.

You might ask "why this reality and not any other?" and I would say they all exist equally well, we just happen to notice this one because we're inside this one.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#77

Post by layer8 »

gpm wrote: post #67
layer8 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A camera perceives its surroundings (add some image recognition to that). An LLM perceives its inputs. Things like that can be fully mathematically described. The question is, how is consciousness different from that? Introspecting, all there is is perception, arrows pointing to the things being perceived, where “things” includes some of the arrows themselves. Is there anything else? What prevents any of this to be f…

> The question is, how is consciousness different from that A consciousness experiences perceptions, if you don't, I won't be able to describe this to you. If you do, it should be clear what I mean by that. We have no evidence that either a camera or a GPU executing an LLM experiences perception. Certainly they react to physical stimuli, but so does an atom, physical reaction is not the definition of experience I am…

The problem I'm trying to hint at is that we are unable to specify what the distinguishing properties of "experience" are supposed to be. It always ends up being self-referential. So maybe it is just a self-referential thing, a system perceiving parts of itself (mixed in with other things it perceives). Perceiving perception as such is trivial, e.g. I can have a system monitoring its own image processing pipeline, or I could feed information about the inner intermediate states of an LLM's neural network back into the LLM as part of its token input. The question is, how is "experiencing perception" any different? I'm not sure it is. The fact that I name part of my inner perceptions "feelings" or "qualia" or "texture", is largely immaterial to the question. They are objects of perception just the same, just originating from the inside rather than from the outside. I also disagree about the color example. I don't see how the experience of what a color feels like, or any insight related to that, could not be described mathematically in detail. Maybe it takes a bazillion of synaptic states that would need to be captured in that description, but that doesn't pose any conceptual obstacle.
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